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Tip of the Berg

@tipoftheberg

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Initiating Exhibition
June 20th
5511 Pacific Blvd
90255

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I hesitate to post this. Instagram is one of the accused.
I didn't know Jason Arday. I won't pretend to know what happened, or what's true in the allegations against him. The cause of his death hasn't been named yet. But something is clear enough to say without waiting for the rest: a man was hunted, and the hunt kept going long after any real question had been answered. Whatever scrutiny was owed him, this wasn't that. This was a crowd of weaklings who assume knowledge of a story after reading the blurb.. that found something to feed on.

These platforms... Instagram included, and potentially criminal in what they allow and refuse to stop... hand ordinary people a kind of power they were never built to carry responsibly. Accusation becomes entertainment. Humiliation becomes something people do together, for fun. A man's collapse becomes content, gets consumed, gets replaced by the next thing by morning.

I'm tired of it. Tired of the addiction we've all agreed to call connection. Tired of how easy it is, how good it feels, to hold a small amount of power over a stranger's life and never have to see what it costs them.

Whatever the full truth is... and it may be worse or better than any of us think... no one earns this. Not the ridicule, not the pile-on, not a death that gets treated as the final punchline. A man is dead. The rest of us are still holding a smoking gun by @tipoftheberg

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2 months ago

This Saturday!
BYOB welcome

5511 pacific blvd
Huntington Park, CA
90255 by @tipoftheberg

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3 months ago

So much energy in “Tip of the Berg” at @mut_la Pix mix installation and opening night views. An occasion to meet fellow artists and art lovers of all ilks. All with pasta served al dente and al fresco. Big thanks to @heleninorbit for getting me involved. #spreadthelove #letskeepitgoing #comrades @tipoftheberg @rudybust @kr_jammin @maura.bendett @tylerdeanlarson @_sayre_gomez_ @gus_van_sant taken in Huntington Park, California by @tipoftheberg

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3 months ago

IT HASN'T STOPPED. FRANKLY, NOBODY'S EVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT.

Last Saturday: three thousand people through a warehouse door in Huntington Park. Everyone said it couldn't be done. A gallery, out here? Tremendous turnout. Record turnout. The line stretched clear into Vernon — people stood outside a rendering plant for two hours to see paintings, and told us it was worth it. We didn't pay them to say that. Nobody could afford to pay that many people.

The waiting lists are longer than Santa's now. Longer lists, better taste, no chimney required.

We're not going to pretend we saw this coming. We built a room, we hung the work, and Los Angeles showed up in numbers nobody can explain and everybody's still talking about. That's not spin. That's just what happened.

We're closing our doors July 10th through the 21st to catch our breath before the next one. Ten days. You people should probably find something else to do in the meantime.

When we're back: spaghetti dinners. Real ones. We still don't know how to make the pasta from scratch, but we've got ten days now, so consider this a threat.

The work isn't going anywhere, and neither is the list — if you saw the crowd and didn't get a real look, or you heard about it and want to see what all the fuss is, reach out. We'll send the PDF. We'll walk you through it personally. This is still a young gallery and every good collection starts with someone who showed up early.

Tremendous show. Tremendous artists. More coming.

TIP OF THE BERG.

@briandddario, snowman, bronze, approx. 8 × 8 in by @tipoftheberg

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3 months ago

Los Angeles! See you all this Saturday!

@t.g.rosen
@thisisamymackay
@_aryana__________
@tongbean
@brendan__lynch
@briandddario
@carterpotter69
@cmvoce
@christiantedeschi1
@_dherr
@hotmatzah
@catacutanstudio
@emaschillin
@emilysilverstudio
@eun_tandiono
@estevanoriol
@finnjk
@gus_van_sant
@isaaclythgoe
@j.c._rice
@jakesheiner
@jakevandenberge
@chthonictimes
@jonmarshalik
@rudybust
@kalanstrauss
@deskofkatecostello
@keenanderby
@kr_jammin
@kimwantscoffee
@kokakokin
@surgeon_hands
@toucheyedee
@taif_albarainkani_
@haight.space
@nedsnider
@nhdepass
@nicolettemishkan
@novaashthoreen
@pedrosname
@quinn_g__
@reinhartselvik
@semcelroy
@stephen_neidich
@williambradleystudio
@timirani
@sheenagh_b_geoghegan
@sophronia.cook
@_sayre_gomez_
@vyalone
@eyemahinay
@marius.bercea
@luismianaya
@apokrify
@chrissucco
@asyapluggedin by @tipoftheberg

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4 months ago

@tipoftheberg Los Angeles!
Saturday June, 20 6pm
5511 pacific blvd, 90255

List of artists coming soon.

Pasta served by @postmodern.family by @tipoftheberg

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4 months ago

Every so often a place becomes a reference point.

Not at the time. Twenty years later.

Düsseldorf. The Meatpacking District. Chung King Road.

Nobody standing there knew what they were standing in. It just felt cheap, uncertain, unfinished, and full of people making things.

Imagine you're young. Nice schools. Nice holidays. Big bedroom overlooking the pool.

Then a hot painter seems interesting, Grandma loves your drawing of her poodle, Joseph Beuys says everyone's an artist, the university agrees, and suddenly you're in art school.

Four years and countless Coors Lights later you're officially an artist.

Then you discover you can make giant abstract paintings that look fantastic in the lobby of a bank.

One painting becomes a hundred.

The bank buys one. The hospital buys one. The law firm buys one. Dad's golf buddy buys three.

You get married. Have a kid. Buy a house.

Twenty years later you're still painting the same fucking painting.

Around Painting #347 it occurs to you that maybe they weren't buying a profound formal investigation after all.

Maybe it just matched the furniture.

Maybe your greatest contribution to contemporary culture was helping a regional bank create a warmer customer experience so they could more comfortably deny loans to people who actually needed them.

That's a tough afternoon.

Anyway.

Another German guy said you need a little chaos to give birth to a dancing star.

We're trying to give birth to 200 goddamn artworks by next Saturday.

Bring the weird one. Bring the unfinished one. Bring the one you're embarrassed by. Bring the one your gallery hated.

Don't be precious.

Hurry the fuck up. by @tipoftheberg

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4 months ago

Hope to see everyone there by @tipoftheberg

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5 months ago

Imagine walking into a room that still actually belongs to the neighborhood around it.

Not a room that showed up afterward to explain the area back to itself once the rents went up and the danger became aesthetic.

A real room.

The kind built slowly by mechanics, immigrants, musicians, fabricators, painters, exhausted families, strange old men, kids in alleys, people dragging too much material through too little space.

Los Angeles is very good at turning life into atmosphere and atmosphere into property value.

Tip of the Berg isn’t against change. I just miss spaces where things still feel unresolved a little. Experimental. Slightly chaotic. Where people are allowed to try something that might fail, or accidentally become something better than they expected.

A room for unfinished ideas, disjointed works, noise, conversations, accidents.

Weirdos like us meeting each other again… or for the first time.

Opening June 20
5511 Pacific Blvd
Huntington Park, California by @tipoftheberg

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5 months ago

Coming Soon, Coming in June
@tipoftheberg

#contemporaryartfailure #tipoftheberg by @tipoftheberg

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5 months ago

There is a sadness settling over contemporary culture that people keep mistaking for sophistication.
Everywhere you look: smoothness. Professionalism. Correct lighting. Correct politics. Correct ambiguity. Correct scale. Correct references. An entire managerial class of culture producers endlessly metabolizing risk into atmosphere.
Nothing bleeds.
Nothing sweats.
Nothing truly desires.
Because desire is inefficient.
The city itself no longer permits it.
Real estate has accomplished what censorship never could. It has rendered genuine experimentation economically irrational. You can still make difficult work, of course. You just can’t place it anywhere without immediately feeling the pressure of financial gravity acting against it.
Everything must justify its footprint now.
Every room must produce.
Every gesture must circulate.
Every deviation from market legibility arrives carrying debt inside it.
And so culture folds inward. It becomes self-protective. Administrated. Curated into obedience by overhead.
The tragedy is that most artists are not cowards. They are exhausted organisms adapting intelligently to hostile conditions.
I include myself in this.
I earn my living building things for artists I care about. Frames. Walls. Structures. Support systems. The invisible architecture surrounding the object. Somehow through this strange arrangement I ended up with access to a large industrial space in Los Angeles.
And lately I’ve become increasingly unable to tolerate the idea of using it responsibly.
Not because I think I have solutions.
I don’t.
But because I would rather watch something fail catastrophically from excessive ambition than continue participating in this endless regime of tasteful caution masquerading as cultural seriousness.
At minimum I would like to create temporary conditions where people can think dangerously again.
Where embarrassment is again possible.
Where contradiction is allowed to remain unresolved.
Where conversation escapes optimization.
Where difficult work is not immediately anesthetized by market fluency and career management.
I am not looking for audiences.

I am looking for accomplices.

@tipoftheberg

#contemporaryart by @tipoftheberg

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5 months ago

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”
-Bertolt Brecht

Photo of work by Darren Bader
@moses_hosiery by @tipoftheberg

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5 months ago