101/EXHIBIT proudly presents Koi No Yokan III, a concentrated group exhibition organized by New York-based curator Dexter Wimberly. This showing marks Wimberly’s 35^th exhibition, first in Los Angeles, and is the gallery’s third annual installment of the Koi No Yokan summer invitational. The opening will be held from 7-9pm on Saturday, July 9 at 668 N La Peer Drive, located on the southeast corner of the Santa Monica Blvd and N La Peer Drive intersection. A 40-page catalog with foreword by the curator and the gallery director will accompany the exhibition. This year’s show features six artists: Leonardo Benzant, Dominik Halmer, Galia Linn, Nelson Loskamp, Sam Vernon, and Cullen Washington Jr. The exhibition includes performance, painting, sculpture, and installation.

Koi No Yokan (Japanese) is a truly beautiful concept. It can be defined as the sense one can have upon first meeting another person that the two of them are going to fall in love. In other words, it is the knowledge one has that he/ she is going to fall in love with another person. This differs from the idea of “love at first sight” in that it does not imply that the feeling of love exists, rather it refers to the knowledge that a future love is inevitable. -Nita Sharma. Untranslatable Words – Culture – High Tower Flashes, 2010, 2011. July 24, 2013. Web.

Each year 101/EXHIBIT takes on the challenge of fortifying the casual art world summer show construct with an exhibition that is identifiably ambitious in nature, thematic in curatorial angle, and that involves artists that are not represented by the gallery. Beginning in 2013 after the gallery relocated from Miami to Los Angeles, the Koi No Yokan show has been an incredibly rewarding endeavor. It is a tradition that has allowed the program to make experimental leaps into new grounds of artistic practice as we aim to continuously diversify and expand our dialogue.

More importantly, KNY is an annual exhibition that - if there is a recurring element - is primarily concerned with relationships and the human connection. The participants each year are artists the gallery has been aware of for some time prior to each show, and through the exhibition, we explore the potential of collaboration. Representational relationships have developed on account of the exhibition that exist to this day. For instance, this year’s show is curated by Dexter Wimberly - a close friend of Micah Ganske and Colette Robbins – two gallery artists who exhibited during the previous two respective KNYs. After the introduction was made and witnessing Wimberly’s spirited approach to curation, the gallery gladly invited him to exercise a concept important to him for this year’s show.

As Wimberly explains, "This iteration of Koi No Yokan focuses on abstraction, materiality and experimentation with form. My curatorial objective is to present an engaging array of works that are meditative, process-driven; rigorous in their construction; yet fluid and lyrical in presentation. Beauty and romance have been largely abandoned by an art world that places a high premium on irony and cynicism. My position, liberatingly naive, is that great art always involves a quantum of love, however minute. In selecting the artists for this exhibition I had the challenge of considering hundreds of possibilities. However, once selected this group was tenacious and driven to deliver."

Leonardo Benzant’s sculptures call upon his spiritual beliefs and practices, conjuring both power and healing. Dominik Halmer pushes up against the very idea of painting, combining it with sculpture and installation. Galia Linn’s vessels and totems explore the relationships between subject, object, and their environments while hinting to the fragility and sturdiness of the human form. Nelson Loskamp uses spontaneity and interaction to create experiences that make the viewer an integral part of his work. Sam Vernon’s Xeroxed drawings, photographs, and paintings are an exploration of a deeply personal narrative. Cullen Washington Jr. conveys materiality and the idea of noir by using everything at his disposal including tape, canvas, acrylic paint, and charcoal dust.

Wimberly’s emphasis on beauty, romance, and love is as timely as ever in a society that appears to be going in a direction that is counter to these essential elements of life and art making. Please join us for the opening as we enjoy the summer air, our cocktails, and simply share in the experience of coming together to view the works of six incredible artists from very diverse backgrounds and practices.

Dexter Wimberly is an independent curator based in New York. A passionate collector and supporter of the arts, Wimberly has exhibited the work of hundreds of artists in the U.S. and abroad. Wimberly maintains a critical dialogue with artists throughout the world by way of his exhibitions, public programs, and talks at galleries and public art spaces. Wimberly is the former Director of Strategic Planning at Independent Curators International (ICI). He is currently the Visiting Curator at Aljira - a Center for Contemporary Art, and serves on the board of The Laundromat Project. Wimberly has organized exhibitions and programs for Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh; Driscoll Babcock Galleries; 101/EXHIBIT; Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art; bitforms gallery; Koki Arts, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA); and The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; among others. His exhibition in Chapel Hill, The Ease of Fiction, will be traveling to The California African American Museum in Los Angeles this fall.

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Leonardo Benzant

b.1972 Brooklyn, New York

Leonardo Benzant’s non-linear practice includes painting, performance, sculpture, sound, and installation. His work relies on intuitive decision-making and a commitment to investigating identity, ancestry, family, community, and spirituality. Benzant draws inspiration from the uniquely shared history of code switching, double-consciousness, and multiple narratives that people of African descent have inherited and are compelled to adopt as a survival strategy for daily life. Like this common experience, Benzant’s work straddles two worlds. Volleying between the sacred and the secular, Benzant mines a deep well of personal experiences and international artistic vocabularies.

Simultaneously, Benzant looks at Western art historical constructions, modalities of thought, and contemporary discourse to inform his practice while centering his work in community practices and rituals, drawing inspiration from the spirit and the oral traditions of his African ancestors that came across the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage.

Dominik Halmer

b. 1978 Munich, Germany

Dominik Halmer is a German artist, currently living and working in Berlin. He studied fine arts at the renowned Academy in Düsseldorf with Albert Oehlen and later with Heimo Zobernig in Vienna. Coming from an analytical but sensual approach to painting, Halmer works with the collision of different realities.

In his so called “semi-functional image-objects,” we find canvases being combined with everyday objects. Based on formal references, Halmer creates a subtle coherence between painting and objects and transforms their specific function into a poetic state of being. He was awarded several grants and is going to have a large solo presentation in the Museum of Arts Wiesbaden in 2017.

Galia Linn

b. 1963 Tel-Aviv, Israel

Galia Linn is a sculptor and site-specific installation artist living and working in Los Angeles. Linn constructs relationships between subject, object, and their environments by creating elemental tensions; a delicate balance between the mediums’ limits and Linn’s exploration with life’s imperfections.  Influenced by an early childhood in Israel, a land full of ancient and contemporary relics of past and present civilizations, Linn’s work absorbs both her physical body through the manipulation of the material and the emotional and historical resonance of the artists’ life. What appears fragile, in the end is rock strong, the cracks become symbolic; a window into the internal makeup of the vessels, a metaphor for strength and beauty; a testament of surrender.

Galia Linn has shown extensively nationally and internationally, and is a part of numerous private collections. Recent exhibitions venues include ESMoA, Marine Projects, LA> 

Nelson Loskamp

b. 1962 Fairbanks, Alaska

Nelson’s Electric Chaircut is an interactive, electro-sonic, hair cut performance. After a brief consultation and the signing of a release form, volunteers are taped to the chair. Their eyes and mouth are also taped to symbolize the fetishism of appearance. The volunteer’s hair is then cut by Nelson, the original master of electro-sonic hair design. His various implements are amplified, scissors and clippers wired to effects pedals, slung round his waist, and blasted through an amplifier strapped to his back. The whacking haircutting sounds reverberates in a trance like cacophony of seemingly random patterns, as the true stylistic nature of the volunteer is released. Originally conceived in San Francisco Nelson’s Electric Chaircut has been performed worldwide since 1989.

The Electric Chaircut satirizes the notion that we are all only a haircut away from possessing a sense of authenticity that distances us from the crowd. He straps a willing accomplice into a chair, and with a pair of amplified scissors attached by wires to a power-pack on his back, attacks the unruly mane of hair. By theatricalizing the “performance” of a haircut, Nelson suggests that the codes of individuality as filtered through fashion, are just that -- theater. In Nelson’s knowing hands, the boundary between the external and the internal shed their dichotomous nature, becoming a single route to a reinvestigation of the self.

Sam Vernon

b. 1987 Brooklyn, New York

Sam Vernon earned an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 2015 and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, New York in 2009. Her installations combine xeroxed drawings, photographs, paintings and sculptural components in an exploration of personal narrative and identity. She uses installation and performance to honor the past while revising historical memory. Vernon has most recently exhibited with Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Seattle Art Museum, Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the Emery Community Arts Center at the University of Maine, Farmington, MoCADA, or the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn.

Cullen Washington Jr.

b. 1972 Alexandria, Louisiana

Cullen Washington Jr. is a native of Louisiana and received his BA from Louisiana State University and his MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. A 2013 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Washington Jr. has exhibited his work in group and solo shows nationally and internationally including The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,TX; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Litvak Contemporary Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel and the Saatchi Gallery, London, UK among other arts venues. In addition to the Studio Museum, Washington Jr. has been an artist in residence at Fountainhead Residency (2016), Yaddo (2011), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010) and was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2009). Reviews and critical essays of his work appear in Art: 21, The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, and The Boston Globe. Cullen’s work can be found in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Joyner / Giuffrida Collection, San Francisco, The Charles Saatchi Gallery, London, and the The Pizzuti Collection, Ohio. Cullen will be the new 2016-2017 Artist in Residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He currently lives and works in New York City.