Pharmaka Offers 'Intervention'

Pharmaka's current exhibition "Intervention" mugs neo pop art out of niceness at 5th and Main. Among the three artists on display is industrial hell bender David Buckingham, who shared with me a glimpse of his personal backstory––when he lived at "The Nickel" in the very building Pharmaka is housed in. His found metal sculpture is almost personal urban typographic rehab. The edited release for tonight's opening reception of "Intervention" is after the jump.

PHARMAKA Presents:
INTERVENTION
Neo (dark) Pop by Three Contemporary Artists
Curated by Rebecca O'Leary
Opening Reception
Saturday, February 16, 6-9pm

Pictured: "Police Line" by David Buckingham

Unlike the candy colored paintings of Warhol or the shiny-new manufactured sculptures of Jeff Koons, artists David Buckingham, Timothy Buckwalter and Greg Miller have created bodies of work reflecting a bleaker vision of popular culture today by using craftsmanship and social commentary, artwork with insight, intelligence, humor and a dark aesthetic.

GREG MILLER is influenced by the social climate of America of 1950s and 1960s as he documents weathered words and images that evoke nostalgia with vintage colors and cultural images––layered, juxtaposed, and abstracted to develop the narrative qualities of celebrated symbols and icons. The mythology of American vintage history in oil paint and surfboard resin to preserve and fossilize the images and to address an inner association with a piece of America's past. Miller's work represents the true essence of post pop art.

DAVID BUCKINGHAM's found metal sculptures capture his lawless-artist intellect and the use of industrialist materials and impeccable craftsmanship are reminiscent of days long ago. His works are primal, provocative and smart. Characterized by his meticulous arrangement of tattered, found metal into unexpected rectilinear and curvilinear sculptures--some strictly with shapes and others with borrowed language. The density, texture and construction of these sculptures exhibit his superior workmanship and range of talent as an artist.

TIMOTHY BUCKWALTER has an emphasis on storytelling as a universal form of human self-understanding, and his paintings blend together images from the recent past to consistently create stories and statements of anxiety, desire, idiocy, anger, joy and fear. Drawings from magazine illustrations, cartoons and comic strips are appropriated from their original source for the paintings and drawings, and edited into new narratives. From there, Buckwalter prints the bits out and repaints them by hand on to kinetic fields of color.

PHARMAKA
101 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
213.689.7799