DIRT CLUB opens TOMORROW
OPENING TOMORROW SATURDAY MARCH 25TH 5-9PM
FRANCHISE will present “Dirt Club,” a solo exhibition of new and recent work from the Los Angeles-based artist Dylan Roberts. On view at the gallery’s 977 Chung King Road location from March 25 – April 22, 2023, the presentation will bring together 25 of Roberts’ new and recent heat-transferred monoprints and mixed-media collages.
Dylan Roberts’ pictures speak in our modern language: screenshots of Google Earth maps, cellphone photography, highly-saturated internet graphics. Their vocabulary is at once familiar and skewed, recognizably, decidedly human, yet made strange by their deeply layered construction and hallucinatory palette. Divorced from their source material and overlaid with snatches of text, swooping parabolas, and vibrant, at times lurid color, they become something new and resolutely themselves. Echoes of their past lives persist but are drowned out. They exist as total products of their time.
Some pieces, with their grid systems and intersecting bands of looping color, can suggest maps, though the places to which they refer don’t exist. This is a cartography of unvisitable vistas, psychogeographies that relate more to a state of mind than a pinnable latitude. Elsewhere, Roberts locates his images in real sites—crude structures stumbled upon off the highway or in the woods in the artist’s Los Angeles, their rudimentary forms calling back to the unassailable truth of geometry: square, triangle, cube. These structures are decidedly removed from society — off-grid, socially, but not completely, spatially. The collision of the real and the imagined results in an anxious energy, an unplaceable uncertainty that reverberates as our collective mood.
These works live in an in-between state. The collision of digital and analog materials—Roberts’ cell-phone pictures, blown-up and printed—both negates the artist’s presence and embeds it within the canvas. The pictures’ raised canvases, their visual information bleeding to their edges and cascading down their sides, transcends their status as paintings, pushing them into objecthood. Sequentially numbered, they’re given the gloss and seriality of trading cards, though what exactly they’re memorializing remains unresolved. Elsewhere, Roberts’ canvases degrade into total context collapse, a riot of color, line, and form. Their geometric scaffolding recalls the constructivist forms of Moholy-Nagy and the technicolor ecstasy of comic book panels in equal measure.
At the root of Roberts’ project is an anthropological engagement with image making. His dense visual constructions sample the elements of our built environment, and so become a study of its contours. They press against the boundaries within which we find ourselves, with the very tools with which we mediate our relationship to it.
These are environmental concerns. These are images that can only exist thanks to the ways we have irrevocably altered the landscape of the physical world. Roberts’ work presents alternate landscapes, not as they belong to some utopic future but how they are truly experienced in the psychic now — an inorganic biosphere of our own patchwork, algorithmic design. Roberts’ collages ask how the structural and material reality of the areas from which they derive affect
our cognitive state, how our connection with those surroundings are altered, amplified, or deteriorate. They ask how we learn to live in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
Dylan Roberts (b. 1989, Houston, TX) lives in Los Angeles, California. He earned a BFA in painting from the University of Houston in 2012. He has held solo exhibitions at venues including Franchise, Los Angeles; Best Western, Santa Fe; and Swish Projects, San Diego. His work has been included in group shows at Pablo Cardoza Gallery, Houston.
SPRING / SUMMER APPAREL
Franchise presents its Spring / Summer 2023 collection, FLY AWAY. Featuring a selection of night club and music inspired designs from Jason Wright, Jake Zielinski, Justin Montag, Sunny Maher & Stuart Maingot.
SCREWED UP
TOMORROW BEFORE DIRT CLUB:
MOCA Store is pleased to announce an evening to celebrate the recent publication of Lance Scott Walker’s book DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2022).Walker will be in conversation with writer and curator Briana Younger about the story of DJ Screw and his influence in hip-hop and beyond.
DJ Screw, a.k.a. Robert Earl Davis Jr., changed rap and hip-hop forever. In the 1990s, in a spare room of his Houston home, he developed a revolutionary mixing technique known as chopped and screwed. Spinning two copies of a record, Screw would “chop” in new rhythms, bring in local rappers to freestyle over the tracks, and slow the recording down on tape. Soon Houstonians were lining up to buy his cassettes—he could sell thousands in a single day. Fans drove around town blasting his music, a sound that came to define the city’s burgeoning and innovative rap culture. June 27 has become an unofficial city holiday, inspired by a legendary mix Screw made on that date.
Lance Scott Walker has interviewed nearly everyone who knew Screw, from childhood friends to collaborators to aficionados who evangelized Screw’s tapes—millions of which made their way around the globe—as well as the New York rap moguls who honored him. Walker brings these voices together with captivating details of Screw’s craft and his world. More than the story of one man, DJ Screw is a history of the Houston scene as it came of age, full of vibrant moments and characters. But none can top Screw himself, a pioneer whose mystique has only grown in the two decades since his death.
TOMORROW NIGHT AFTER DIRT CLUB
Long-time collaborators and friend foursome AceMo, Kush Jones, MoMA Ready and DJ SWISHA ricochet footwork, Jersey club, drum & bass, jungle and more off each other all night for the premiere of Bahar Khadem and Mapamota’s new party, Direct Drive. TICKETS HERE
JAM ON IT
THE NAME IS TOO LONG FOR THE CAPTION BUT IT'S CLOSE CROPS OF IMAGES FROM DESERT MAGAZINE 40, 41, 60. I HAD TO HELP SAM WHEN HE WAS PRINTING THIS BECAUSE HE NEEDED SOME ADVICE ON MATERIALS AND STUFF. NATURALLY HE CALLED THE EXPERT, OF COURSE. IT WAS MADE FOR THE ZINE SWAP WITH NO INTENTION FOR ME TO PUBLISH IT, WE SLAPPED A STICKER ON THE BACK AND NOW IT'S CO-PUBLISHED. IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE MAGAZINE, YOU CAN NOW SEE 3 ISSUES IN 1.
HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS
April 1–May 20, 2023
Highway Hypnosis, Ryan Preciado’s first solo exhibition is an organic homage to the people and conversations he finds himself in. Each piece can be traced back to a place of work, an everyday temple, a moment of genuine connection with the transcendent beauty and meaning which is available to all of us, equally.
MOODBOARD