Jim Jocoy 'Order of Appearance' Opens @ These Days LA

Almost 20 years after the release of his first monograph, We’re Desperate, produced with the help of Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore and fashion designer Marc Jacobs and widely regarded as the definitive catalogue of early West Coast punk fashion, Jim Jocoy’s archive of previously unseen photographs has been re-examined and re-considered to compose Order of Appearance, a new body of work that humanizes his young subjects as they go through their daily lives sharing the tender moments of love and loss that came to encapsulate the late 70s and early 80s as the Summer of Love slowly eroded and gave way to punks’ disaffected view of the world. 

Unknowingly foreshadowing the AIDS epidemic that would grip underground communities throughout the country, Jocoy’s poignant photos share an intimacy not unlike that found in the work of Nan Goldin, combined with the underground compulsion and clout that permeates the photos of Katsumi Watanabe, and Karlheinz Weinberger.  Spanning three short years from 1977 to 1980, the collection of images expose vignettes from a one night affair where emotions range from delight to despair, sober to wasted, clear to blurry to half-way-clear-again by morning.  Jocoy’s ability to reveal these touching moments of restless youth allows us to feel empathetic towards a girl with bruised knees and then laugh at the comical horror of a sunburst-yellow clownish car turned violently upside down from an accident. As a photographer, Jocoy has an uncanny capacity to make even a car wreck look like the best time ever. Order of Appearance is on view through August 19th at These Days, 118 Winston Street, 2nd FL Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Creepy Crawl These Days "Raymond Pettibon Flyers" From The Collection Of Bryan Ray Turcotte @ These Days Gallery In Los Angeles

Creepy Crawl These Days "Raymond Pettibon Flyers" is an exhibition of over 130 original punk flyers from the late 1970s through mid-80s either created by or utilizing the artwork of influential artist Raymond Pettibon for bands such as Black Flag, Minutemen, Sacharine Trust, Circle Jerks, Wasted Youth, Throbbing Gristle, Red Cross and Descendents. Culled from the archives of sub-culture historian, archivist and collector Bryan Ray Turcotte, these unintentional pieces of art speak to us on many levels. Not only do they afford a look at the early work of this now-legendary and highly acclaimed artist, but they also offer a glimpse into the era’s underground DIY hardcore music scene. These DIY advertisements, torn and frayed, rescued from countless telephone poles and walls, suffering staples, tape and paste are physical representations of the 20th century’s most influential music scene and its most revered artist. The exhibition will be on view until February 26, 2017 at These Days in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Nick Waplington "A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty" @ These Days Gallery In Los Angeles

These Days and Thomas Solomon Art Advisory present A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty, an exhibition of paintings by Nick Waplington. Over the last thirty years Waplington has developed an extensive body of work marked by eclecticism and juxtaposition. While best known as a photographer, Waplington also works extensively with painting, video, computer-generated imagery, sculpture, and found material.  Over the past year Waplington has been living in Los Angeles, devoting his art practice entirely to painting. This show features a number of large semi-abstract canvases rendering the city’s urban psycho-geography as well as its light and landscape. Once again, his work explores themes of chaos and volatility on a number of levels; in these paintings, Waplington evokes the constantly changing light and weather of Southern California in a time of climate instability, the city’s fragile existence on the edge of the San Andreas fault, and the desperate existence of the many men and women living precarious lives on the fringes of Los Angeles’s prosperity. Click here to read our interview with Nick Waplington. A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty will be on view until June 5, 2016 at These Days, 118 Winston Street, 2nd FL Los Angeles, CA

8 EZ Steps by Gusmano Cesaretti at These Days in Downtown Los Angeles

"Eight pinups in a portfolio laced with perfume. Wallet-sized: a barber's New Year's gift slipped into the hands of loyal customers. The secret currencies of men in suits. The kid searches his father's jacket pocket for the prize. Any thumbnail memento promises to make real his world of fantasy. He smells the perfume. In his studio, an artist photographs a friend. The photographs are transferred to screen prints. Her body is abstracted in close-up, her figure fractured by halftone dots. Glossiness is displaced by the rough grain of uncoated paper. A fuzzy sensation becomes direct. The coy touch gets confrontational. Gratification becomes something less certain. As the kid finds pleasure in obscenity, the artist finds it in disorientation and dissonance. They agree on the urge. Peeking and seeing are two different acts, but no one should refuse the right to look. Satisfaction only takes a few steps." A poem by Sam Sweet. 

These never-before-displayed photographs by Italian-born Los Angeles photographer Gusmano Cesaretti represent a departure from the gritty, black-and-white documentary pictures and portraits of Los Angeles subcultures for which he is mainly known. By contrast, this 1979 series delves into the artist’s experiments in abstraction and eroticism. Cesaretti took a progressive series of eight tightly cropped black & white photographs of a woman shaving her pubic hair. He made traditional silver gelatin prints which were then turned into high contrast half tones eliminating any grey scale from the images and rendering them purely in black and white. He furthered the mutation by running the halftones through a mid-70s photocopy machine and adding only the color red or green to the images. The result was a combination of pop art and abstraction, producing a voyeuristic view of an intimate, yet anonymous, grooming ritual. Gusmano Cesaretti "8 EZ Steps" will be on view until January 17, 2016 at These Days in Los Angeles. You can also purchase a monograph of the works here.