Innovative artist comes to the Hammer

Ask Angela Dufresne whose work she admires and you’ll find
her biggest influence may be her own striking personality.

“Bob Dylan a lot and Bruce Lee, too,” she answers at
first. Then she’ll start quoting “Enter the
Dragon” faster than you can follow, until you end up
promising her you’ll rent the darn thing.

Dufresne, a spunky 37-year-old artist born in Hartford, Conn.,
currently works out of Brooklyn, N.Y., where she is represented by
the Monya Rowe Gallery. She received her B.F.A. from Kansas City
Art Institute and M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art in
Philadelphia.

“I never understood what “˜career’ meant, but I
did go to art school. I refused to take the SATs. I hate
standardized testing,” she said.

Her work, which consists mostly of large-scale oil paintings,
will be on display at the next Hammer Projects exhibit at
UCLA’s Hammer Museum. James Elaine, curator of Hammer
Projects, founded the series seven years ago in collaboration with
Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer. The pair worked together at
the Drawing Center in Soho, N.Y. for 10 years before moving to the
Hammer.

Noticing a void in venues for young artists, Elaine created the
Hammer Projects series for local, national and international
emerging artists.

“The program is a bit like a laboratory. It doesn’t
house definite and finished shows. It gives artists a chance to
test waters and experiment ““ something that can’t be
done in more commercial galleries,” Elaine said. The exhibits
“have a spontaneous, flexible feel ““ the feel of a
studio.”

Elaine had seen Dufresne’s paintings at an art festival in
Florida and the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and was
intrigued by the psychedelic colors, abstract brush strokes and
modernist design incorporated in her work.

While Dufresne gathers inspiration from sources as sordid as
drunken blondes and sexual misconduct, the pieces selected for
Hammer Projects consist of her architectural landscapes, which
manifest the visual intersection between elements of politics,
people and the world they live in. Her subject matter shows a
penchant for the fictional, non-fictional and autobiographical;
Dufresne abandons the separations between herself, the environment
she inserts herself into and her work.

“I could watch a movie by Bunuel and think it’s
autobiographical,” Dufresne said.

Her strange modernist structures evoke the same idealism sought
by architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.
“It’s not the fact that they’re architects; they
have a maverick sensibility I find appealing ““ the ability to
think about something in a utopian way not applicable to
reality,” Dufresne said.

Dufresne’s large canvases, electrified by her frenetic
brush strokes, amplified color palette and fantastical imagery,
inspire a feeling of anxiety in their quest to find a place ““
a world in which people belong.

“She questions what is true in politics, war, art and our
hearts. Her paintings are a mish-mash of these, looking for a dream
world that doesn’t exist,” Elaine said.

A mirror to her persona, her work is impossible to categorize
because it is not tied to any mode of identity. She slices through
the rhetoric of society, navigating culture, history and everyday
life through her art.

“It’s not an agenda,” Dufresne said.
“It’s an attitude.”

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