October 10th marks the opening of Margo Victor’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The Company has been busily making plans with the multifaceted artist to debut her range of expertise. Do we show her very latest experimental films? Or her most recent paintings,  drawings, and collages on Pantone color swatches? We understand that Victor’s 35mm conceptual western The Rotten Riotous West (2006) debuted in New York earlier this year and has also been presented in Cologne, but it’s never been shown here in LA, the land of milk and film, and the city where it will be most appreciated. The Company has made up our mind: her solo show will feature the 6-minute western, and will be accompanied by paintings and  collages inspired by the film.

The Company is pleased to present Margo Victor’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles,  featuring the premiere of The Rotten Riotous West. The film was shot in California’s Mojave Desert, and completed by special invitation while in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts’ Art & Tech program. Victor’s meticulous editing and sound mixing of the film’s footage creates a breathless, hypnotic vision of a contemporary western. The protagonist, a gender-bending gunslinger played by Jenny Shimizu, is a lone figure in the desert landscape. A duel  transpires with an unseen enemy, although her revolver is directed at the viewer. Scanning the surroundings and becoming aware of her vulnerable state, the outlaw’s courage is not enough to guarantee her survival.

Three large-scale paintings from 2009 inspired by The Rotten Riotous West will be on exhibit in The Company’s annex. Victor begins with a traditional landscape, and then obliterates the idyllic scene with bold, aluminumcolored strokes. This methodology of building-up-only-to-demolish combines her interest in austere aesthetics and often disturbing tropes of the unexpected. By producing powerful gestures of silver to hide these landscapes, she creates a surface that simultaneously eradicates parts of the original and creates an ordered framework for thought and discovery. Victor’s works quite often begin at a traditional starting point, but by the time she completes her process, the points become mere traces of the original.

Margo Victor received her BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Her work has been  exhibited at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, as well as group shows in Los Angeles and New York. In 2006, Victor was invited to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio to complete her film The Rotten Riotous West. Victor recently exhibited in the group show, Data Cowboy, curated by Julia Fryett at the Core Club in New York, and completed a mural project, Bending the Notes, at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. The Rotten Riotous West was shown in New York in a solo show of the same title at Venetia Kapernekas Gallery in July 2009. She is an active curator, musician, and performer living and working in Los Angeles,  California.

For more information or high-resolution images, please contact The Company: info@thecompanyart.com or call
(213) 221-7082.