Show runs from now until September 20th

The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center's Advocate & Gochis Galleries

The Village at Ed Gould Plaza
1125 N. Mcadden Place
Los Angeles, CA 90038

MON-FRI 6PM-10PM
SAT 9AM-5PM and by appt.

GOOGLE MAP

Postcards are frames, finite spaces bordered by the constraint of a certain perimeter, a certain space within which to move, to contemplate, to communicate, a rectangular field within which to annotate experience. The space of the postcard functions as a zoom lens: here is the daily, here is the day, cacophonously crowded with perceiving and doing and imagining, thinking and feeling and communicating, reinventing various wheels and wheeling through various wild inventions, the somersaulting world with us magnetized gravitationally to it spinning out more information than any one body or brain or heart can possibly incorporate. We need a moment to pause: we need a postcard.

Here we notice noticing, and are invited to pay attention. Here the personal direct address goes public, opening the embrace of its communiqué to include each of us in a whimsical, serious, sincere, radically open everyday collectivity. Here the interior spaces of a particular life are exteriorized within the vulnerable, brave confines of an ongoing series of small public missives. South Korean artist Soun Hong writes that “a single painting takes pride in itself as a complete composition, but surrounded by many other pieces, the painting is reduced to no more than a part.” JP’s postcards are an enthusiastic refusal of the model whereby the genius artist creates a masterpiece for the enthralled masses to admire. They are a blatant act of generosity, a fearless manifestation of open-hearted inclusiveness, an irresistible mirror of the variegated ongoingness that is the practice and process of living. They are no more than a part. As acts of communication, they encourage listening and invite reciprocity. These postcards reflect a perspective that is genuinely and uniquely and dazzlingly JP’s, and at the same time seem exuberantly to holler, as anyone who has encountered JP Craft Captain might easily imagine: don’t just sit there admiring us, join us! Make something!

Jen Hofer
August 4, 2008

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