DEM PASSWORDS

Sam's enthusiastic adoption of his father's techniques has established, along with his sister Alpha's work, a family method that approaches painting with paper and glue. Leveraging the randomness provided by their vintage starting materials and producing with an "art is work" approach to image making, Beach creates collages that take a decidedly narrative tone and structure while Lubicz's pieces ring more musical and exuberant. Beach's collages are mostly figurative, mini narratives whose titles echo his work as a fiction writer while Lubicz's output is inflected by his ongoing work as a member of the 333 Boyz music production team.

Hitting notes ranging from Monty Python to Hannah Hoch and with a psychic indebtedness to the Blues and sample-based electronic music, the family's work is advancing the spirit of West Coast rebel image making Beach has championed and succeeded in interfacing broadly with the mainstream consciousness across 4 decades. Few have taken collage this far and still fewer have the craftsman chops and compositional instinct Beach has honed and now passed on to Sam. Beach is creating work in what is certainly the most exciting phase of his personal practice and Sam's embrace of his father's stylistic legacy and practical encouragement that his dad return to the physical realm of cutting and pasting in 2006 after nearly a decade of almost exclusive digital production is taking the Lubicz family collage legacy into dynastic territory.

This is Beach and Lubicz's third show in cahoots. Beach has exhibited works at galleries including Billy Shire Fine Arts, OffRamp in Pasadena and Adventureland in Chicago and with Sam at galleries including La Luz De Jesus and Nickelodeon Studios in Burbank.

Contrasting the delicate line work and cartoony figures he is known for, this latest peek into Rege's universe has yielded larger dark, abstract works painted with enamel on wood panels. In the breathing space that follows the kind of frantic outflow of ideas that was The Cartoon Utopia, Rege has slowed down to focus on a loose and transcendent style in paintings that serve as snapshots of some unknown vibrational field. Like trying to draw a flame or an ocean wave, these latest works aim to grab some sort of frozen close up of the shimmering effluvia - of the flowing dark matter, the invisible ether of quintessence that surrounds us always, unseen.

"Ron Rege, Jr., is a very unusual, yet accomplished story teller whose work exudes a passionate moral idealistic core that sets him apart from his peers. His new book The Cartoon Utopia, a unique work of comic art focusing on magical, alchemical, ancient ideas and mystery schools is part sic-fi, part philosophy, part visual poetry and part social manifesto. Rege's work exudes psychedelia, outsider rawness and pure cartoonish joy" - Abraxas Journal

Originally from Plymouth, Massachusetts, Ron Rege, Jr., began publishing his own minicomics in 1988. He has since published work with Highwater Books, Fantagraphics, Buenaventura Press, McSweeney's, and Drawn & Quarterly. An active and accomplished musician, Rege writes and performs music as a solo artist and plays drums with Los Angeles-based band Lavender Diamond.

Ian Flynn has shown work at galleries including Cooper Cole in Toronto, The Arm in New York City and exhibited as part of group shows at the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore (curated by Matt Groening and Gary Panter), Mutant Pop by Loyal Gallery in Stockholm and Scared Straight at Perugi Artecontemporanea in Padova, Italy.

In this exhibition of his works on paper, canvas and word processed writings, Perry plays both the prayer and the punisher through fast ink dispatches that contrast more elaborated paintings. Each work carries with it a unique psychic weight supported in part by Perry's legacy as the creative fount that nourished Bob Marley, among so many artists, and by his seemingly inexhaustible capacity for evolutionary abstraction.

Lee Scratch Perry was born in Jamaica in 1936. He lives and works in Switzerland.

Pearlman's paintings, music and video capture that possibility of excitement from a seemingly ordered zone but really it's the guffaw she cherishes - it's the spontaneous outburst of dance she's after. Romance too. And her works deliver that punch with an exaggerated beauty that bleeds from her canvases and paper into her video and songwriting. Her paintings merge with her digitally rendered video landscapes serving to unite her figures and the viewer on the dance floor in search of an "intense freedom" and sporting a flared hem.

Annie Pearlman lives and works in New York and has shown at galleries including Tomato House and Malraux's Place.

In this, his first solo showing of artworks, Reynolds defines in part, a "colonial contaminated mindstate" through "degenerate realizations" that introduce his characters to their boundaries like the game master of an RPG. His digital dysmorphia emerges out of his after hours legacy and the music contained therein and into his spiral bound dream journals plumbed for work arranged here mostly the way it exists in its natural environment - tacked to his bedroom walls.

In his Starbucks series of drawings, shown here as framed 24'' x 33'' ink-jet prints of the 8.5'' x 11'' originals, Reynolds launches his assault on the banality of the iPhone era with the acrid stench of roasting coffee beans at his back; a stench matched only by the stink of desperation in his subjects, dutifully observed and cataloged through his uniquely illustrative style of surrealist portraiture. His dynamic range in these drawings extends from flat, 2-D emptiness approaching the simplicity of a smiley face to pointillistic, almost Crumby elements. And the tonal range of the unfolding narrative extends from generally harmless and subtle sex obsession to full clowning, in both the metaphorical and literal senses.

Reynolds' spirit is pointed but the fetishizations contained in "San Fernando Valley Heady" seem more for the purpose of defining his own private universe than improving on ours. He's been emboldened to this state.

"Mucoid Plaque," a term coined by naturopath Richard Anderson to describe an elusive fibrous shit rope alleged to cling to the inside of the human gastrointestinal tract and removable only through colonic cleansing, is Maher's outward reference to "artists unloading psychic garbage onto their audience" and inwardly to a sort of revitalizing and cleansing of his own spirit. The idea of psychic garbage, however, is useful in relation to Maher's work too if you acknowledge that his knack as an artist is for finding transcendent tones in materials that may otherwise be in the recycling bin.

In this exhibition, Maher is also recycling his own degraded work with a ribbon of water damaged pages of an old photocopy zine running along the floor of the gallery's west facing wall underlining framed works dating back to 2007, content previously featured in French graphics journal Nazi Knife. In contrast, along the east facing wall of the gallery, prints and original versions of his latest works alternate back and forth in a way that evokes a waveform, an allusion to the "rotten-ambient" music that is his hallmark.

Hundreds of delicately arranged tiny strips of cut paper with rounded and serrated edges are layered on top of each other like brushstrokes of paint; the paint pallet here being Fangoria(?) magazines, mail order catalogs and old paperback book covers, among other printed materials, culled more often for color than content. The content, however, is key and never too far from the instantly identifiable Maher aesthetic: halloween motifs, rubber stamps, spiderwebs, mildew, missing person mugshots. He's more of a jock than a nerd. His work has teeth. It's oozing. This is collage work closer to black mold than Black Dice.

The opening reception will include a music performance by Pat Maher to begin promptly at 9 PM.