The Venice Institute of Contemporary Art (ViCA) presents artists from Mexico, Syria, Austria and Southern California as part of and expanding program at it's new gallery spaces, opening during First Thursdays San Pedro on January 3, 2019 from 6-9pm. The show continues during the art fair season until February 28, with several Art Talk & Tours scheduled throughout.

Sulamit Elizondo, from Mexico, presents gorgeous sequential works that evoke cinema in their scale, aspect, and powerful yet vulnerable subject matter. Syrian artist Waseem Marzouki is presenting a very large scale work and some smaller companion pieces - which promise to combine his strongly political style with dramatic color and image - created for this exhibition, while Roman Traexler brings his Austrian sensibility to evocative portraits that appear beautifully, starkly out of the ether.

Southern California represents with Doug Edge's latest large paintings that are bitingly ironic and pop with color. MB Boissonnault brings her message of the inherent conflict of civilization and our common home to a color palette that is beautiful, naturalistic, and feels somewhat distant. Juri Koll conceals personal and political elements of figuration - clues - in his abstractions, ultimately finishing as studies of color. Jodi Bonassi rounds out the group with her inside the mind/out on the street sensibility, using quilt-like patterns interwoven with faces and monsters that dramatically reveal themselves in almost impish ways in her very latest large scale works.

These diverse yet unifying artists are all up to something new - each of the works in this show are being seen for the first time.

We brought these unique artists to Southern California to create a dialog with artists doing similarly special things here. Each of these artists reflects the present state and flux of their environment, and as such, need to be speaking to each other, just as we all must. We're so pleased to be opening our new spaces with this selection of works.

(Juri Koll, ViCA)