Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present, Jeffrey Vallance: La Chapelle de Poulet, an immersive experience into the mind of influential Los Angeles artist Jeffrey Vallance. Over the course of his career Vallance has consistently added to the strong assemblage tradition of Southern California. This exhibition, featuring mixed-media drawings, sculptural works, and performance reaffirms Vallance’s position as one of the most influential and talented artists of his generation whose work combines vastly different symbols along with found objects from his travels and correspondence across the globe, as well as in L.A. itself.

In the dense assemblage works presented in Jeffrey Vallance: La Chapelle de Poulet, Vallance combines the iconography of Blinky the Friendly Hen with drawing, painting and found objects collected over the past 40 years. Often beginning with an intuitive gesture, and then built layer-by-layer through collage and painting methods, Vallance performs the making of each work like a “possessed cat,” scratching and clawing at each surface with manic gestures and pure emotion. Vallance’s exhibition is offset by a large-scale souvenir cart that extends modes and implications of an assembled display in order to reflect on collecting as a deeply engrained human activity.

Vallance’s work pushes one to question the social and personal significance that shape their meaning. Known for his critical yet humorous eye, Vallance ‘s drawings, performances, sculptures and installations often reference his California childhood, voyages to the Polynesian Islands, Iceland, residences in Texas, Las Vegas, the Arctic, and travels to the Vatican. In his legendary Blinky the Friendly Hen project from 1978, a funeral service was held for a frozen supermarket hen at Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park. The artist’s examination of these experiences combines a pseudo-anthropological approach with an art historically informed practice, and addresses themes of faith, myth, ritual and popular culture, along with the geopolitical landscapes of the past and present.