Using the beautiful Beacon Arts Building–once a storage facility–as a starting point for exploring our complex relationship with the things we choose to keep or discard, the artists featured in “Storage Wars,” presented by 5790projects

 grapple with a similar quandaries – whether it’s the modified ancient tablets of Natalie Labriola (in which emoticons replace hieroglyphics), or the abstracted still life paintings of Etienne Zack, preserving a unique narrative through registry and archive is an intrinsically human ritual.While Emily Silver‘s bittersweet birthday party relics recall a collective fascination with documented milestones, Justin John Greene‘s wry paintings recall our tendency to romanticize our experiences with a cinematic flair. These various behaviors are hinged on our plight for an enduring identity a notion exemplified through Finishing School’s mixed media, performance, installation, and intervention projects. As technology modifies our relationship with verisimilitude, the relevance of a repository, archive, or even cache for our perennial selves is ever evolving.

Thirty artists’ studios in the Beacon Arts Building will also be open the evening of Saturday, February 9, making this a very art-filled evening.5790projects focuses on finding pop-up spaces for Los Angeles-based artists, and “Storage Wars” runs through February 15.

Finishing School

top image: Emily Silver