Projects.

PeoplesLab offers procedural, pragmatic and sensorial tools for change: meeting conflict with an adaptive process to revive trust between people; guiding recognition and understanding of differing perspectives; illuminating ways in which we may be caught in old structures, beliefs and habits; teaching communication and negotiation skills to bridge differences, and generate creative options for effective collaboration. In our era of severe cultural tension and change our collective future depends on our asking, “Who are we to one another”, and on choosing to align in mutual support to meet each other with new creative responses.

LM Projects is pleased to announce its latest publication, The Sighted See the Surface, by artist Dorit Cypis

The Sighted See the Surface​ is an expansive project developed by Dorit Cypis over the course of seven years (2012-19). Sparked by the death of mentor and teacher Michael Asher, Cypis excavates her 40 year art practice by connecting disparate points from past to present while unearthing the complexities between sight and seeing, difference and the psychosocial relations within and between people. Works made during this period include video, photography, prints and drawings.

Friendly Fire – Epoch Virtual explores how our internal landscapes may reveal traumas of social histories – trapping us into reactive behavior. Histories are embodied and refracted by us even as we may hold elevated social principals and values. How may we be wearing the ancient warrior coliseum as a collar around our necks? In the age of Covid-19 everything has shifted under and around us. It’s a new world order yet held by broken old world structures. How will we assess conditions with new eyes, ears, minds and bodies to weave our ways towards developing generative models for who we want to be to one another?

The Color of Whiteness was performed Sunday, August 30, in-person and over Zoom, by invitation-only and on site at ICA-LA. This event was created by Cypis and 7 previous participants of PeoplesLab: Identity, Race, Whiteness + Antiracism, a research/training/dialogue program Cypis developed in June 2020 following the tragic murder of George Floyd.

Come Closer is a triptych of prints intended to be challenging to read. The work asks the reader to take time, to focus carefully in following a flashlight beam across words that appear and disappear in shadow.

Welcome the Stranger is created for the Open City Festival, Lublin, Poland, an ancient city with complex political and cultural histories. Welcome the Stranger is an urban installation, performance and social engagement project that reflects principles of sharing sustenance across all human need. Dorit Cypis and Louise Steinman are two artists, a visual artist and a writer, living in Los Angeles, USA, both with family roots in Poland’s Jewish community.

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The Sighted See the Surface, which began as a tribute to artist Michael Asher whose practice shed light on power and consciousness, documents a mapping process of projected light across 11 photographs installed on a wall at the artist’s studio. The photographs perform as portals into events taking place between 1973 - 1977 and 2012 - 2016. Cypis’ process borrows from crime detective tropes connecting unlikely suspects, locations, intentions and expectations to chart a prism of possibilities between sight and blindness, intimacy and violence, conceptual art and community dialogue. The Sighted... deepens Cypis’ investigation into aesthetics, ethics, identity and human relations, the roots of her practice since the late 1970s.

Santa Monica Prefecture is pleased to present a new work by artist Dorit Cypis, Close Your Eyes If You Want to See, a social sculpture exploring relationships between psychological, physical and social aspects of identity and social relations. Clear, fearless, and piercing, Dorit’s work emphasizes critical social engagement, never falling into reaction, or outrage.

Dorit Cypis presents a ten-act interactive presentation on identity, difference and conflict – key themes in the upcoming collaborative research project, One Another. Here, interested audience members will be invited to apply to participate in the seven month process, where, if selected, they will progress through several rounds of rigorous collective inquiry and self-examination.

Presented by Days of Dialogue, Institute for Non Violence Los Angeles, across Communities of Los Angeles City and County, Dorit Cypis is assisting The Future of Policing as a Dialogue Facilitator. Days of Dialogue is a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to be a catalyst in the community problem solving process by creating dialogue on sensitive social issues among diverse community groups.

A safety vest protects the human chest and warns of danger. This vest is stuffed with “campaign” buttons asking questions of psycho-physical dimension. We pass people in need on the streets every day. What do we know of one another? How can we connect beyond our fear, towards empathy and reciprocity?

Series of 18 prints, each unique
Photographs with visual braille in Silkscreen.

Who Did It (alert) makes simple words complex to read. The 5 prints mimic the 5 colours of Homeland Security Advisory System instituted in the USA in 2002.

Photograph of a monthly journal, Braille edition - one of a series of eight.

Archival pigment prints on Hahnemuhle rag paper.

Video: 30 sec (loop), iPad, aluminum frame, 12” x 18” blackboard.

The Life of Life is a performative work including “sleight of hand” tricks that continue the artist’s aesthetic exploration of the uncanny nature of history.

Yearlong event - flowers held in this vase from January 1 – December 31, 2010

Two rubbings of same silver box (from A Symmetry).

A Symmetry is a time line of photographs and text charting seven objects chosen from the artist’s family archive.

The artist spent three-months investigating her archive to discover connective portals of personal and political dimensions. Personal objects took on cultural and political meaning not previously recognized.

Inside/Outside/In was developed as a performance for Dan Graham the gallery, to engage with the artist Dan Graham's Performer/Audience/Mirror, originally performed in 1975.

Galileo is an immersive installation of photographs, mirrors, a telescope and chairs.

Stranded Subject (weekends), an immersive installation, digitally re-combines newspaper images to create new narratives from those that are delivered to us daily.

Sightlines, is an immersive environment where the viewer becomes partner to cross-historical and cross-cultural variables.

Liberty (leading the people) is a reflection on Eugene Delacroix's romantic/classical painting Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Cypis employs photography, video, performance, and sculpture to create an immersive space of experience and discovery, psychological, physical and political.

Framing Memories I Never Had is a perpetual projection machine projecting images of 7’ x 5’ against the wall it faces.

The Visceral Viewer and the Court was developed as college curriculum bridging aesthetics and social practice. Partnerships were developed between college/university art departments and California Superior Courthouses.

Psycho-Portraits are made from autobiographical and public domain pictures that each subject participant chose from his/her personal collection. The portraits evoke social and psychological layers of identity.

Artist Dorit Cypis created Kulture Klub Collaborative in 1992 within Project OffStreets, a drop-in center providing crisis intervention services for homeless youth in Minneapolis.

Living Buildings Act, was presented at the Federal Building, 11000 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA.

"What is the GSA, the agency responsible for holding back and NOT passing on the presidency logistics baton to Biden/Harris?

In 1979 I spent the year negotiating with the GSA - General Services Administration of all USA federal buildings - to permit me to install and perform a daily ritual at the Federal Building in West Los Angeles - a ritual represented by dancers moving under/with the metaphoric weight of government and corporate industry across their shoulders. (comment added 11-11-2020)"

Foundation for Art Resources was founded by the innovative gallerists Morgan Thomas, Connie Lewallen, and Claire Copley, for the production and presentation of contemporary art projects outside of the gallery structure.