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San Jose Museum of Art

March 26 - August 15, 2011

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110 South Market Street San Jose, CA 95113
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Beta Space Sketch for Beta Space installation by Ruben Ochoa, 2011
The San Jose Museum of Art will launch a new exhibition series called “Beta Space” this March. Like the legendary Silicon Valley garage, Beta Space will serve as an experimental laboratory for artists, collaborative ventures, and catalytic ideas. The Museum has converted the north gallery on the second floor for this ongoing series of exhibitions. The first installment, on view March 26-August 14, 2011, will feature new works by Appel and Ochoa, two Los Angeles-based artists known for rethinking the built environment. Appel focuses on domestic settings, while Ochoa explores urban landscapes. Beta Space will bring the two artists together for an artistic “conversation” to imagine alternative urban spaces and domestic habitats. Ruben Ochoa is fascinated by the built environment, particularly urban spaces that are punctuated by obtrusive cement walls, sidewalks, chain-link fences, and concrete footings. For “Beta Space,” Ochoa plans a massive installation of metal fence posts and concrete forms, suspended from the ceiling like a chandelier. Kevin Appel belongs to a generation of artists who mine Los Angeles’s legacy of modernist residential architecture. For Beta Space, Appel is creating a large architectural scrim and several new paintings. Appel has had one-person exhibitions at Acme, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Wilkinson Gallery, London; and other venues. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the New York Public Library; the Saatchi Collection, London; and other public and private collections. “Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa” is organized by Kristen Evangelista, associate curator, and sponsored by the James Irvine Foundation and Technology Credit Union. Ochoa’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; Site Santa Fe, NM; and numerous galleries nationwide. His work is in the collections of such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Armand Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.