****Tiny Creatures presents: "Under Alvarado: There is a Beach," Tiny
Creatures goes to Mexicali. Curated by Janet Kim for the Mexicali Rose
Centro de Arte/Medios in Baja California, Mexico for the night of
November 14th and 15th, 2008.*******

WHAT
For two nights in the bordertown of Mexicali, Tiny Creatures will
invade Mexicali's art community center Mexicali Rosa Centro de Arte/
Medios with both underground and well-known artists such as Kelly
Coats, Rachel Detroit, Jason Grier, Jason Yates, Matt Fishbeck, Ry
Rocklen (who has recently shown at the Whitney Biennial), and others,
all of whom have gravitated to Tiny Creatures, embracing its non-
commercial and underground culture for the past two years. Once a
music label, now a music school as well as an art and music community
center, Tiny Creatures will be celebrating its last art show at like
minded space in Mexicali, Mexico, notorious for its underground
tunnels and the smuggling of opium and alcohol during the prohibition
era. Now the biggest Chinese population in Mexico, the colorful
Mexicali is not unlike the colors of Echo Park, home of Tiny
Creatures, with mafia owned streets, drug deals around the corner, and
the savory combination of Chinese and Mexican food. Almost looked upon
as a pilgrimage, this caravan of Tiny Creatures artists will none the
less be excited to share their eclectic art work with kindred spirits
of the Centro. Consider this a weekend of Tiny Creatures loose on the
streets of Mexicali, art and music abundant, all creatures of a
creative, free, and sometimes decadent aesthetic and a pseudo
intellectual mind – unite and celebrate!

DATES
Art Opening: Friday, November 14th 2008, 7pm
Artists: Kelly Coats, Rachel Detroit, Hedi El Kholti, Matt Fishbeck,
Paul Gellman, Jason Grier, Sklyar Haskard, Julia Holter,  Eli Langer,
Jed Ochmanek, Ry Rocklen, Bobbi Woods, Jason Yates, Samuel Vasquez.

Music Night: Saturday, November 15th, 2008, 9pm
Bands: Holy Shit, Nikki Obscure, and more TBA
DJ's: by Various Artists and DJ Eggy

WHERE
Mexicali Rose Centro de Arte/Medios
Ave. Colima 1436, Colonia Pueblo Nuevo,
Mexicali, Baja California, 21120
MEXICO

CONTACT
For Mexicali Rose Centro de Arte/Medios
(52) (686) 552-8345(mex)
(760) 595-2639 (U.s)
rosa-de-mexic...@hotmail.com
www.myspace.com/rosademexicali

For Tiny Creatures
628 N. Alvarado St. Los Angeles, Ca. 90026
ja...@tiny-creatures.com, (323) 712.208o (U.s)
www.tiny-creatures.com, www.myspace.com/tiny-creatures

About the Curator
JANET KIM began Tiny Creatures as a record label in January of 2006.
Having been a musician since being able to walk, and admiring art
teenager on, she has always sought out a community of artists and
musicians throughout her adult life. Tiny Creatures, inspired by the
Factory and perhaps even the cafes of Paris at the turn of the
Century, was begat in seeing a lack of such culture. Since the opening
of the doors of what is now the gallery space of Tiny Creatures in
Echo Park, like-minded individuals have been eager to spark friendship
and share art, ideas, and music. After two years of setting up over 10
excellent art openings and numerous music and other events, Janet has
decided to end her "gallerist" position at like minded space in
Mexicali, as a pilgrimage and adventure and as a new desire to take
her artists and artwork on "tour."  She hopes to travel with Tiny
Creatures to Europe in the upcoming Spring, including at Lemaire,
Paris, where a few of her artists will be featured as designers of
their t-shirt line.

Janet Kim is also lead singer and co-founder of Softboiled Eggies. She
teaches music privately and in group classes at Tiny Creatures.

About the Artists
KELLY COATS is an artist, musician and designer based in Los Angeles,
California. She received a BFA from Western Michigan University in
1998, and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati (UC) in 2002. In
Michigan, Coats was the front person for the garage/punk bands
Moonshine Mountain and The Free Agents.

While at UC, Coats traveled to Mexico City several times to
collaborate with local artists there. In 2002 she co-founded the
Mexico City based artist collective Bordermates, which produced 15
events and the work of over 100 emerging artists. The events were
coordinated at parking lots, cantinas (bars), restaurants, etc., in
Mexico, the United States, and Argentina. With free music, drink and
food, Bordermates created a relaxed environment where artists and
visitors could observe and participate mutually. The group
unofficially disbanded in 2006 after their last event, a giant cake
contest at a bakery in Guadalajara.

In Mexico, Coats was a member of the satirical, electro-caberet trio,
Mi Grupo Favorito. She also created futuristic visuals for corporate
tequila parties and the design concept, logo, and illustrations for
the counter-culture zine Replicante. Her solo show Epic Thriller at
Rimjaus Gallery featured a phenakistiscope (optical toy) that – when
activated – morphs Michael Jackson's face from the pop-icon's Jackson
Five days to it's current state.

Since her move to Los Angeles in 2005, Coats has tooted her flute with
the likes of Matthew Lawton, Baseck and Crooked Cowboy & the
Freshwater Indians. With L.A. Fog, a boogie-woogie trio formed by
Giles Miller, she has performed with Wu Ingrid Tsang and My Barbarian.
Coats is currently fascinated and horrified by the daily flood of
consumer enticement she receives in the mail. With her collage series
Little Shopwise of Horrors, Coats samples the poorly printed objects
(i.e. pizza, linens, electronics etc.) of sales inserts and morphs
them into mutant specimens of quotidian waste.

RACHEL DETROIT The moniker Detroit has been adopted as a rejection of
her Roma-Romanian surname Kucsulain. Choosing Detroit has rendered the
convenient "Tall Rachel" as obsolete (a title which any woman over
5'10" is saddled).

Contrary to popular belief, Rachel Detroit never derived inspiration
or perpetrated alleged infamous skills and/or scams through the
process of Cockmosis. These vicious rumors are patently false. Nor did
diligent scholastic turpitude define her style.

Instead, her first free-balling foray into the artistic world began as
bathroom wall graffiti. The constantly changing, vulgar, gratuitous,
effusion of her emotions affirmed her relevance among her peers, and
cemented her place as an esteemed bastion of heroic debauchery.

HEDI EL KHOLTI is mainly a Co-editor for the independent press,
Semiotext(e). His other Projects include curating "Starstruck" by Gary
Boas at Dietch Projects in New York, The photographer's  Gallery  in
London, and Karen Lovegrove in Los Angeles; designing "Extreme Canvas,
Movie Poster Painting from Ghana" which was exhibited at the Fowler
Museum, UCLA; curating "New York Sex 1979-1985" by Gary Boas at Kamel
Mennour Gallery in Paris; organizing two film series in Los Angeles in
2000 showcasing the works of Alexander Sukurov, Chantal Akerman, Tsai
Ming-Liang and Pedro Costa, and curating the ongoing "Deleuze A to Z"
film screenings at the Mandrake bar in Los Angeles. He currently edits
a Zine called Animal Shelter.

El Kholti grew up in Morocco and Paris, and lives in Los Angeles.

MATT FISHBECK is a musician and visual artist based in Los Angeles.
Fishbeck commandeers the amorphous pop group Holy Shit, which he
formed in 2001 with Ariel Pink.  Since then, Holy Shit has written &
recorded about 60 songs, and has performed about 70 times; about 85
different musicians have been active members of the group at one point
or another.  There is an album, "Stranded At Two Harbors" (UUAR,
2006), and a very new '45 called "Rough + Tumble" (Beatrice Records,
2008) which will be available the minute Holy Shit arrives in
Mexicali.  Holy Shit will release a new album in early 2009, happily
on the Tiny Creatures record label.

Fishbeck presented his first art show, "Workish," at Tiny Creatures in
the Fall of 2006.  It  precipitated a string of exhibitions in
Chinatown (Los Angeles) – among them a group show at Daniel Hug
Gallery and his solo debut, "We Never Close," at New High Art Gallery.

His artwork for the Under Alvarado exhibition investigates issues like
birth, reproduction, visual re/representation, exposure, simulation,
simulacrum, performance, narcissism, surprise, reproduction &
reproducibility, negational identity, and the authority of the
photograph.  A considerable quantity of Fishbeck's pictures will be
shown. Called "analogues" (his term), these self portraits, created
with a standard office photocopier, are stark, toner-heavy, and
macabre. Each analogue is unique, unduplicatable.  In them, Fishbeck's
face (in whole or in part, depending) is startlingly, variously, de/
formed.  Still, even when the facial anomalies in these prints are at
their most extreme, their most "unreal," the subject is unmistakably
the artist/Fishbeck.  "They are not distortions.  They are faithful
portraits – uncorruptibly truthful.  In each one, I have shot myself,
my face, at point-blank.  At that range there's no room for dodging
the truth."

Fishbeck was born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1975.  He received his
Bachelors Degree from Harvard University in 1998.

PAUL GELLMAN was born in St. Louis Missouri. He received his BFA at
The Cooper Union, MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is
currently teaching printmaking at a local city college in the Los
Angeles area. Gellman has recently shown his artwork in La Cienega and
Chinatown galleries Angstrom Gallery and Bonnelli Gallery, along with
a group show at Tiny Creatures last August. His inspiration includes
Tarot cards, 99 cent stores, spirituality, nudity, backpacking, music,
neon colors, and glitter. Amongst being Tall Paul in the Echo Park
community, Gellman is also involved with putting on plays and
performances with the New Energy Encounter Group along with art duo
Los Super Elegantes, creating zines with Hedi El Kholti (Semiotexte)
entitled Animal Shelter, and performing music with avant-group Vibe
Central.

JASON GRIER is a songwriter, composer, and computer programmer from
Los Angeles, California. He founded the Human Ear Music label in 2006,
which he continues to operate in partnership with Julia Holter. He
attended the California Institute of The Arts up to 1999. Since then,
he has written and performed music in popular and fine arts settings
while based in New York and Los Angeles.

Between 2004 and 2005 he recorded a series of six albums of unabashed
pop music that traversed an imaginary career arc from proto-art-rock
to adult contemporary. His pop music self-consciously recalls
influences from 1970's European ambient rock, 1980's slam-jam funk,
90's techno-hip-hop and "smooth jazz" styles. Following a series of
live band gigs of his own music, he began performing intimate, solo
arrangements of his friends' songs.

More recently he has been interested in techniques of gestural
notation, free reed instruments and early-modern piano music. His
recent music is concerned with the relationship between chance
occurrence, sentimentality, and sacred meanings. In it, he calls for a
varied sound palette including Southeast Asian, African and European
resonators, voice, wah-wah and specially constructed reed-vocoders.

SKYLAR HASKARD is a Los Angeles based artist working in a variety of
media including, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. His
work has so far been involved with the identification of the
contradictory conditions that exist in certain social spaces and how
these contradictions can lead to their eventual deterioration. Some
works have involved the construction of rooms within the gallery that
are then used to create environments in which the viewer may
experience the work. As in his most recent work, R U Feeling
Phenomenal? 2007 Haskard created a "room for reflection" in which the
viewer, artist, and gallery members became active participants in the
works success/failure and its subsequent deterioration. The exhibition
is always seen as durational in which the work is not seen as a finite
solution but more of a specific response to its location within time
and space.  Although Haskard's practice is mainly process based and
ideally seen as continual (one work leading into the other) he also
makes discreet objects and videos which are usually lasting
manifestations/documents made within these constructions.

His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Anna
Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles (2007) and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow;
while also shown in numerous group exhibitions both nationally and
internationally, including Squatting,  New Langton Arts, San Francisco
(2006); Collapsible Monuments,  Thrust Projects, New York (2006);
GroupShowBoard II, Kunst Pavilion, Innsbruck (2005); Speed, Need, and
Greed, Villa Arson, Nice (2005); SugarTown Participant, New York
(2005); and Love after the Cold War in an open house of a (re)
constructed Babylon by a popular Mechanic, Mackey Apartments, MAK
Centre, Los Angeles (2004).

JULIA HOLTER is a songwriter, composer and sound artist from Los
Angeles, California. She holds a BFA in composition from the
University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and is
currently attending the Masters program in composition at the
California Institute of the Arts. She began contributing to the Human
Ear Music label shortly after its founding in 2006, becoming co-
chairperson of Human Ear Music in December 2007. Her interest in the
promotion and distribution of music and radio has always accompanied
her art practice. Her music has been released on CD in the US and
Germany.

Between 2006 and 2007 she recorded a collection of mysterious and
beguiling songs in which she developed an individualistic poetics,
utilizing found and mis-translated texts, phonetics, and archaic
languages.

Her song-writing shows a careful sense of balance, expression and
picturesque instrumentation, unfazed by homespun recording techniques.
Her sound resonates and sparkles with crystalline vocals, carefully
molded synth tones and acoustic percussion loops. The result is a
music that transcends classification, though rough comparisons can be
made to baroque music, French bubble-gum pop and Fairlight-era Kate
Bush.

Her experimental work frequently uses simple, chance-based procedures,
textual interpretation and ritual-like activities that lead to complex
personal and devotional meanings.

ELI LANGER "is a Canadian visual artist. Langer rose to prominence in
1993, while 26 years old, in the Toronto art world with a solo
exhibition at the Mercer Union Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition
consisted of 5 paintings and 35 drawings addressing various issues of
childhood sexuality. Toronto police raided the exhibition under
Canada's new child pornography legislation. This event and ensuing
media coverage created a national debate over the reach of law and
freedom of expression." – Wikipedia.

Recently, Eli Langer has been showing in Los Angeles with Dan Hug. His
art piece for Mexicali consists of a string that is meant to play
with, interact with, and even annoy those that come in contact with
it.

JED OCHMANEK received his BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School
of Design in 2005.  He lives and works in Los Angeles.  He has
exhibited in Los Angeles with Tiny Creatures and Phantom Galleries and
is preparing for a forthcoming exhibition at 1430 Contemporary in
Portland, Oregon.  He is 26 years of age.

RY ROCKLEN has shown art work in various places around the world
including Bangkok, Brussels, The French West Indies, New York City and
Los Angeles. Ry participated in the Whitney Biennial 2008. Ry is also
a musician and his solo album is to be released with Human Ear Music
later this year.  Born and raised in Los Angeles, Ry gives abandoned
and forgotten objects a second life as sculpture.  Through minimal
alteration Ry reanimates the materials of the everyday. Ry received
his MFA and BFA from UCLA

BOBBI WOODS received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2008
after studying in Germany for a year. Bobbi has shown in various group
shows throughout her years at Art Center including Dan Hug Gallery and
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and has collaborated
with Natacha Snellman and Brian Bress in several art performances.
She will be showing art work relating to her interest in found videos
of strip searches along with a movie poster.

JASON YATES was born in Detroit 1972. He received his MFA at Art
Center and his BFA at the University of Michigan. At age 20, Jason
began painting and collaborating with George Clinton of Parliament
Funkadelic. Yates has sttudied at Art Center with Mike Kelley, Mayo
Thompson, Liz Larner and has collaborated on various projects/events
with Ariel Rosenberg, a.k.a Ariel Pink, including a multi-media
spectacle at the Los Angeles Geffen Contemporary Museum. He designed
the cover for Penny-Ante, a Los Angeles based bi-yearly art and text
compilation. He is currently designing a storefront for an art store
in Los Angeles Chinatown and has recently participated in a group show
at Black Dragon Society 2008. His solo show at Tiny Creatures 2007 was
a spectacle of hand-made fliers he has made under moniker Fast
Friends, Inc. His aesthetic is regressive, manic, sometimes illegible,
and tactile; borrowing conventions from punk flyers and 60's
psychedelic posters and employing the strategies of the Dadaists,
Situationists, and Fluxus.

SAMUEL VASQUEZ was seriously trained to be a politician in college,
which he credits as to why his performances always include a mask and
costume of some sort. His obsessions with actors, costume makers,
shamans, and pretty people have led him to co-found eighteen-thirty in
2007, an art space in Echo Park that serves to promote performative
arts in Los Angeles. His art work is also influenced by long hair,
male dancers, dark things, and jealousy. Samuel will be performing at
the opening event, which includes folk-lore tales, regional myths,
pyramids, and colors.

About Tiny Creatures
TINY CREATURES is a desire to find a way to live our own way, to have
a sense of community, to see each other while on earth, to share our
lives, our pains, our talents, our thoughts, to capture a moment in
time that will be lost or forgotten, and to package it with beauty,
love, pain and all that we can feel as humans. TINY CREATURES is
making this small community of Los Angeles artists available to the
wider world, or perhaps, the wider world available to us. In addition
to serving as a venue/space/gallery, TINY CREATURES is also a
community-inspired independent record label with a family of artists
including Ariel Pink, Holy Shit, and Softboiled Eggies and an
affordable music school in the community of Echo Park. TINY CREATURES
has worked with No Age, Family, Human Ear Music, and Eighteen Thirty
Gallery to set up phenomenal art and music shows in the Los Angeles
area, along with numerous other underground and DIY Los Angeles based
artists including Jason Yates, Tall Paul, Matt Fishbeck, Kevin
"Spanky" Long, and George Friery.

For more information, visit www.tiny-creatures.com.

About Mexicali Rosa Centro de Arte/Medios
The Centro is a community based art gallery that also functions as an
educational after school program for high school kids.

MEXICALI ROSA CENTRO DE ARTE/MEDIOS es una organización comunitaria,
la cual de forma voluntaria se dedica a proporcionar acceso gratuito a
medios artisticos para la juventud de Mexicali, Baja California. El
Centro de Arte/Medios Mexicali Rose se encuentra en la colonia de
Pueblo Nuevo, una de las colonias mas viejas y vibrantes
historicamente de la ciudad, siendo una de las areas de mas cercania
con la frontera Mexico/Estados Unidos. Los organizadores crecieron y
se basan en esta region, reconociendo una verdadera posibilidad de
opciones diferentes para la juventud de esta comunidad.

El proposito de este proyecto es proporcionarle a la juventud
fronteriza una avenida para expresarse y reflejar su ambiente
creativamente y positivamente a traves del arte. Al otorgarle esta
abilidad a comunidades que de otra forma no tuvieran capacidades o voz
relacionada a los medios, el proyecto puede servir como una
alternativa positiva para una nueva generación. A traves del arte, los
jovenes pueden reflejar y afectar lo que acontece en un lugar tan
culturalmente diverso y desafiante como lo es la frontera entre Mexico/
Estados Unidos.

La edad necesaria para los jovenes involucrados en esta comunidad
artistica es entre 13-18 años de edad.