PYO Gallery LA is pleased to present TEXT, a group exhibition featuring artists Gary Ward, Jana Cruder, and Morgan Sorne. Text explores the methods in which words can enable artists to interact with, play with, communicate with, and challenge their audiences. These three artists use literature as both medium and subject to engage viewers in a more personal relationship.

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Gary Ward is a Los Angeles based artist whose work embodies elements of painting, drawing, and poetry. His paintings are witty, playful, sharply cynical, embracing of mistakes and flaws, and uninhibited, with an element of urgency and naivete. His influences come from a wide range of sources: print media, advertising, film, graffiti, Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Del Close, and Kamasi Washington. The final pieces represent a visceral synthesis of word and image designed to provoke.

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Jana Cruder is a Los Angeles based artist who designs environments which challenge viewers to participate directly, intimately, with the artist herself. Her work questions our relationship with technology its ability to manifest emotional influence. In her 2016 interactive installation piece entitled The Way of the Modem Man, Cruder invited audience members to enter an isolated chamber with only their phones and text her in the nude. Cruder says, “I feel with the clothing removed, it levels the playing field and shows us we’re all human”.

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Morgan Sorne is a Los Angeles based artist, musician, actor, and filmmaker. Through nuanced vocal layering and frenetic scrawled pictographs, Sorne investigates the breakdown of language both sonically and visually throughout a series of site-specific installations in downtown Los Angeles, California. Using a vocal range of four octaves and his own invented language Sorne explores the constructs of communication as a primal emotive experience with the people, landscape and environment of the dramatic ever-evolving city center.

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Prescott McCarthy is a Utah born Los Angeles transplant. McCarthy's work spans many mediums while always keeping a narrative of nostalgia revolving around archetypal objects, spaces, and stories.  In the upcoming exhibition, 'TEXT' he will be adding, and subtracting from writing to create a saga of a thousand bits and pieces. McCarthy intends for the viewer to experience as though they were looking thru memories with poor analog cellular reception.

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The exhibition will run from June 25th, 2016 to August 6th, 2016. An opening reception will be held at PYO Gallery LA on Saturday, June 25th, from 6pm to 9pm.