LOS ANGELES — The Craft & Folk Art Museum presents Jonas Becker: The Pile, the museum debut of the Los Angeles-based artist’s most recent work. The Pile is a multimedia installation of video, photography, and handcrafted sculptures that explores desire—evoking questions such as where do our desires come from, how do they drive us, and ? The exhibition opens to the public on January 25 and is on view through May 3, 2015. The Pile from the street, a mountain of hand-sewn, red felt objects pressing against the Museum’s windowpane. Inside the galleries, the pile towers talismans from an endless bolt of material, piling them higher and higher around her. Each object is the symbol of an actual desire voiced by one of the thousands of participants in Becker’s project. In parks, places of worship, classrooms, and online forums, he collected over a thousand answers to the question what one thing would make your life better? He then collaborated with his mother, the video’s protagonist, to handcraft a physical manifestation of each answer in red felt. For CAFAM, he extended this collaboration to the public through open sewing meet- ups, doubling the scale of the pile from previous installations. The desires that appear in the pile run the gamut from the extremely material—“money” or a “car”— to the very intimate, such as “preventing my son’s suicide” or “keeping my family safe.” Becker’s work draws upon artistic traditions in craft, social intervention, land art, video, and photography. Simultaneously, it employs tactics from popular culture, such as craft circles and crowdsourcing. Interweaving “high” and “low” culture and “real” and endlessly manufactured. Becker received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 2010. His most recent solo exhibition, Zol Zayn//What If?, took place at Shulamit Gallery in 2014. His work has also been exhibited at LAXART, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles Art Mart, LA Road Project, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA, and Foundation for Art Resources, Long Beach, CA. He received a Six Points Fellowship in 2011, and he is the founder and An opening reception for Jonas Becker: The Pile will take place on Saturday, January 24 from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. The reception is free for CAFAM members and open to the public for a $12 admission fee. CAFAM members will be able to preview the exhibition on Saturday, January 24 starting at 12:00 p.m. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Sasha Ali | Exhibitions Manager [email protected] | 323.937.4230 x25 JONAS BECKER: THE PILE January 25 – May 3, 2015 Los Angeles artist Jonas Becker creates multimedia installation featuring a 13-foot tall mountain of wool felt talismans representing human desire Killed Death, Ben Venom, Harley-Davidson t-shirts, fabric, 2013. Courtesy of the artist [The American Context #14] Madame X, Luke Haynes, used clothing, new fabric, cotton, batting, thread, 2013. Courtesy of the artist