TRYST is a new international art fair for artist-run-spaces and collectives as well as an international conference addressing the needs and future of global exchange for artist-run spaces, collectives, and organizations. A Torrance Art Museum (TAM) project, TRYST addresses the need for opportunities that foster artistic exchange between grass-roots artist organizations worldwide. This art fair will introduce international artists to Los Angeles, a leading center for contemporary art. Connecting artists to the art-savvy Los Angeles audience, the LA arts scene, and to one another allows unlimited networking opportunities in which artists can engage with other participants and develop further international exchanges. Talks and performances will be included in the program, as well as social events for participants. This will be the second edition of TRYST.

2024 PARTICIPATING SPACES:
International: AAC Platform (Italy), Art Center of Social Studies (Armenia), ARTSPACEMEXICO (Mexico), DE BOUWPUT (The Netherlands), Eitoeiko (Japan), El Quinto Piso (Mexico), ETAJ (Romania), Gallery 70 (Albania), INSTYTUT AVTOMATYKY (Ukraine), ISG (Norway), MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture (Switzerland), Open O’pen$ (Ukraine), Our Neon Foe (Australia), Small Projects (Norway), The Black Piglet (Mexico),

USA: After Time Collective (Portland, OR), Available Art Space Projects (Las Vegas, NV), Dinghy Rig (Fort Collins, CO), Hyperlink (Denver, CO), iBiennaleX (Hawaii), Mercury 20 Gallery (Oakland, CA) , nHnT (Chicago, IL), Proyectos Raul Zamudio (NYC), PRP Project Space (Dallas, TX), SFAA (Chicago, IL), Utopian Mega Project (Midwest), Vorderzimmer (Brookyn, NY)

Southern California: 515, 3C Gallery Collective, A&T Gallery, Art in Room, Artbug, Artdrop, AWOL, Crear Studio Gallery, DMST Atelier, Dorado 806 Projects, Durden and Ray, Erect Walls, Flux Art Space, IDOLWILD, JAUS, Junior High LA, Korean American Artist Collective, Landmarks of Art (LOA), MAARLA, The Middle Room, Monte Vista Projects, Nous Ance, Noysky Projects, OCCCA (Orange County Center for Contemporary Art), OFFUS, Portuguese Bend Projects, Prospect Art, Proxy Gallery, Quiet Please, Ruth Gallery, S-Gallery, Shockboxx, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Toy Bin Art, UOOORS, ViCA (Venice Institute of Contemporary Art), Winslow Garage, Wonzimer, Young Projects

https://www.torranceartmuseum.com/tryst

AAC Platform was founded in 2007 in Roma as a nomadic platform for promoting emergent and established international artists and architects. AAC Platform stages solo, curated group exhibitions, and collaborations with others institutions and galleries, like AOC F58. AAC Platform’s program is defined by a precise curatorial intention of research to provide platforms for exposure and exchange through a range of languages, and several projects who investigate the narrative capacities of photography, installation, video installation, sculpture, painting and theoretical architecture.

For TRYST, we have invited artists Peter Ydeen and Matthew Smith.
Black, White, and Gray is a series realized by Peter Ydeen. It's a series of urban landscape photographs shot along the eighty-mile I-78 corridor, beginning in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, traveling through a cross-section of both desolate and urbanized New Jersey, and then landing in the center of New York City. These are images living in the mid-tones, which find their origins in the stoic tenets of New Topographics, only to wander into a romantic embrace of the often unseen animism that fills our places. This is a Lewis Baltz industrial park with a Brunelleschi perspective or a Robert Adams trailer topped with a Fragonard cloud. Here, geometry melds with movement, sometimes contorted, cluttered, or even stretched, while still presenting a respect for the classic, formal, and academic qualities of our built environment. These are photographs that embody shades of gray, both in tone and subject matter, yet are constructed with tensions that envelop us as unobservant passersby. Black, White, and Gray is a chimerical romance, a search for the angels in our architecture, and an interaction between the monumental shapes and structures and the cacophony of our urban landscape.
Ascension is Smith’s latest photoseries. It received an Honourable Mention at the Lucie International Photo Awards 2020, in the Professional Analog/Film: Fine Art category, as well as Honourable Mentions at the Tokyo International Foto Awards 2022 and the Moscow International Foto Awards 2021.
Featuring photographs taken in London, Venice, LA and Tokyo, Ascension explores the hidden territory of the mind and the heart, through the outer world of a hybrid cityscape. Taken during a time of deep instability in his life, which included the death of his first wife, the photographs reflect an inner journey that he needed to complete, through fear and grief, to find lasting courage and clarity of mind. Bringing together street, landscape and abstract photography, to build an integrated world in which reality is open-ended, yet ever-enriching, Ascension moves through light and dark, life and death, to ‘make the darkness visible’.