Like many major metropolises, Los Angeles is a city brimming with transplants from across the U.S. and around the globe. Uprooting their familiar lives to move here in search of new opportunities, many find their corner of community and ultimately make L.A. ‘home.’ Yet, for many—especially at first—the transition to Angelino can feel challenging, often marked by an unshakable feeling of being an outsider. Stark contrasts from their hometown, paired with an unfamiliar lifestyle and culture, can create a sense of observing life from a distance, making the concept of “home” feel perpetually just out of reach. This meditative unease and questioning melancholy—layered with a desire to belong—permeates each of Kevin Yaun’s canvases in In Between Walls.
In his first solo show with Billis Williams Gallery, Yaun delves into our complicated relationship with the feeling of ‘home.’ Originally from Georgia, Yaun’s transient lifestyle has moved him across the United States as well as to international locales in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia. Capitalizing on this experience, his work cautiously examines the elements that make a place feel like home, balancing internal emotions with the way we perceive our surroundings. Each of the fourteen paintings in this intimate exhibition plays with this tension, contrasting interior and exterior spaces, clear window panes with distinct reflections, captivating light set against hazy or deep shadow, and painterly abstract brushstrokes with distinctive land or cityscapes. Yaun skillfully creates visual barriers—cement walls, imposing hedges, and glass windows—that separate the viewer from a perceived reality just out of reach. This calculated distance allows us to reflect on our own beliefs and perceptions, examining the distance between our sense of belonging and the desire for connection from a safe vantage.
Kevin Yuan, Shiny Objects 1, 2024, Oil on canvas, 47 x 80 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery. Kevin Yuan, Pacific Coast 27, 2024. Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.
Though these paintings lack distinctive landmarks, they evoke an unmistakable essence of Los Angeles. Works such as Pacific Coast 35 (2024) and Shiny Objects 1 (2024) capture the vibrancy of west coast sunlight as it transitions from early morning to evening neon, while the iconic three-story hedges in Pacific Coast 27 (2024) bring to mind the defensive walls of a medieval city . Each scene feels precious and personal, as if observed by someone who admires the beauty in simplicity.
One of the most dynamic works in the show, Hillside Glass (2024), is also its most colorful and abstract. Initially presenting a view of a large red building, the composition is interrupted by an ominous reflection from a window behind us that casts a fence-like image over the building, commanding our attention. Its shadowy, thick jagged lines, reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still’s signature style, become an additional obstacle or distraction that separates us from the outside world. The intense red hue and fervent brushstrokes give the work a more anxious feel, perhaps hinting at doubts creeping in about belonging to this place. As Yaun’s work descends further toward abstraction, with objects blending into fields of color and thicker brushstrokes, the emotional value feels more complex and saturated.
Kevin Yuan, Hillside Glass, 2024. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.
In another standout painting, Pacific Coast 7 (2024), a strong vertical format artfully displays hillside homes in a window-like composition. Here, buildings clustered at the top of the canvas catch golden-hour light, contrasted by an indistinct field of deep indigo below. The floating translucent rectangle at the bottom of the canvas reinforces the window illusion, subtly nodding to Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, with his somber color fields, rectilinear forms, and quiet introspection.
Kevin Yuan, Pacific Coast 7, 2024, Oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.
Yet, perhaps the most striking art historical parallels to Yaun’s work can be found in the paintings by American Modernist Edward Hopper. Known for his portrayals of New York City’s retail and apartment buildings with distinct light, Hopper’s compositions often peered through residential and storefront windows to highlight the fishbowl-like existence within the city, creating scenes of isolation that capture a soundless solitude. Both Hopper and Yaun explore a psychological connection to observation and solitude in their paintings. The difference in their approaches is subtle: while Hopper documented a (often idealized) sense of detachment amid his home city, Yaun’s work is more introspective, evoking a longing to connect while maintaining a cautious distance.
Installation image of Kevin Yaun: In Between Walls at Billis Williams Gallery, 2024. Image courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.
One might wonder if Yaun considers L.A. to be home yet. His piece At Home (2024) offers some clues. Distinguished by painterly, textured brushstrokes, it depicts a view of a sand-colored neighbor’s wall with a small window. Superimposed on the image is a reflection from another window, showing a silhouette of a small solitary houseplant perched on the sill—a personal touch that instills comfort to the scene. While feeling ‘at home’ is a deeply personal experience, this reflection seems like a subtle reminder of the efforts made to feel at ease in new surroundings.
Installation image of Kevin Yaun: In Between Spaces with At Home, 2024 located at second from the right. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.
Overall, Yaun’s work balances abstract forms, technique and hue with intriguing reflections, creating an ideal vehicle for channeling our often contradictory inner thoughts about belonging. His scenes create safe vantage points to observe and invite viewers to contemplate their desired sense of place and home through gently placed barriers. Though early in his career, the artist certainly feels at home as a pensive observer with brush in hand. Looking forward to seeing how his work evolves, and curious to see if he decides to call L.A. home.
Kevin Yaun: In Between Walls JOctober 12 – Nov 9, 2024 Billis Williams Gallery 2716 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90012
Elana Mann is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice, the embodiment of language, and deafness. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for the past twenty years she has researched the act of listening and everyday communication through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Mann’s rattles, trumpets, and other instruments are tools that galvanize the sonic energy of her work; together, they make a synergistic roar that embodies the voices of those who strive for social and environmental justice. She has participated in exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, among many others. Mann’s awards include an International Artist-In-Residence at Artpace San Antonio, the California Community Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the Cali Catalyst award from the Center for Cultural Innovation.
Q: Artistic Challenges: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in a project, and how did you overcome it?
A: Ha! So many challenges over the years that it is hard to choose. Here’s one: in 2017, I found this incredible home-made folk musical instrument that was used in protests in Claremont, CA during the 1970s. It was called the Mega Kazoo Horn; it’s ten feet long and has six siren whistles attached to a long central horn. I wanted to create an homage to this piece and use it in present-day street protests and performances. I started to work on it in late 2019/early 2020 after having my second child. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I isolated myself at home with my newborn and my five-year-old while my husband worked—it was hard for me to go to the bathroom, let alone the studio. On top of that, it dawned on me that this sculpture, made for six people to breathe into simultaneously, had become a COVID-19 super spreader. And the only people protesting in the spring of 2020 were those who didn’t want to be vaccinated or masked. I thought: This is the worst idea for an artwork of all time, and this sculpture will never be finished.
But then the summer of racial reckoning happened. Masses of people risked their lives to protest for racial justice, and I began to imagine that the piece could be completed and used someday. I finished the sculpture during a residency at Artpace, San Antonio in late fall 2020 and called it Our Work is Never Done (Unfinished Business). It took another three years before I felt comfortable using the piece in a performance, and I finally premiered its sound in January 2023 with Hope is a Hammer at Human Resources, Los Angeles, in collaboration with composer and musician Sharon Chohi Kim.
Elana Mann, Hope is a Hammer, 2023, a collaboration by Sharon Chohi Kim and Elana Mann, Human Resources LA, CA. Photo Credit: Ruth Kim.
Q: Influential Experiences: Is there a particularexperience that significantly shaped your recent artisticdirection?
A: I learned this summer that I was born Hard of Hearing—after twenty years of making art about the act of listening, the collective voice, and embodied language. I laughed and cried at the same time at the irony of it all. Clearly, my subconscious knew about my disability before my conscious mind did. It’s very strange to learn, at the age of forty-three, that you’ve had a disability your whole life and never confronted it. This new self-awareness shook me at first. I had built up so many ways to compensate for and cover up my hearing loss, and my internalized ableism was strong. But after I got over the initial shock, I was elated. Suddenly, I started to understand my life and my art practice in profound ways, and I could see that my artwork has been dealing with disability and deafness for years. I even have a large collection of antique hearing aids that I made into an artwork in 2014 called Having a Choice and Having a Voice, Having a Voice and Having a Choice. I am still in this process; it has only been four months since I was diagnosed with congenital hearing loss. I am so excited to see how this self-knowledge will shape my work moving forward.
Elana Mann, Having a Choice and Having a Voice, Having a Voice and Having a Choice, 2014, Metal and assorted antique ear trumpets from the 19th and 20th centuries, 7’ X 4 ½’ X 3’. Image courtesy of Elana Mann.
Q?: Unexpected Mediums: What’s the mostunconventional material or medium you’ve used in your art? How important are these media in your work?
A: My material curiosity is endless—last night I was making letters out of cooked spaghetti for a new text piece. I was trained as a sculptor, so mediums and materials are critical to my work. In 2019, I started making ceramic rattles for protest and ritual (Shake, Rattle, Roll), and it was vital to me that they be made of clay. They sound incredible, are easy to transport, and have a deep association with all the ceramic wares we use at home. The rattles are delicate, though, and they break if dropped. People often ask, “Why can’t you make these out of a more durable material?” Building them out of another material like plastic would diminish the piece for me. I love how the rattles share a vulnerability with the human body and mirror the fragility of the hand that activates them.
Elana Mann, Shake, Rattle, Roll, 2019-present, Documentation of a rattle action at the “Bans off our Bodies” rally at Los Angeles City Hall, May 14, 2022. Participants of Shake, Rattle, Roll included Jerri Allyn, Anne Bray, Frida Cano, York Chang, Courtney Fink, Janice Gomez, Everly Gomez-Hoang, DeniseGray, Maya Gurzantz, Micol Hebron, Robby Herbst, Juniper Herbst-Varella, Ella Hushagen, Michele Jaquis, Mick Lorusso, Shana Lutker, Susan Mogul, Mehregan Pezeshki, Claudia Pretelin, Jeremy Quinn, Milo Quinn, Michael Rippens, Ron Schneck, Sandy Shannon, Stephanie Sherwood, Colin Smith, Matias Viegener, Jan Williamson, Jemima Wyman, and Joan Zeta. Photo Credit: Monica Orozco.
Q?: Favorite Sound: As an artist who often works withsound, do you have a favorite sound or auditorymemory?
A: This summer, I was on a residency in rural Minnesota at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. Just before this trip, I had been fitted for my hearing aids, and this was my first time traveling with them. One of the best parts of the trip was my sound walk along the marshes of the Mississippi River, a five-minute trip from my hotel room.
The sounds of the marshes were off the charts. My hearing loss affects my ability to hear mid-frequency sounds, so I had never heard such a beautiful chorus of buzzing, trilling, and chirping sounds of swampy insects and animals. I must have taken at least twenty sound recordings—my mind was lit up with joy.
It’s fitting that I had this experience during my residency because the pieces I exhibited at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum are part of a project called Sounds from the Swamp. It was a chance for me to go physically deeper into the project’s ideas in ways I did not expect. This kind of experience is happening to me all the time with my new hearing aids—I just discovered that my husband of twenty years swears like a sailor under his breath! But the swamp cacophony was truly unforgettable, and I long to return so that I might hear it again.
Elana Mann, Sounds from the Swamp, 2020, Outdoor installation at the Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX. Photo Credit: N. Baker.
Q?:Audience Interaction: How important is audienceinteraction in your work, and how do you encourage it? Do you feel it’s intuitive? Do you think there’s a wrong or right way to engage with your work?
A: Participatory artworks have always been a part of my practice: I’ve made sculptures that amplify voices and/or create sound, built sonic architectural structures, and used mirrors that reflect a viewer’s body and mouth. My hearing disability has influenced my drive to create physical, bodily experiences for viewers, often involving the sensations of sound. I cannot control how audiences will interact with my work, and I always approach these participatory pieces with deep curiosity about how people will engage. This allows me to conduct real-time research; as I observe how people interact with my work, I come up with new ideas. For example, I made my first hearing aid—a sculpture called a “histophone” — for a commission from the Getty Villa called Villa Murmurs (2014). I designed these objects to facilitate the sonic exploration of the museum. During the listening workshop, I witnessed how one participant used the sculpture as a megaphone, a way I never would have imagined. This inspired my piece Call to Arms (2016), which I have been using for the past eight years in performances, protests, and collaborative projects.
Elana Mann, Villa Murmurs, 2014, Commissioned by the Getty Villa Museum, Pacific Palisades, CA. Photo Credit: Jean-Paul Leonard.
Q?: Artistic Evolution: How has your artistic style orfocus evolved over the years?
A: It’s funny because I look at past work and think: “I am just doing the same thing, over and over.” I know many artists have similar experiences—your work continues to unfold over your lifetime, like peeling an onion. A few life changes have really altered my work, though. Early in my career, I was working predominantly with performance and video, alongside producing large-scale collaborative pieces with others. Becoming a mom really shifted my capacity to create this kind of work. My time is so compressed, I am physically exhausted, and I yearn for time alone. Although I still work performatively and collaboratively, making objects and images has become an increasing source of solace for me over the past decade.
More recently, my artwork has started to incorporate more and more text. This is influenced by my encounters with changes in communication technology, AI, social media, and a deep internal feeling that I am losing my grasp of language. Perhaps this is also impacted by my increased hearing loss. Regardless, I am noticing a strong desire to write and use letters and words in my art practice.
Q?: Playful Projects: Have you ever created a piecepurely for fun or experimentation? What was it? Do you think experimentation is an important part of your practice? Has it led to any breakthroughs?
A: All of my work emerges from processes of play and experimentation. Recently, I had the opportunity to work for free in a shop that does prototyping for start-ups. They have all kinds of high-tech machines —laser cutters, water jets, CNC machines, mills, and more. I had never used any of them, so I began to experiment with a laser jet machine. I programmed the machine to cut out text (sayings I had written, heard, or misheard) from paper, acrylic, and wood. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with these pieces, so I stuffed a bunch of them in the back of my car. Whenever I had a free minute, I would look at them or take them out to play with. One day, while waiting at a park to meet someone, I brought these pieces out and started experimenting with how they intercepted the sunlight, using the cut-out text to cast shadows on the pavement. This is how my current body of work, Shadow Poems (2024), was born.
Elana Mann, Shadow Poems, 2024, Archival photograph on paper, 19″ x 22″. Image Courtesy of Elana Mann.
Q?: Creative Inspiration: What non-artistic sources—books, music, films, nature—have inspired your work?
A: Some literary inspirations include: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer; Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Food and Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by Adrienne Maree Brown; and
Doppleganger: A trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein.
As far as music, I enjoy work by the composers Kate Soper, Raven Chacon, Sarah Hennies, Caroline Shaw and Pauline Oliveros.
Activism is also a critical part of my practice and I’ve found inspiration from The Occupy Movement, #Metoo movement, Extinction Rebellion, The Movement for Black Lives, and The Bread and Puppet Theater.
Even hiking in the San Gabriel Foothills and playing with my kids are great sources.
Q?: Public Art: How do you view the role of public art in communities? Can you share an example of a public art project you’ve been involved in and its impact on the community?
A: In 2013, I was invited by Side Street Projects —a community-based arts organization—to create a temporary public artwork at their headquarters in Northwest Pasadena. This part of Pasadena has been historically underserved and underrepresented. At that time, most of the Northwestern Pasadena population lived under the poverty level, with the majority of residents being immigrant and undocumented families. The project I created, called Listening as (a) Movement, focused on amplifying community voices through public artworks and events. I built three large-scale sonic sculptures in an open lot and collaborated with local groups for over a year to host a series of community events. This was deep, relationship-building work that expanded on the foundation of trust Side Street Projects had been nurturing for years. I attended neighborhood council meetings, reached out to every non-profit within a ten-to-fifteen-mile radius, and listened to the needs and concerns of individual stakeholders.
As a direct result of the project, new safety infrastructure (more street lamps!) was installed—something the neighborhood council had been trying to implement for years. The city also increased youth programming for Northwestern Pasadena, and Side Street Projects adjusted the way it commissioned future artworks. One of the project’s main participants, who was a teenager at the time, now works for the City of Pasadena as a planner.
Honestly, I am still amazed and proud of all the positive effects Listening as (a) Movement had on the neighborhood. When given the right support, partnership, and time to move at the speed of trust, community-based artwork can have that power. At the same time, I don’t expect or even want all my artworks to be functional or have quantifiable effects. If I did, I would stop being an artist and become a social worker, a community organizer, or a city planner. Poetry and mystery would be replaced by mission.
Elana Mann, Listening as (a) Movement, 2013, Commissioned by Side Street Projects, Pasadena, CA. Photo Credit: Jean-Paul Leonard.
Q?: Career Advice: Can you describe a moment in your career when someone’s help was indispensable to your current success? With that moment in mind, what advice would you give to aspiring artists? What was the best advice you received?
A: When I was ten, I met the artist José Clemente Orozco Farías, the grandson of the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Clemente (as he was known) was my summer camp counselor and the first professional artist I had ever met. He was full of warmth and schemes for artworks and pranks that he pulled off in collaboration with the older campers. I idolized him and thought he was a genius. We stayed in touch until his passing in 2021. It wasn’t a specific piece of advice Clemente gave me per se, but just witnessing how he lived his life—with curiosity, openness and joy— that I took as a model for how I wanted to be when I grew up.
Art is a tough career path, especially for women artists and quadruple that for moms. Although I graduated from art school at the top of my class, my college mentor actively discouraged me from continuing on as a professional artist. At that stage of my life, I had very few role models. Last year, I was commissioned by artist Gala Porras-Kim to write a letter to young women artists for a project at REDCAT as part of “The Feminist Art Program (1970-1975): Cycles of Collectivity.” I imagined the advice I wanted to give myself when I was young and here is what I wrote (in shortened form) below:
Ten Tips for Young Womxn Artists
1. Find your coven
2. It must change
3. Say “no” early and often
4. Nurture patience
5. Guard over your studio time zealously
6. You are not a cow
7. Welcome fallow times
8. Mother earth cares for us and we must care for her in return
9. Look within, not without
10. You are not alone
Q?: Relationships: Can you tell us about some of the important relationships you’ve forged over the years, and how they’ve been mutually beneficial?
Community is everything and keeps me afloat. I want to take this opportunity to give a big shout-out and massive love to the artists whose friendship has been so important to me in this period of coming to terms with my disability: Alison O’Daniel, Gabie Strong, Debra Scacco and Audra Woloweic. The intimate and frank conversations I have with these four women have grounded me. Their artworks and the ways they navigate the world—each in their own unique way—inspire me and everyone they touch.
A: Art Collection: We hear that you also collect art. Can you tell us about your collection, and why you feel it’s important to collect?
I collect art every chance I can. The pleasure of living with art you love cannot be understated. The artworks up in my home are more than merely decoration; they are spaces to think, objects that offer comfort, things that make me laugh, and bring me moments of deep feeling.
I have a large collection of works by two of my close friends, John Burtle and Audrey Chan. In our living room, we have paintings by Anoka Faruqee, my graduate school mentor. More recently, I acquired a gorgeous work on paper by Patricia Yossen that I still need to frame.
I love to support working artists who are hustling every day to survive and thrive—especially ones that are dear to my heart.
Q?: The Dream Exhibition: If you could exhibit your workanywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
A: For the past year, I have been dreaming of a collaborative project with Japanese and Japanese American artists that would take place in Los Angeles and Los Alamos (USA) alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan). This project would be an excavation of a heavy family legacy: my grandfather, Dr. Leonard Pepkowitz, was a chemist who worked for the Manhattan Project and assisted in inventing the nuclear bomb. In my tradition (Judaism), you can always do repair work, even for events that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. I feel called to do restorative work around the massive destruction that Grandpa Len helped to unleash, and I hope to start work on this project in the near future.
Q?: The Pipeline: Please share with our readers where they can see your work and let us know about any upcoming or current projects.
A: I am currently part of an exhibition titled A Nation Takes Place at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, MN, curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. Griffin. The show explores race, water, and the founding of the United States, presenting critical new narratives that provide vital antidotes to the rise of fascism, racism, ecocide and white supremacy in our country.
A Nation Takes Place
curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. Griffin
I am also participating in WILD UP!’s Democracy Sessions project at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which opens this week and runs from November 8-10. This multi-dimensional project examines the nature of democracy, and I was commissioned to create a score for a ‘zine produced in tandem with live performances and other events.
In March 2025, I will be presenting a show of new works called Shadow Poems II at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi in Rome, Italy, curated by Camilla Boemio. The exhibition will include new photographs and sculptures, as well as a community-based project with migrants who are seeking refuge in Rome.
When thinking of sewing and textiles, our first thoughts may be of large garment factories like those once prevalent in Downtown LA. These were often staffed by mostly women of color, usually immigrants from Latin America or other parts of the world, working tirelessly to produce our clothing. But the practice also evokes memories of matriarchs who carefully mend a pair of ripped pants, add a patch to a denim jacket, or make a dress for a sister’s quinceañera. Sewing can move beyond the utilitarian and into a place of care, of love. Every stitch reinforces the bonds of not just the fabric but also of the connections to things we hold dear. Every thread becomes an integral part of the fabric of our lives. It’s in these everyday essential threads where Erick Medel sources inspiration for his elaborate sewn ‘paintings.’
In his sixth career solo show— and first at Charlie James Gallery— titled “Vidas,” Medel presents a series of intimate portraits stitched with such painstaking detail that they resemble textured paintings from afar. His subject matter (except for three still-life flower arrangements that the artist said he did because “all painters have a still-life era”) portrays intimate moments within Medel’s community in Boyle Heights. The working-class people of color, along with their families and animals that make up the neighborhood, are documented with care and reverence that elevates and places importance on each subject. One such moment in the work titled Hold My Hand depicts a woman leading a child across the street. The tenderness and love of a mother for her child on their daily walk from school is felt in the scene, carried over into every stitch. Witnessing this simple moment between a parent and child becomes a document of care and community.
While many types of art incorporate stitching — such as crochet, knitting, hand-embroidery, quilting, assemblage, and numerous forms of indigenous textile arts that are all important both culturally and historically— Medel’s approach is distinct. He enlists the sewing machine like a paintbrush to meticulously blend hues and create compositions, transcending genres to “make it new,” a point American critic and poet Ezra Pound argued that every artist should do. This unique approach is significant because Medel does not consider himself to necessarily be an artist in the traditional sense of ‘painter,’ and yet his technique borrows from and innovates off of so many elements from the painting medium that the designation is undeniable.
Medel originally studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning an MFA in 2018, and only began exploring sewing as a medium of expression in 2020. He would take quick street-style snapshots with his phone (to remain more inconspicuous) and later used those photos as preliminary studies for his compositions sewn onto denim. His early work showed promise, though pales compared to this current body of work. The beautifully crafted early pieces used spaced-out lines that resembled sketches. Now, his new series is much tighter, with every inch of the surface covered with thread, feeling more like finalized ‘paintings.’ Subjects have shadows composed of multiple colors of threads layered together like thin linear brushstrokes to provide the perfect color and effect. Even cracks in the sidewalk are jagged and meticulously rendered. Every strand is carefully manipulated to show a range of textures, from a dog’s soft and tousled fur in Walk Around the Block to the realistic, colorful panels of a street vendor’s umbrella in Frutas Frescas (Pride parade 2023).
Medel’s admiration for the eastside of Los Angeles is palpable in his work. He emphasizes the sense of community and culture that permeates the neighborhood. Here, public art seamlessly integrates into everyday life, with new murals appearing on nearly every corner. Pintor documents one of these murals and plays with a three-point perspective, making the mural feel like a scene straight from Guanajuato, Mexico.
An immigrant himself, Medel also noted how his neighbors, of all ages and backgrounds, embrace and support one another. He has observed how people come together for community events, much like those he has experienced in Mariachi Plaza. This very place inspired the stunning night
scene depicted in the artist’s largest work of the show, Sonidero Night. Here, youthful couples dance happily while seniors look on and engage in conversations. In exceptional detail, single threads depict light emanating from the stage, gently grazing the figures below. His personal connection to the scene further lends an emotional connection in the work inviting the viewer into his world.
By thoughtfully depicting the everyday lives of his fellow residents, Erick Medel captures their essence and elevates their significance, ensuring their stories are visible and acknowledged within the larger canon of art — a crucial affirmation. His painterly approach to the sewing medium, pushes the genre to new limits while maintaining its deeply empathetic tradition that enriches the portrayal of his community.
We look forward to future evolutions of his artistic process.
Circus of Books exterior and storefront window. Image courtesy of Mito Aviles @artteasela. Photo by Jimena Sandoval.
Blazing pink like a Willy Wonka fantasy on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, Circus of Books is a historic gay bookstore and porn shop with a history stretching back to the 1960s. The store is the subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name about the older heterosexual Jewish immigrant couple who ran it for years as a mom-and-pop business, un-discriminatingly serving the gay community they found themselves in the midst of.
The shop was repurposed and reopened in 2020 offering the surrounding gayborhood sex toys on the right side of the store and, on the left side— in an unlikely move—an art gallery. This June, in celebration of Pride, the gallery hosts a group show entitled “ART-TEASE,” curated by West Hollywood (WeHo) City Arts Commissioner Mito Aviles. The exhibition features a range of photographs, fashion pieces on mannequins, and an immersive room by WeHo artist SKÜT.
ChadMichael Morrisette, Storefront window installation detail. Image courtesy of Mito Aviles @artteasela. Photo by Jimena Sandoval.
The show begins in the storefront window with a display by multimedia and mannequin artist ChadMichael Morrisette, whose interest in the human form is apparent. This mixed-media display spotlights a collage flanked by two mannequins from the artist’s 2,500-strong custom collection, from which he keeps Hollywood’s wardrobe departments well-supplied. The collage features mainly magazine clippings of chiseled torso forms (read: hot men), and at first glance, it feels like an underwear ad for Calvin Klein. It isn’t until further inspection that the viewer realizes that, hidden in the PG-13 underwear ads, there are glimpses of the artist’s naughty and snarky streak, with fully nude figures joined by a werewolf and a naked group in sunglasses, giggling, and covering their genitals. The effect continually unfolds for the viewer, at first deeper into desire but then, surprisingly, into play.
The window display is street-facing in front of Vaseline Alley, the notoriously cruisy parking lot behind the building. Curator Aviles insinuates that the collaged images are a sort of menu of desire, in which each passerby can see their sensibilities reflected. The mannequins complete the assemblage effect, somehow both more natural and less attention-grabbing than the photo clippings. They are in conversation with each other, contesting the reality versus artificiality of both forms, and bringing to mind the proliferation of headless torsos on gay dating apps – the anonymity of a mannequin mirroring the anonymity of the gay closet, a space of possibility at once open to interaction and yet shut off from any identifying details.
Entering the space, the first things one sees are commercial products – this is a store, after all – a pop-up shop with a range of apparel from gay-owned business Frootloots, with hoodies that say things like “Alphabet Mafia” (a reference to the “alphabet soup” of LGBTQ+ identities) and “Don’t Fuck With the Gays.” Behind this table and a table of memoirs by drag queens, you’ll find where the “ART-TEASE” exhibition continues.
ART-TEASE Installation image. Image Courtesy of Brian Sonia-Wallace
First and most striking are pieces from trans-fashion designer Sylvio Hooper’s fantastic fashion collection, a range of gender-bending metallic underwear displayed on mannequins in front of a wall of photos and sketches. The fashion’s nod to BDSM styles like harnesses and expose, exaggerate a mix of genitalia rather than hide them. The chrome of the garments gives everything a futuristic flare, as if the viewer has entered a strip club on another planet.
Eric Scot, 6163, n.d. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.
On the wall behind the fashions, photographer Eric Scot’s series “First Touch” is a play of light and shadow between two figures in a variety of intimate positions that are more pornographic than tender. Yet each is lit almost to the point of abstraction, with the whole emotion of the piece coming from the curve of a back or the angle of a shadowy face. All of the sepia-tone photos are of the same two models, giving a sense that the series explores a single encounter. Next to the photograph display, artist Kevin Cortez presents a range of sketches and pastels of body parts, zooming in on potential loci of desire with a few thick, bold lines. These works resemble loose sketches —like something from a queer figure drawing night—with the most successful works tending toward a minimalism that reveals the artist’s style and humor, like in After, where five bold lines suggest a softened penis.
Kevin Cortez, After, n.d., Charcoal on paper. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.
Photographer Christopher Garcia’s work, in contrast to the rest of the works on display, is an explosion of warm color. Young men are framed intimately and seemingly all too aware of the camera’s presence. Photographer VAGHO completes the collections on the walls with black-and-white natural landscapes in which inconspicuous nude figures lounge amid rocks and waves.
Christopher Garcia, Forever Young, n.d., Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.VAGHO, Within, n.d., Archival print. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.
“The theme the gallery asked me to curate was ‘Pride,’” says curator Aviles, “but I didn’t want to do a historical show, I wanted to show what elevated erotic art could look like.”
ART-TEASE Installation image. Image Courtesy of Brian Sonia-Wallace.
The piece de resistance is the backroom, a deconstructed temple or shrine to Pride by local artist SKÜT, who started his career by creating the Grindr logo. Here, SKÜT displays a mix of sculpture, painting (including a version of his iconic skull logo dripping in rainbow paint), and multimedia sound/projection, creating a space of tranquility and meditation in the backroom (and I don’t need to tell you what you might normally expect to find in the backroom of a sex shop).
SKÜT, Unicorn Origami Kaleido, n.d., Acrylic resin with mixed media, Maquette. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.SKÜT, SkullPop Kinetical, n.d., Acrylic and mixed media on an upcycled core. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.
There is a pop-queer sensibility to SKÜT’s aesthetic, with the most impressive piece being a rainbow origami unicorn on a plinth, backed by spinning obelisks with, ostensibly, the “themes” of Pride, ranging from “MAGIC” to “SERENITY” to “SEX.” After emerging from the low-colored lights and the meditation of the shrine room, the rest of the shop feels overly bright and cluttered.
This concludes the “ART-TEASE” exhibition, but reflects only a fraction of the art in the store. On the other side of the counter, past the poppers but before the harnesses, a permanent art exhibition features playful works like ceramic vases in the shape of jockstraps and the requisite Keith Haring prints alongside beautifully lit cases of what might be sculptures but are actually just anal toys.
Circus of Books shop interior. Image Courtesy of Brian Sonia-Wallace.
In truth, Haring feels omnipresent through much of the gallery and store. The 1980s New York street artist who died of AIDS in 1990 is enjoying something of a resurgence right now, with retrospective shows from The Broad to Luna Luna. His bold lines and cartoon characters are childish in a way that balances playfulness and raunchiness. Still, Haring was successful in part because he crossed the divide between high art worlds and commercial products, attracting criticism from the art world for his Pop Shop, which sold t-shirts, toys, posters, buttons, and magnets with his images as a way to create access for everyday people to own a piece of his work.
The artists featured in “ART-TEASE” are likewise casually commercial, spanning a range of experience levels, and with artwork price points ranging from $150 to $4,000. Homoerotic art has always been fringe, often even cheap. Their idea is that one might go into Circus of Books for a puphood and also come out with a pastel drawing of a man’s lip ring and mustache. There is a value, the gallery seems to assert, in art “for the masses.”
Kevin Cortez, Muscle, n.d., Charcoal on paper. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.
Though tamer than, say, the illustrated gay sadomasochism of Tom of Finland, the art on display at “ART-TEASE” gives a portrait of desire, one that is tied to connection, to nature, and to play.
Just in time for Pride. Go for the poppers, leave with some art.
ChadMichael Morrisette, VAGHO, Christopher Garcia, Kevin Cortez, Sylvio Hooper, Eric Scot, and SKÜT “ART-TEASE” May 23 – June 30, 2024 The Gallery at Circus of Books – West Hollywood 8230 Santa Monica Blvd. West Hollywood, California 90046
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article credited eponymous drag queen and director Chi Chi LaRue with Circus’s reopening, when the owners are in fact Rob Novinger and Steven Walker under the company name C1R according to the Circus of Books website.
Medical professionals forecast somewhere between 130 and 176 million people globally will have dementia in 2050, dramatically rising from 57.4 million in 2019, meaning that the chances of developing a neurodegenerative disorder or knowing someone with one are increasing at an alarming rate. “Preserved Memories,” a solo presentation of installation work by Aazam Irilian at Gallery 825, tells the stories of five people who suffered from dementia-type neurodegenerative disorders and the stories of those who loved them in life and kept their memories alive. This is Irilian’s second time showing this body of work, and as the rate of dementia diagnoses continues to rise, her passion project expands with more profound significance.
Installation view of “Preserved Memories” with Transitional Bodies and Shredded Mind Panels. Image courtesy of the artist.
Each of the five stories is told in four parts. Flanking five sculptures are five floor-to-ceiling drawings of the human body swallowed by synapses starting below the neck called Transitional Bodies (2022). Five Shredded Mind Panels (2022), distressed red canvas panels with holes mimicking a decaying brain, accompany the drawings. Finally, a hanging chain of family portraits printed on Duralar clear paper identifies the subjects of the central sculptures, but the photographs are altered, so each face gradually loses clarity until it fades. Depending on the lighting and size of the gallery space that houses these works, the transparency of the paper translates the images onto the walls, further distorting these memories.
The dim overhead lights in Gallery 825’s small back room don’t quite project the images onto the walls, but what the room lacks in width, it makes up for in atmosphere. At certain angles, the portraits interact with the red panels, resembling stained glass. It feels more like a chapel than a gallery.
Together, these accessory elements illustrate the drastic collapse of the brain’s internal workings that is characteristic of dementia-type neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Aazam Irilian, Detail of Fading Memory Family Portraits, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
At the heart of “Preserved Memories” are the sculptures made from personal belongings that both distill and provide a window into the lives of their subjects. Clusters of salt crystals cling to the treasured items—Irilian grew these crystals in her studio to make assemblages from organic materials, found objects, and evolving technologies. In this body of work, salt acts as a natural preservative for the compiled belongings, and QR codes printed on a wall provide visitors with short audio recordings about each sculpture.
Aazam Irilian, Detail of Tea Time, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Tea Time (2022) spotlights a mint green and cream-trimmed teacup and saucer resting on a lace doily. These belonged to the mother of Ellie B, who purchased the set during one of their secondhand shopping adventures together. Ellie’s mother ate biscuits with her afternoon tea every day. In the late stages of her memory loss, she still remembered this teacup and refused to drink from any other vessel.
Aazam Irilian, Detail of Soccer Player, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist
Another sculpture, Soccer Player (2022), reflects Irilian’s late husband, who passed away in 2023. One of his great passions was soccer, having been a player, coach, and referee over the course of his life. For a time, he maintained the ability to play with their grandkids despite his diagnosis. Still, eventually, the progression of his dementia deteriorated his verbal communication and motor skills until he could no longer be active. However, in her recording of this story, Irilian recalls seeing his face light up when they watched practices at a local park and official matches on TV.
Here, the artist hangs his yellow referee jersey near a pair of clean black cleats and a soccer ball as if ready for the next game. For a moment, melancholy bends to bittersweet comfort; seeing his worn-in and well-maintained gear, knowing he did what he loved, one feels Irilian’s husband must have had a happy life.
The initial motivation behind this exhibition was Irilian’s husband—how she loved him for many years as both wife and caregiver—and how they respectively dealt with their impending losses. But this experience of feeling people slip through our fingers is lamentably common.
Installation view of “Preserved Memories” with the artist at center. Image courtesy of the artist.
Understanding this, an integral part of the show is visitor response: on a table in a corner of the room are blank notecards for guests to write down memories of loved ones who suffered from these diseases. Irilian incorporates new cards into the installation by hanging them beside the entrance. On the table, there is also a sign with a phone number to call for those who may prefer to share their stories aloud.
Written on one card, a message from someone named Chris concludes with:
“To see yours + your husband’s story represented so beautifully here is yet another reminder of cherishing what we have while we have it and of holding onto the love and the memories—in the end, everything fades for all of us. Except perhaps, for love. And perhaps, that’s enough.”
Installation view of the message wall. Photo by Caroline Vasquez.
As we age, we face decisions regarding our bodies, minds, legacies, and possessions. Who will take care of us? What will survive us? Will there be anything left to show of our lives?
“Preserved Memories” demonstrates how multiple methods of memory keeping can and should exist. Where photographs may wither, sculptures stand firm. When the written word fails, recorded voices can carry. The people memorialized in the sculptures once chose their items, and though their caregivers cannot keep every scrap of someone’s life, they can choose to continue imbuing meaning into certain objects as a representation of their loved ones.
Of course, people are not only their possessions; we know each other in different ways. Caregivers will remember their loved ones through these objects, and we, as visitors, will remember Irilian’s beautiful tribute to those who continue to be loved.
Aazam Irilian, Detail of Prayer, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Aazam Irilian “Preserved Memories” May 4 – June 7, 2024 Los Angeles Art Association (LAAA) | Gallery 825 825 N. La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles,CA 90069
On rare occasions, there are gallery exhibitions that make a strong statement—either politically, culturally, or both— capturing the zeitgeist of a moment, and sparking a myriad of conversations. Perhaps the work is by an artist whose star is quickly rising or one whose art is so striking you know that their work will be included in future textbooks about a particular art historical movement. Simply put, there are exhibitions where you walk in, you know you are experiencing a historical moment. “At the Edge of The Sun” in the Deitch Gallery LA is one such exhibit.
Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White
Part of what makes this show so profound is how it came to be. Twelve Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x artists —Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Michael Alvarez, Mario Ayala, Karla Ekaterine Canseco, rafa esparza, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Gabriela Ruiz, Ozzie Juarez, Maria Mara, Jaime Muñoz, Guadalupe Rosales, and Shizuoka Saldamando—all of whom met and connected over the last decade, were given free rein to curate a group show that encapsulated their individual and communal stories. Much of the work expands on ideals from the inception of the Chicano Art Movement, an offshoot of the larger cultural Chicano movement in the United States. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican-Americans sought to challenge and resist the societal hierarchy and stereotypes to build cultural autonomy, record their history, and celebrate their experiences that were often rejected in mainstream culture. All of the sixty-two artworks included in “At the Edge of The Sun” strongly speak to different elements of each Chicano/a/x artist’s personal and cultural identity while also elevating their everyday experiences. Collectively, their work transcends being a mere historical record, and instead elevates it to a place that says my experience matters, my experience is beautiful.
rafa esparza, Trucha, 2024, Acrylic on adobe and steel,123 x 145 x 156 inches (overall), 60 x 48 x 3 inches (each). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo by Joshua White.
One notable work by performance and physical artist rafa esparza (the artist intentionally uses lowercase while spelling their name) is a mural titled, Trucha. This large-scale painting of acrylic on adobe and steel features a male Latino figure lying on their stomach gazing at the viewer from bed. The subject’s eyes are cold yet contain the slightest tinge of softness when you study them for long enough. But as the Chicano script style tattoo of “trucha” (translating loosely as vigilant, both as an action and a way of being) on the subject’s arm implies, you would not mistake their eyes as vulnerable. Symbols of strength continue on their sprawling back tattoo depicting conquistadors slaughtering indigenous people. The symbolism of this alone is quite powerful but pairing it with flanking images of the Mesoamerican god Xipe-Totec, along with various books running the gamut of Aztec accounts of history, post-colonial theory, as well as global colonialism and oppression, you have a complex image that can be unwrapped in numerous ways. In one complex reading, you could explore the ‘conflict of existing’ within the context of colonialism as many (not all) have both European and indigenous blood. Yet, while grappling with this, they also fight to detangle the ties colonization has on suppressing their indigenous roots — cultivating and celebrating the positive, while ardently rejecting the violence and attempts of cultural genocide. Like the tattoo on the man’s back, history is not forgotten and still lived with today.
Karla Ekaterine Canseco, Las profundidades del asfalto,entre vida y petrificación. Perra que nada en petróleo. / The depths of asphalt, between life and petrificación. Perra that swims in petroleum., 2024, Steel, bronze, stucco and motor oil,93 x 40.5 x 77 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White
The exhibition becomes especially reflective when artists incorporate objects and iconography that are common to the cultural experience of many working-class people of color, and re-envision them into higher planes of being. One of the strongest examples is the mixed-media sculptures by Karla Ekaterine Canseco. Canseco takes various elements from an auto-mechanic shop and transforms them into otherworldly dark dreamscapes. One such piece titled Las profundidades del asfalto,entre vida y petrificación. Perra que nada en petróleo. / The depths of asphalt, between life and petrificación. Perra that swims in petroleum., starts with a cherry picker engine hoist as its foundation, with sharp metal flames rising up its back and across the arm, as a chain lowers a bronze dog into an oil pool. Dogs are often considered to be spirit guides, so placing one into a Dante’s Inferno-esque environment protects them on their journey into the emotional depths. But just as the chain of the cherry picker —symbolically representing culture or family—-can lower you into the pits, it can also pull you back out. Both the source and cure for our trauma can come from the same place giving these symbols a dual meaning.
Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.
Heading into the backroom, there are multiple installations by Jaime Muñoz, Alfonso Gonzales Jr., and Mario Ayala that in addition to providing some of the strongest cultural commentary, create the most immersive experience of the entire show.
Jaime Muñoz, Ad Space, 2024, Acrylic, paper, and flocking on wood panel, 72 x 60 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White
Jaime Muñoz’s work deals with themes of transportation, labor, technology, and advertising, exploring how they intersect now and in the future. Two of the immaculately designed paintings resemble the back of Big Rig truck doors. One such example, Ad Space, features soft yet vibrant colors depicting a collage of images including Jesus on the cross and decals of Japanese nectar drinks that the truck is potentially hauling. Truck door hinges adorn the painting’s edges accompanied by the all too familiar “How Am I Driving?” a cracked bumper sticker with the added lines, “How Does an Engine Even Work?” and “How Can a Loving God Cause Such Agony.” All of this is painted across a diamond grid pattern that appears as if it were assembled on tiles. When viewed through the lens of working-class people who are often the most impacted by the machinations of commerce, these larger themes of facing suffering feel especially poignant. We often look towards God for solace, but what do we do when there is none?
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Abogado Bélico (banco), 2024, Concrete, wood, oil, spray paint and enamel, 44 x 84 x 21 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.
Additionally, Gonzales Jr. uses his experience from sign painting and outdoor advertising to recontextualize the predatory legal advertising that runs rampant in low-income communities of color. One of his contributions to the show is a pair of large billboard and bus bench advertisements, a commentary on the accident attorneys as criminals by portraying the lawyer as one. The bus bench piece titled Abogado Bélico, ‘abogado’ is Spanish for lawyer and bélico is a more modern slang version of ‘narcocorridos,’ popularized by artists such as Peso Pluma and Fuerza Regida. Bélico can, however, also mean someone who enjoys music and fashion, or participates in narco culture. Here, the lawyer dons a cowboy hat and a half-buttoned dress shirt with a large gold pendant hanging from his neck. In the advertisement, he takes a selfie yet the phone screen reveals an image of Malverde, the patron saint of the narcos. While the lawyer does give off a rather cool swagger, his portrayal does not instill confidence in potential clients.
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Injured?, 2024, Oil, enamel latex, dirt, gel medium, LED lightbox, on wood panels, and canvas, Dimensions variable.Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.Detail, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Injured?, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.
Another rather large installation titled, Injured, creates a wall you might find in any South or East Los Angeles neighborhood. Saturated with recreations of real ads from insurance agencies and injury attorneys, they are familiar examples of marketing strategies to communities of color in the greater LA area. One such ad is of the San Gabriel Valley lawyer James Wang, who has long been part of an urban legend claiming Wang is the real-life Better Call Saul-style character. Another ad for Adriana’s Insurance agency takes on new meaning after becoming a cult meme through the Instagram page Foos Gone Wild. It’s conversations like these that the work incites, both deeply critical as well as humorous, and that elevate everyday experiences to levels of art.
Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.
It would be immensely easy to discuss each of the twelve artists articulating how profound their work is in both the context of “At the Edge of the Sun” and the larger Chicano Art Movement. It is also important to note that many of these artists are already in the permanent collections of major museums such as LACMA, MOCA, SFMOMA, among others. This show, and its forthcoming book with an introduction by Dr. Rose Salseda and interviews from the artists, will no doubt become important artifacts to learn about the forefront of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x art from the 2020s. Expect to hear a lot more about each of these artists for years to come.
Group Photo, Photo by Estevan Oriol
At the Edge of the Sun Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Michael Alvarez, Mario Ayala, Karla Ekaterine Canseco, rafa esparza, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Gabriela Ruiz, Ozzie Juarez, Maria Mara, Jaime Muñoz, Guadalupe Rosales, and Shizuoka Saldamando February 24–May 4, 2024 Jeffrey Deitch Gallery 925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles
A map is a drawn representation of space, making sense of and setting limits to a given area. The earth’s terrain is charted through its natural barriers, carved and reshaped by mountains and rivers, as well as its man-made artificial borders used to enforce territory. Similarly, the human body can also be thought of as a map when we describe neural ‘pathways’ in the brain and use ‘body mapping’ in psychology to work through lived experiences, or in neuroscience as a form of conscious, corrective physical therapy. In her recent exhibition “Imaginary Cartography”, Marthe Aponte explores these ever-shifting boundaries between nature and the body, while embracing time as a marker to map change throughout her career.
The twenty paintings in “Imaginary Cartography” span over fifty years, before Lancaster-based Marthe Aponte even considered herself an artist. She began her professional art career in 2010 but made art throughout her life while in France, Venezuela, and the United States. Aponte’s early work was primarily acrylic on canvas or wood—pairing bright colors with craft materials, such as mesh and beads, or building up scenes using tiny dots, akin to Pointillism. These dot paintings are a cousin to the picoté style that Aponte is most known for, an intricate 13th-century French folk art tradition of meticulously piercing holes in paper with a needle and awl. Yet where there are several dot paintings in the show at the Palmdale Playhouse, there are no picoté artworks.
Marthe Aponte, Woman in the Forest, n.d., Ink on paper. Photo by Edwin Vasquez.
One of the oldest pieces on view is “Woman in the Forest” (n.d.), inspired by a drawing she made in Venezuela in the 1970s. A female figure lies on the ground beneath a grove of trees, and a couple of trunks blend into the solid black of the figure’s lower body and the side of her head. Other trees are given life with delicate lines and empty white space. Throughout her career, the human form and nature have been Aponte’s two primary subjects as she believes people are not separate from nature. This painting, and the more recent “Mapping the Body” (2021), a horizontal red piece featuring another figure bonded with trees, interpret this literally.
Installation View of Mapping the Body, 2021 (top). Image Courtesy of Palmdale Playhouse
In “Mapping the Universe” (2021), Aponte portrays a humanoid figure with no identifying features other than a turtle on its face and arms and legs dismembered at the joints. This figure resides in an abstracted intersection on top of parallel vertical lines like roads, and on its torso and legs are tubular protrusions resembling side streets, all connected by a wavy dotted line that ‘drives’ our eye around the composition. While the canvas edges may bear physically defined borders, the cropped appendages imply continuation beyond those boundaries: too long to be contained. Growing up, the artist described feeling as if her body continued past her limbs, infinitely. “Sometimes when we pay attention,” Aponte said when I interviewed her in early March, “we connect with a dimension that is beyond space…and then, all of a sudden, you feel like you are in touch [with the natural world].”
Marthe Aponte, Mapping the Universe, 2021, Acrylic on canvas. Photo by Edwin Vasquez.
During our conversation, Aponte admitted she was at a crossroads with her career. In part, she revisited past work to view it in a new light, as many of these paintings have never been shown or have languished in her garage since their last appearance. Yet a longer discussion revealed the artist’s hyperconsciousness of her changing body. Recent hospital visits and weak spells have made plain the reality of aging, and although she spent much of last year exhibiting her recent work across Southern California, she questioned her productivity and relevance in the art world. These days, she worries whether she has the strength to do picoté again, or if she does, that the quality will not be like before she fell ill.
Marthe Aponte, Mapping a Maze. Photo by Edwin Vasquez.
Modern society demands forward progression, discovery, and newness of artists. To pause or return to a previous point is viewed as a waste of time. “Imaginary Cartography” pushes back against that idea and instead forges emotional pathways into Aponte’s autobiographical past for viewers to traverse. Her metaphorical maps of the human form and nature are not about exchange, acquisition, or possession in the material sense of map making, but rather they chart the psychological states of one’s body to reflect upon our lived experiences.
Marthe Aponte, Sacred Flowers, n.d., Acrylic on canvas. Image Courtesy of Palmdale Playhouse.
After a similar conversation with her friend, CSUN art professor Betty Brown, Aponte has continued to create dot paintings like the ones on view in this exhibition. While painting is relatively faster than picoté, she still cherishes the repetitive work of mark-making. By returning to her roots, Aponte is embracing a tried and tested familiar path in her practice to move forward. Considering life’s natural cycles, where every end heralds a new beginning, “Imaginary Cartography” accurately documents the conclusion of one journey while widening the path for the next.
Learning about new and emerging contemporary artists can be daunting for the average person who doesn’t regularly attend gallery openings to mingle with artists, collectors, and the occasional celebrity, or discuss the latest art trends while exuding an equal level of aloofness and coolness. To do this in the first place, you would need to know about the plethora of galleries and obscure artist-run spaces that exist all across the sprawling landscape that is Los Angeles—and beyond. This is where art fairs can bridge the gap, providing a large survey of what is currently happening in cities throughout the art world today, all condensed into one accessible space.
For those unfamiliar, an art fair is similar to any other type of convention, where you generally have various vendors —in this case art galleries— erecting booths to display or sell their goods. In an art fair, each booth houses a different local, national, or international gallery that brings a sampling of art from the artists they represent. Los Angeles’s Art Week runs from February 26th to March 3rd hosting three major art fairs that run concurrently across the city. There is Frieze in Santa Monica, which is the largest and most commercial, SPRING/BREAK in Culver City, a curatorial and installation-driven theme, and, arguably the more interesting, Felix Art Fair in Hollywood. What sets Felix apart from most other art fairs is that it inhabits various rooms and floors throughout the historic Roosevelt Hotel. Not only does the locale allow for each gallery to present their work in a fully separate and enclosed space—enabling their installations to take center stage—but it also allows the gallery to display the works in a more natural setting. For potential buyers, seeing a piece of art on a static white wall next to a series of other pieces is one thing, but being able to see how a painting looks and feels in a living space can provide more context, and become something you can imagine living with.
Leo Mock, We Stand Surrounded by a Million Years at M+B Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.
Walking into Felix is a true LA experience. On the ground level, the cabana rooms encircling the pool are transformed into gallery spaces, all labeled with the gallery name and their home city. This curated experience is further extended to rooms on the 11th and 12th floors of the towers. Here the unexpected is to be expected with hallways adorned with paintings or a sculpture jutting out from the ceiling. Bathrooms have artworks displayed above the toilet, or even featured in the shower. You may find a sculpture placed in the middle of a bed as if casually inviting the viewer to lay down with it—though to be clear, unlike the lady who happened to lay down next to it for a selfie on the preview day, you should not. It is this contextualizing, as well as clever re-contextualizing of real residential spaces that allows the art to take on new life. Each work becomes something that is lived with and experienced rather than something just to hoard away in vaults only to be acquired for its potential resale value. Even if you are not someone who has the means, or interest to collect art on this scale, Felix is a great and fairly affordable immersive introduction into the contemporary art scene.
As for the artworks themselves, there are quite a few galleries that have some intriguing and thought-provoking works on view. Here are a few of the Los Angeles-based galleries that had especially strong showings:
RESIDENCY ART GALLERY
Will Maxen, Untitled (Fourth of July) at Residency Art Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen
Residency Art Gallery based out of Inglewood, California had one of the more inspiring exhibits by a solo artist. Featuring a selection of new paintings by Will Maxen in a series titled, “I’ll Be With You As You Go,” Maxen uses both personal and historical memories as well as his mixed-race background to examine the tensions of modern American life. The portraits, based on archival photos, are at once quite personal and yet are entirely universal. Details are both blurred and sharp depending on the feature with muted colors disconnecting the ghost-like subjects from reality and placing them between a shapeless dream and memory. Although
Will Maxen, My Hands Shake When I Try to Write Small (top) and Untitled (West Walk) (bottom) at Residency Gallery.
made to resemble photographs, at times they appear more like distorted film negatives having bled all over the canvas to reveal something more about the human experience. Overall, the portraits are some of the most beautiful works on display at Felix and should not be missed.
CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY
Erick Medel, Mom con Spiderman at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen
The Charlie James Gallery out of Chinatown had arguably the most compelling and cohesive group presentation in the entire fair. Composed of artworks from primarily North American POC artists, the work explores themes of identity and culture in powerful and inspiring ways. Textile works such as Erick Medel’s embroidered thread paintings offer a tender examination of life in the Boyle Heights community. The sheer level of artistry and skill it takes to sew each portrait and still-life are apparent in the emotive softness and care of every stitch. One scene of a mother walking down the street with her child dressed in a Spider-Man costume is a snapshot that embodies both youthful innocence and the loving nature of motherhood. In Danie Cansino’s multiple portrait and landscape paintings on striped serape fabric, we are introduced to strong statements of identity, resilience, and cultural pride. The serape fabric holds so much cultural context and at the same time hosts itself as a canvas for vibrant, almost photo-realistic subjects. One example titled Bloodline, is a powerful
Danie Cansino, Bloodline at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen
self-portrait of Cansino sitting nude while staring directly at the viewer. Her body is covered in tattoos with her legs as canvases for Chicano portraits and prominent indigenous line work on her face— all a detailed history lesson inscribed on her body. Keep an eye out for future shows at this gallery.
M+B GALLERY
Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Chante Fantome de Bob at Photo by Zachary C. Jensen
The M + B Gallery based in West Hollywood had another well-designed group show with works by Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Erna Mist, and Matthew Rosenquist. Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and now living in Paris, created portraits of colorful nightmare-like creatures with CHANTE FANTÔME DE BOB, LES ÂMES DANSERONT, LES MORTS SE RÉVEILLERONT ET MON TOUR ARRIVERA as a highlight of this collection. A large oil on canvas, it features a multi-faced creature with numerous arms playing the guitar, while smaller ghostly creatures hang on and around it. The painting, while dark in subject matter and palette, also offers a celebratory interpretation of the afterlife that many cultures embrace. Nearby, a playful series of wooden painted sculptures by Matthew Rosenquist feature hipster-esque characters. Posed in various aspects of everyday life, they are arranged on the patio of the gallery’s hotel room. By placing them close together, and in the center of a crowded space, these sculptures meld into the fair crowds while also
Matthew Rosenquist, (left) White Jeans (center) Lunchin’ WIth Lydia (right) Self Portrait at M+B GalleryMatthew Rosenquist, Texting in A Tartan Skirt at M+B Gallery
forming their own group. In Texting in a Tartan Skirt, we witness an examination of our modern attachment to cell phones complete with the immobile moments of obliviousness we all experience with our screens.
Nik Gelormino, Flat Dove (no. 2), 2024. Image courtesy of Sea Shell Gallery
Sea View Gallery out of the Mount Washington neighborhood has a wonderfully eclectic booth that runs the gamut of artistic mediums and styles, while still embracing Felix’s domestic setting. The functional reclaimed wooden sculptures by San Francisco artist Nik Gelormino tie in shapes found in nature to create exquisite designs that can be both admired and used. Two such examples are the seashell stool made of naturally fallen cedar, and the multi-layered flat dove sculpture made of hard-carved redwood that doubles as a coffee table. Next, Canadian artist Jane Corrigan’s textured oil paintings depicting cartoonish scenes of adolescence, capture the whimsical nature of young adulthood while also thoughtfully representing the growing sense of anxiety that coming-of-age can bring.
Jane Corrigan, End Days, 2024. Image courtesy of Sea Shell Gallery
In Days End, her soft pastel palette paired with the serene sun setting behind a tree provides a warm comfort. Yet the skeletal form reclining beneath the tree tempers that feeling, and quickly brings realizations about the finality of summer, life, or journey. While many of the gallery spaces at Felix could be consumed in a few short minutes, Sea View’s installation is well worth a few extra moments of your time.
NICODIM GALLERY
Installation view of painting by Emily Ferguson at Nicodim Gallery
Lastly, the Nicodim Gallery out of Downtown Los Angeles is always a pleasure to visit. One standout portrait by Emily Ferguson installed in the bathroom has perhaps an unintentional mirrored view as you approach causing the subject to look away from themself and made for an intriguing installation.
On any normal day in Los Angeles, it would be nearly impossible to view all of these galleries in a single day, let alone see works from London, Paris, New York, and Turin all in one place. Art fairs like Felix grant casual viewers and collectors alike the opportunity to globally gallery-hop in an afternoon.
Felix Art Fair February 28 – March 3 2024 The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel 7000 Hollywood Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90028
Drawing inspiration from film and art history, Karyn Lyons’ wistful, evocative oil paintings of teenage girlhood are charged with coming-of-age romanticism. In her first solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, “The End of the Night,” New York-based Lyons presents a suite of intimately scaled, semi-autobiographical oil paintings that capture the tenderness, mischievousness, and enchantment of a bygone adolescence.
Karyn Lyons, The Afternoon in August, 2023, Oil on linen, 23 x 29 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.
Lyons’ redheaded protagonist exists in an East Coast prep school fever dream. She wanders the halls of a lavish home and dons designer labels but with a decidedly unaffected air that belies her privilege. Her apathetic expressions and slouchy posture hint at the tedium of this chapter of her life as if she knows all too well that she’s playing a waiting game on the cusp of adulthood for bigger and better things right around the corner. In The Afternoon in August (2023), the girl lays alone in a grassy field, kicking her sneaker-clad feet, gazing into the horizon, and seemingly yearning for an inscrutable something. Lyons cleverly captures the universal feeling of waiting for your childhood to end with a mixture of apprehension and exhilaration.
Karyn Lyons, The Bright Midnight, 2023, Oil on linen, 30 23 ½ inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.Karyn Lyons, A Crush on Byron, 2023, Oil on linen, 18 x 22 ¼ inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.
At the same time, revealing a multifariousness unequaled by anyone who has never been a teenage girl, she is driven to explore new, grown-up experiences. In many scenes, the backdrop is littered with loose matchsticks, cigarette boxes, and liquor bottles. In others, she kisses a dark-haired boy in varying states of undress, her first sexual forays happening under the watchful eyes of a recurring feline friend and beaming full moon, in The Bright Midnight (2023), or a stern 19th-century portrait, in A Crush on Byron (2023).
Karyn Lyons, Mystery Down the Hall, 2023, Oil on linen, 22 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.
To counteract the mature themes and emphasize this transitional state of her subject’s life, Lyons inserts reminders of youth and mischief. In Mystery Down the Hall (2023), the girl wields a flashlight and, with her shoelace childishly askew, prepares to investigate a dark hallway a la Nancy Drew, signaling girlish curiosity and the thrill of the unknown at that ripe age. Lyons also carefully fills out her world with sentimental and lighthearted emblems of adolescence — a baggy Mickey Mouse tee, a copy of “Wuthering Heights” more than likely assigned as summer reading, a cup of lemon Italian ice eaten with a flat wooden spoon, a red solo cup sipped from while curled up on the ground, a bedroom wall poster of David Bowie. Lyons masterfully colors the titillating gray area between being a kid at heart and wanting to be seen as so much more. She reminds viewers that they, too, once ached for new experiences and daydreamed about who they might become. Perhaps, as in the cheekily titled Dream Date (2023), they even fantasized about dating Bowie.
Karyn Lyons, Detail of Dream Date, 2023, Oil on linen, 17 ¾ x 14 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.
Karyn Lyons, The Dominion of Night, 2024, Oil on linen, 53 x 73 ¾ inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.
In The Dominion of Night (2024), the only work that features the protagonist from a distance, the artist provides a voyeuristic view of the girl through her bedroom window; the scene is suspended in a disconcerting twilight with her house shrouded in shadows under a curiously clear daytime sky. The scene holds up a mirror to Lyons’ practice of painting herself as a teenager from the outside looking in and highlights the disorienting experience of reflecting on your own childhood with a breadth of understanding your younger self couldn’t even begin to fathom.
Karyn Lyons, The Lemon Italian Ice, 2023, Oil on linen, 22 ¼ x 18 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.
Woven throughout her work, Lyons embraces longstanding artistic traditions such as her renditions of gallery walls, chiaroscuro shades of light and dark, and framing scenes as though they are vignettes of Sofia Coppola film stills. These aesthetic choices speak to the classical and universal nature of youth and innocence.
Overall, Karyn Lyons’ compositions smolder with surrealist undercurrents that make her pieces feel timeless and magical, an homage to the resonance of girlhood memories.
Karyn Lyons The End of the Night January 27 – March 2, 2024 Anat Ebgi 6150 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90038
The meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, in 2023 has commanded our attention. From its popularity on platforms like ChatGPT—capable of generating and editing text with a few simple commands—to headlines of Hollywood on strike to renegotiate contracts based on AI’s newfound capabilities, to even President Biden’s recent executive order ensuring the “safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence,” it’s evident that AI is infiltrating more of our daily lives. And the art world is no exception. Amidst this sea of confusing terminology, news, and hyperbole, artists have raised legitimate concerns about copyright issues, especially as AI learns from freely-scraped web images and produces “artworks” that mimic their artistic style. Despite this apparent threat, AI also presents opportunities to artists who seek to explore its capabilities as a tool and teachable assistant—and for Los Angeles-based Argentine artist Analia Saban, AI presented the next logical step in her artistic practice.
In Saban’s latest solo exhibition, Synthetic Self, which took place at both Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, she presented an insightful investigation blending both digital abilities and natural materials. An ambitious exhibition that concluded last month, it featured sixty-three new works that spanned across sculpture, painting, tapestry, and clever tech-centric mixed media. Deeply philosophical, the show eloquently questioned and reframed the role of an artist in an ever-expanding technological and AI world.
Analia Saban, detail of Circuit Board with Deliberate Lines #4, 2023. Ink on ash burl wood. 72 x 72 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Sprüth Mager
When describing her show in an Instagram reel, Saban expressed, “It’s a show about: What does it mean to be an artist these days? What’s the creative act and what are our gestures that really count?” After traversing through both galleries, viewers witnessed how this very thought process unfolded as the complete essence of the term “artist” manifested in an exhaustive selection of media, methods, and materials including linen, copper, stone, wax, graphite, wood, oil and computer parts. Throughout both exhibition spaces, viewers were encouraged to discern and question which elements were “synthetic,” by the artist’s hand, or something entirely novel. The artworks presented in the show addressed Saban’s role as a creative force and showcased her commitment to a dual approach to this new technology, utilizing it as both a tool to create elements of her works and, at times, treating AI like an apprentice by teaching it in-depth explanations of how to create various works of art.
Analia Saban, Flow Chart (Painting a Painting), 2023. Oil stick on encaustic paint on canvas. 72 x 128 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Sprüth Magers.
One such work was Flow Chart (Painting a Painting) (2023). In this work we encounter a sprawling blackboard-inspired canvas filled from edge to edge with writings, directional arrows, and sketches in white. As the title suggests, the artist has meticulously designed a comprehensive flowchart detailing the steps a potential artist might undertake to begin and complete a painting. Careful consideration is given to elaborate on each element such as comprehensive lists of pigments, illustrations of various brush shapes, and detailed diagrams on how to draw a hand, eye, and skull. One particularly intriguing step involved a signature, where the artist offered seven variations of her name before culminating in a circled “END.” Curiously, this exhibition marks the first time Saban has incorporated drawing into her work. This emphasis on mark-making shows Saban considering her physical role as an artist where she ultimately created an analog artwork to train a future digital AI in the art form of painting.
Another standout painting was Face Mapping (2023), which included 150 photos of the artist’s face at different angles. What set it apart was the deliberate decision not to digitally alter the errors and inconsistencies present in each photo before printing; instead, they are left intact. Many images on the grid bear notes to “remove hair” or feature scribbled-out backgrounds and again emphasize the artist’s hand. This work also served as a study or training tool to craft a “deep fake” of the artist’s likeness, Prompt Drawing: Deep Fake (2023), which feels reminiscent of a 1980’s school portrait with three floating heads of different sizes all gazing to the left. Together, both works question and challenge how we think about, categorize, and consider art. Can this still be considered a self-portrait with so much input from AI? Is a self-portrait only about capturing the likeness? Or can it be acceptable for Saban to simply ask the image generator to craft all her self-portraits? The number of questions raised by these works is dizzying.
Analia Saban, Face Mapping, 2023. Graphite on encaustic paint on panel. 48 x 73 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Sprüth Magers.
A great analogy of thinking about AI’s role in Saban’s work is within the constructs of a traditional artist’s workshop. During the Renaissance, inexperienced youths—almost always young boys—would take an apprenticeship under a master artist to learn the trade of painting, metalwork, or sculpting. They would learn the basics, such as preparing the support structures, or grinding and mixing pigments, and would eventually participate in the creation of a finished work. Customarily, the master would sketch or design how the work would look, and then the workshop full of other artists would complete the masterpiece under his watchful eye. One famous example would be Andrea del Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ (c.1475), where his young pupil, Leonardo da Vinci, beautifully painted and rendered one of the kneeling angels.
In the context of Saban’s exhibition, the title implies that she views her artificial “apprentice” not as a separate entity, but as a “synthetic” extension of her own artistic practice. Consider it more like training a craftsman for her workshop rather than training the next Leonardo. However, the fact that she does train AI like an assistant or apprentice prompts even more questions: Will AI ever be accepted as an artist in its own right? Can art only be made by humans? Should art only be made by humans? Do any of these questions even have answers yet?
At the end of her interview clip, Saban prophetically asks: “What is the point about technology right now?” I believe she alluded to an answer in her show: Like every other tool we’ve created, it should be used while also thoughtfully considering the impact it will have on ourselves, society, and the environment.
Synthetic Self was a very timely exhibition that grappled with both the anxiety and potential of AI. It fostered critical questions about the evolution of art media and tools as well as the complication of technology’s role in creating art and how the artist can and should fit into this equation.
Analia Saban Synthetic Self September 14 – Oct 28, 2023 Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038
Sprüth Magers 65900 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90036
What is revealed behind the fold? What is hinted at, but goes unseen? This is the power of art; to make something in our minds beyond what’s on the page.
Hank Ehrenfried’s work — on display in Los Angeles for the first time as the new Vardan Gallery’s entrée into the art world — is a pared-down photorealism, painting after painting of crumpled collages thumb-tacked to the walls, as if the artist had chosen to frame and immortalize the contents of his pockets. It’s a tribute to ephemera, partial and redacted portraits of a man’s taste — textual, sexual, stylistic, and artistic.
Installation of “Under the Impression.” Courtesy of Vardan Gallery.
I visited Ehrenfried’s postage-stamp studio in Brooklyn three months before his Los Angeles opening. It’s in an unassuming warehouse subdivided with 8-foot walls to create a cell-block of studio spaces. Ehrenfried’s studio, like his work, is simultaneously minimalist and crowded. His plain white walls are hung with the collages that I recognize from his paintings, and his floor space is occupied by cubbies of paints and a cheap metal bookshelf with neat rows of titles that neatly mirror his themes: Magic, The Male Nude, The Art of Illusion, Working Out, Pablo Picasso, Cubism. “The mentality to hoard and let things accumulate is part of maintaining a studio,” Ehrenfried tells me.
Since 2019, Ehrenfried has been working on his current collection of collage paintings. During the pandemic, when he wasn’t able to get new materials, he found himself treating and re-treating the materials he had on hand, a mix of found magazine cut-outs and tracing paper. This breaking apart and recombination in a controlled system led to the collages which serve as his subjects. They are overlapping, folded — as if you could reach into the painting and turn their pages to see what’s on the other side, hinting at more information that is irreversibly lost to the viewer in the transfer from collage to paint.
Courtesy of Vardan Gallery
Ehrenfried traces his lineage to the cubists, who collaged and flattened the world during a shift into modernity. He draws an analogy between the first World War and COVID, one hundred years apart, a period which saw artists sitting and waiting, trying to track the slippery compression of time and history that happens in moments of crisis. “The cubists were also interested in obfuscation,” he tells me. By placing disparate references — from male nudes to antique furniture — overlapping and folded into one another, Ehrenfried suggests a unity and a dialogue between his subjects, the way Picasso makes a face from many cut-out angles of a face.
“There’s a camp value to antiques,” Ehrenfried says, before revealing that one of his favorite pastimes is watching furniture restoration on YouTube. He revels in the obscenity of luxuries past, but also the permanence of objects and their images through change. “At what point do you let something become garbage?” he muses. There’s a documentary quality to his painting, a restoration and recombination of images to bring the past and the present into alignment.
Ehrenfried shares that his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. After her passing, he was left with tons of documents, but just as many questions — questions he’ll never have answers for. “The lack of answer in itself is content,” he says.
This tension of desire between the known and the unknowable in the paintings slips discreetly into a dialogue with the erotic. Antique furniture ads nestle next to nude models and tear-outs of hardcore gay porn, an aesthetics of queer domesticity that contests what is (or historically has been) appropriate to the sphere of the home. The underlying theme of obfuscation feeds into this historical narrative and hints at the kind of “looking under the folds” present in gay cruising culture, in which men encounter one another in public spaces for sex. Historically, with the home as a wife’s domain, this sort of risky public encounter in restrooms and parks were how gay men were able to meet. The banal and everyday (a public restroom, for instance) become erotically charged if you stay long enough and look hard enough. Likewise, these paintings invite a lingering, an undercurrent of sexuality that is sometimes evident, often masked.
Courtesy of Vardan Gallery.
Space plays a role in these paintings, too, as Ehrenfried’s studio walls themselves become part of his subject, down to the electrical outlets. It’s a winking nod to the process behind the painting. The walls in the paintings are punctured with tacks and splattered with paint, themselves artifacts of the painting that’s happened on them. “We’re in a moment where everything feels miscellaneous,” Ehrenfried tells me, thinking about the distance between the present moment and history, between subject and context.
“At the end of the day, the paintings are about looking,” he tells me. “There’s so much stuff — how do you make sense of it? How do you decide what’s important, and what happens to the other stuff?”
The stuff — and the studio itself — become a metaphor for the artist’s interior life. When you follow an obsession in a studio, Ehrenfried says, your brain itself becomes a studio, always working, so each artwork is a few hours of paint on canvas and many more of thought, effort, and obsession.
This obsession is what is on display here. Always obfuscated, always revealing itself.
Hank Whrenfried “Under the Impression” September 16 – Oct 15, 2023 Vardan Gallery 6810 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038
We as humans seem to have a fascination with documenting ourselves—with showing that we were here, that we mattered. From the crude marks of ancient cave paintings to more contemporary portraits of the wealthy and aristocratic, the act of documenting does more than just record its time. It also exposes something more universal about us, such as our fear of impermanence and fear of being forgotten. While the advent of photography catalyzed and democratized the ability to record ourselves (and, arguably, replaced painting as the primary method for recording ourselves visually), painters seem to keep finding ways of saying something new.
Will Thornton, Mine, 2023. Oil on linen, 28 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim. Photograph by Yubo Dong, of studio photography.
According to the press release for his solo show at Nicodim, “Hypnagogic Sex Idols,” Will Thornton forayed into portraiture as recently as 2019. Since traditional portraits were still very much in style where he lived in the South, Thornton thought it would be a lucrative venture to paint portraits of wealthy families in the area. But this journey into portraiture came to an abrupt halt when the Covid-19 Pandemic struck. As we all know, it was a time of fear—of sickness, death, and the unknown—and a constant reminder of humanity’s fragility. Most people were too hesitant to even have their friends over, let alone allow a craftsman or portrait painter to come into their homes. Yet, the pandemic opened a door for Thornton to explore something else.
Harnessing the fears of the pandemic, his skill as a traditional portrait painter, and even his recent experience with becoming a father, Thornton manifested the nightmarish figures of “Hypnagogic Sex Idols.” Taken literally, Thornton’s paintings appear to be portraits of anthropomorphic sculptures, made of fabric, leather, clay and canvas, which are then posed in front of dramatically-lit backdrops. But they work in other ways, too, as if materializing something from the subconscious, or even functioning metaphorically.
Will Thornton, Some Have Broken Ankles (Some Have Broken Hearts), 2023. Oil on linen, 26 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim. Photograph by Yubo Dong, of studio photography.
One of the strengths of Thornton’s paintings is that they lend themselves to multiple interpretations and references, which often interact in unexpected or unsettling ways. For one, the figures aren’t human, but are familiar enough to be humanized. Features that look limb-like and effeminate easily transition into lifeless geometric forms, sometimes monstrous in proportion and shape.
More curiously, although these figures appear overtly sexualized, they can be just as grotesque. Some are even vulgar, dripping or spraying liquids onto the floor. Others give off an air of demure innocence or sadness. Very cleverly, they appear to draw from the visual language of ancient fertility totems (Venus of Willendorf, for example), but are also reminiscent of the freakish creations of contemporary pop culture (Ugly Dolls, Huggy Wuggy, Real Monsters, Feisty Pets). Despite their often nightmarish and even grotesque appearance, Thornton gives them a sense of tenderness.
Will Thornton, Dye Stealer, 2023. Oil on linen, 22 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim. Photograph by Yubo Dong, of studio photography.
It’s hard enough to create—and then balance—such disparate traits and expressions in human subjects, but Thornton makes the effort seem natural, and with inanimate objects too. Take Dye Stealer (2023) for example. The dark reddish-brown figure in this work features a prominent backside, a puffy leather couch-like texture, some sort of orifice, and tilts its “legs” in a casual pose. Owing to Thornton’s skill as a painter, Dye Stealer seemingly reveals a candid moment, or maybe even a private one, like nude portraits that are obviously posed but attempt to capture a casual feeling.
In an era when it is easy to draw on the ugliness and trepidation of life (in the face of a global pandemic, climate change, and other events seemingly beyond the control of any individual—just to name a few), Thornton offers something else. As if materializing an abstraction can provide some sense of control or certainty over it, these works offer something like that for the very real yet hard-to-place sentiments of life. They ask us to gaze into the nightmare, but find more than just fear.
Will Thornton Hypnagogic Sex Idols July 8 – August 12, 2023 Nicodim 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue #160 Los Angeles, CA 90021 www.nicodimgallery.com
Zachary C. Jensen is a writer, educator, and sometimes translator based in Los Angeles, California. He is the managing/founding editor of the literary journal Angel City Review and the editor of the chapbook series Animals by Business Bear Press.
In more ways than one, a garden is an apt metaphor for describing life. It’s difficult to tend; it requires patience, skill, and planning; and sometimes, despite a great deal of love and labor, the seeds we plant don’t always grow or blossom as we had hoped. Our internal lives can act as a garden, too, offering a place of secrecy and protection; a place which also needs nurturing, yet thrives amidst the cacophony of the external world. Like a shielded greenhouse or “hot house,” this garden can spring to life during moments of exhaustion or unfathomable loss.
Isn’t it art that best tells the story of these ineffable occasions? That certainly seems true of Colleen Herman’s work, whose abstract paintings, which are heavily influenced by nature, are just as conceptual and psychological as they are material.
Colleen Herman, “Flux i, ii, iii,” 2023. Acrylic, ink and gouache on canvas, 60 x 144 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Brook Gallery. Photograph by Ruben Diaz.
Presented by Sarah Brook Gallery in its new Hollywood location, “Hot House” is a solo exhibition of eleven large abstract paintings by New York-based artist Colleen Herman.
Walking through the show, we are introduced to several compositional styles. They range from sparse collections of bright hues stained into the canvas (as in Flux i, ii, iii [2023]), to fully saturated pools of color that engulf the picture plane (as in An Offering [2022]). In this body of work, color—and in particular a rich oxblood and deep seaweed—are the leading actors.
Colleen Herman, An Offering, 2022. Acrylic, gouache, and oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Brook Gallery. Photograph by Ruben Diaz.
One standout painting, Lush (2023), bursts with pools of hunter and mossy greens, and splashes of flare and buttery yellows. There are also small windows through the composition’s “canopy,” revealing periwinkle and cobalt, the kind you would find gazing deeply into the sky or clear water. Making the work even more lush is Herman’s brushwork, with lines looping and bending as if expanding off the canvas, evoking vibrant and tenacious growth. We can appreciate the bounty of Herman’s brushwork and color choices when we start to sense abstract concepts emerge from its abstract forms; the fullness of Herman’s paintings invites a reading of strength and flourishing.
Colleen Herman, Lush, 2023. Acrylic, ink and oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Brook Gallery. Photograph by Ruben Diaz.
In another work, Pyre (2022), Herman’s brushwork certainly cultivates concepts deserving of the work’s title. Smokey chartreuse swirls over a dark, mossy-green composition. Flare yellow clusters seem to both blossom and snake through the composition. A puffy white column and cool gray forms expand upward into raw canvas. Perhaps Pyre alludes to a sacrifice needed to move forward in life, or an act of removing the dead-weight from our lives. But whatever pain has been endured here, Herman’s palette also offers a sense of overcoming it.
Colleen Herman, Pyre, 2022. Oil on linen, 48 x 42 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Brook Gallery. Photograph by Ruben Diaz.
While the beauty of Herman’s paintings stems from her deep understanding of color relationships, the true strength of her work is how she uses color to map complex thoughts like self-reliance and fortitude. Portraying our inner lives so vibrantly on canvas, the psychological realities of her abstractions—which are both nurturing and tumultuous—feel at times even more palpable than the paint. It’s in exhibitions like “Hot House” where we can experience how “art is the guarantee of sanity,” as Louise Bourgeois once eloquently stated—and we all deserve that reminder from time to time.
Colleen Herman Hot House Februrary 15 – March 25, 2023 Sarah Brook Gallery Los Angeles, California 90027 www.sarahbrookgallery.com
Ashley Ouderkirk is an independent curator, art writer, and emerging artist advisor who splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles.
Understanding the chaos and grandeur of Elliott Hundley’s collage works means understanding the fundamental unit of their construction: the intimate and almost sentimental act of sifting through old objects and images, delicately cutting them out from their original form, and then placing them on pins as if they were entomological specimens. Hundley does this hundreds if not thousands of times, though—often without attaching any images or ephemera to the pins—transforming the act into something obsessive and seemingly pathological.
It’s easy to see how Hundley’s collage works earned him success. They stage a collision of different eras through the old and familiar tradition of collage and the post-internet age of information abundance, two visual languages that certainly have a household presence. And they stage that collision such that their commentary on contemporary life can be understood through the experience of viewing them, instead of through some theoretical exercise. Hundley is at his best with works like The Plague (2016), where he’s cultivated the intimacy of a Joseph Cornell boxed assemblage, but also the mood and grotesque sprawl of a Hieronymus Bosch landscape.
Elliott Hundley, The Plague, 2016. Paper, oil, pins, plastic, foam, and linen on panel. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.
Echo, a twenty-year survey of Hundley’s work at Regen Projects, features some of these collage works, alongside an array of others, including freestanding and hanging sculptures, assemblages, paintings, photographs, ceramics, and works on paper. There is even a hallway displaying what seem to be objects of personal importance to Hundley, interspersed with some of his smaller works. Echo is installed and presented as an immersive experience into the artist’s practice, and touches on his usual themes of excess and abundance, but this show feels more like a product of its time and less of a commentary on it.
Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.
Echo is installed much like Hundley’s collage works are assembled. Swarms of pins and miniature images hover around individual works, which, according to the press release, was inspired by Hundley’s studio. This salon-style, everything-everywhere approach would seem to make sense, as it’s consistent with the themes of his work and provides a way to link the different media of his oeuvre, but it overreaches. There is so much going on—so many pins, so many choices, so many images intricately cut out—that it is implausible, if not impossible, that Hundley eked out this exhibition himself. Just looking at all of Echo can be measured in man-hours.
Fine artists use assistants all of the time, and for the most part it’s uncontroversial and no one even notices or cares. Filmmakers use hundreds to thousands of people, and this is seen as perfectly normal if not optimal. But there is a problem with it here. Hundley’s collage work is inherently intimate and personal, if not presented and promoted as such. When the use of assistants becomes so conspicuous, as it has with Echo, it changes the nature of the work. After all, part of what makes Hundley’s individual collage works great is because they seem created by one person. Breaching that semblance, Echo becomes less about the obsessive, intimate act of the artist—and the extraordinary effort and care of one man—and more about the manufacturing of it.
Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.
Echo’s conflict between feeling intimate or manufactured seems befitting in a culture that increasingly struggles with its own competing desires for authenticity and illusion. In a time when everyone has a camera, editing software, and a platform, there is not only a trend toward constantly staging and curating one’s life, but also a revulsion to it. As for Echo, maybe it shouldn’t matter how the art is made, and that manufacturing something intimate is perfectly acceptable. But if that’s the case, we need to ask ourselves some probing questions about our tolerance for illusion, if not our desire for it.
Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.
It’s also questionable what Echo really achieves by its installation. It does blur the line between the art and the process of making it, but it creates perceptual issues with its more-is-better ethos. Unlike Hundley’s individual collage works—which do corral overwhelming amounts of information into something more—Echo strains to tie together every collage, sculpture, painting, pin, image, brushstroke and scrap of at least three rooms of the exhibition.
Echo wants the viewer to conclude that its whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but the installation lacks the synergy or dynamic interaction of its parts that usually leads to that effect. Instead, it achieves something close to the opposite. Echo’s installation spreads the viewer’s attention so thin that each individual work seems to have a more important role as a mere part of the whole; and because of that, less is expected from each work. At worst, the more an individual work blends into the rest of the installation, the more it feels like decoration. What this adds up to, it seems, is Echo asking only one thing from the viewer: to marvel at the immensity of its production.
There is an appeal to the spectacle of the installation, but I can’t help but think that this is because contemporary viewers (myself included) are conditioned into having their attention spread thin, and that low bandwidth shapes what we’re drawn to. Maybe tapping into this is ingenious of Hundley. Maybe it’s pandering. Maybe it’s unintentional. But it feels like something I would expect more from a social media company than from an artist.
Elliott Hundley, Untitled (2013, oil on linen), as installed in Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo by Art Memo Magazine.
Like Echo’s installation, Hundley’s paintings seem heavily influenced by his propensity for hyper-collage. But it doesn’t make for good paintings. For one, Hundley is prone to cramming too much information into his paintings. There are so many styles, marks, layers, and clashing colors—all densely packed into one canvas—that it is hard to take anything from these paintings other than “the chaos is the point.”
Elliott Hundley, 21.12.22.1 (2022, oil on linen), as installed in Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo by Art Memo Magazine.
Maybe worse, I think Hundley’s predilection for collage makes him quote other painters a little too much—almost as if he’s collecting marks and styles like one would endearingly collect objects or images for a collage. Works like face and form (2013) and Untitled (2013), for example, are suspiciously similar to the work of Albert Oehlen. Of course, artists are always drawing from, and building on top of, the work of other artists, but in the incremental difference between Hundley’s paintings and his precedents, it’s hard to discern what Hundley’s contribution to painting is, if anything. And at a gallery as eminent as Regen Projects, the inclusion of these paintings begs the question.
Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.
Hundley deserves the acclaim of his collage works, but what made those works great does not necessarily scale up or translate well to other media—and neither of those things make Hundley the artistic polymath he is sometimes thought to be.
I still found Echo to be a noteworthy exhibition, though. From what I can tell from the responses of other writers and artists, Echo seems to be quite polarizing. It’s hard to sense decades-long shifts in cultural and aesthetic sensibilities, but—to me, at least—that polarizing response is what slow-moving change feels like in the moment. So, in some way, Echo did leave me feeling immersed, just not in the show itself.
Elliott Hundley Echo January 14 – February 19, 2023 Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90038 www.regenprojects.com
With all of its flesh tones and synthetics, its re-purposed refuse, its simulations and premonitions, its wisps of human history and myth—and especially its rethinking of the body—“Durian on the Skin” feels very post-human, maybe even a little post-apocalyptic.
Before seeing the show, “Durian on the Skin” caught my interest as I wanted to see how the curator handled the dilemma that seems to arise when addressing forward-looking topics or drawing from emerging visual languages. And that is: if the work draws too much from a new or emerging visual language, it risks having no effect on a viewer, as visual languages need time to accumulate connotations and associations before the artist can go about orchestrating them for some effect. But if the artist relies too heavily on old or familiar visual languages, they risk failing to capture something essential about the forward-looking topic.
It’s easy to forget—maybe because artists have such free rein now or because art is “all subjective anyway”—but there are aesthetic decisions artists (and curators) should be making. It’s a role where they, and only they, can identify visual languages where others could not; and to surprise us, maybe even wound us, with what we know, but don’t recognize. This was just the sort of thing I found with “Durian on the Skin.”
Intallation view of “Durian on the Skin,” 2022. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.
“Durian on the Skin” was so expertly curated, and offered so many revelations in between its works, that it would be crude to categorize it as post-human or post-apocalyptic, or to categorize it at all. It does pay a lot of attention to the body, though, and owing to how its curator handled the “dilemma” of emerging visual languages, you can feel its definitions shifting.
For a show interested in the body, the curator, Gan Uyeda, was apt to include a virtual reality piece. VR is known for simulating environments, but it runs another less obvious simulation: that conscious experience might not have anything to do with the material that holds it. In Rindon Johnson’s Meat Growers: A Love Story (2019), you’re guided through a forest of giant trees, you pass cloaked buildings, you glide over wet earth as if a storm had just passed. Occasionally, almost as if it detached and floated away, you remember your own body. The more immersed you become, the more you contemplate what it’s like to push conscious experience out of the material and into the immaterial.
Intallation view of “Durian on the Skin,” 2022. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.
Taking off the VR headset, that meditation on the body and immateriality continues with the neighboring works. The cast beeswax torso of Kelly Akashi’s Stratum (2021), for example, quite literally treats the body as a vessel, albeit a fragile and organic one. In Gabriel Mills’ DIAMOND SEA (2022), paint flickers between material and immaterial across three panels, and its floating ethereal pane sparks an unexpected connection between painterly abstraction and virtual space. In Danica Lundy’s Late Summer Pitch (2022), bodies glitch into bleacher seats and paint eviscerates its subjects.
Candice Lin, Piss Protection Demon, 2022. Glazed ceramic, vaporizer, water, wolf piss. Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson.
Uyeda adds subtle touches of history and myth, too. Candice Lin’s squatty and gnarled totem, Piss Protection Demon (2022), feels like history and myth have curdled into artifact. Joeun Kim Aatchim’s fish-hooked porcelain works strike a tribalistic note. Isaac Soh Fujita Howell’s schematic painting of a humanoid-as-machine, with its nod to Italian Futurism, lends a tone of past-imagining-future.
Intallation view of “Durian on the Skin,” 2022. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.
Some work, like Liao Wen’s two humanoid sculptures, made me think of my own body’s hardwiring and how it has evolved to understand other bodies. That evolved response can be as simple as wincing at another’s injury, or it could be, if you’re familiar with Boston Dynamics, as curious as the trace of empathy you feel when the researchers abuse their robots to test their balance. Wen’s figures trigger something like that. Flesh-toned and jointed like dolls, they feel like full-body prosthetics, writhing but somehow in a state of Zen. One even has a weighted wire hanging through a slot in its body. Even though the figures are neither alive nor naturally posed, I still felt my body trying to make sense of theirs—trying to transpose quasi- or non-human sensations onto itself. It’s a little eerie visiting the periphery of the body’s natural responses, but with technology like artificial intelligence and genetic modification, contemporary life seems to insist on the eerie becoming relevant.
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Peter from Hereditary, and a being with translucent skin whose water from the Rio Grande passes through it (when the sun has just set and the water is hazy and mercurial as it ripples the fresh drift of a new night sky), 2022. Plastic part from a TV (maybe) found in Guadalajara, pigmented silicone that my niece helped smear, pigmented rabbit pelt, goat leg, my aunt’s high heel, industrial shank nail put together to make the mouth of the bottom feeder found by the arroyo of what must have belonged to a construction worker that helped make a newly renovated park, horn tips, zip ties. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Murmurs Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson.
One of Uyeda’s more counterintuitive ways of addressing the body was including works made from repurposed materials and the remains of manufactured objects. Appropriating the visual language of manufactured objects extends back at least to Duchamp’s “readymade” sculptures, but Uyeda stresses the darker aspects of that lexicon to invoke our changing relationship with fabrication and waste. In the same room as Wen’s figures are a wall-sized pelt made of porcelain shards, a spiked chimera of fur, plastic and scrap, and a plaster suit swirling without a subject. With works like these, Uyeda casts a shade of ecological desolation over the show. And in light of the show’s allusions to technology, myth and history, they sensitize the body to something both primal and prophetic.
Srijon Chowdhury, Andreas Under Cherry Blossoms, 2022. Oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Foxy Production. Photo by Paul Salveson.
One might say that, as we lurch through history, it’s the role of fine artists to make sense of our shifting condition by examining the corresponding changes of visual languages. But unlike other sense-making disciplines—and even some forms of art—fine art often does not offer answers or clear explanations. And, arguably, that makes it a better place for rethinking what feels so obvious or fundamentally true. Shows like “Durian on the Skin” remind me of that. Presenting the body as something suspended between myth, earth, virtual and synthetic, “Durian on the Skin” does what no dissection or system of rules could; as if, when looking more closely within, you could ever really expect to find a stable, certain, endlessly knowable thing.
“Durian on the Skin” September 17 – October 22, 2022 Curated by: Gan Uyeda Works by: Ann Greene Kelly, Brach Tiller, Candice Lin, Danica Lundy, David Douard, Gabriel Mills, Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Joeun Kim Aatchim, Kelly Akashi, Liao Wen, Maren Karlson, Mire Lee, Rebecca Manson, Rindon Johnson, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Srijon Chowdhury, Tomás Díaz Cedeño François Ghebaly Gallery 2245 E Washington Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90021 www.ghebaly.com
Oil painting’s historical connection to wealth—and more specifically to the rise of capitalism—is not news to anyone. As the art critic John Berger pointed out, oil painting’s rise to prominence as a medium had a lot to do with its ability to express the changing worldview of the Western European ruling class of the 16th century. That is, oil painting offered a model of the world where the world could be owned, possessed, and sold—where “everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.” Oil painting is remarkably good at representing objects of desire as though they are real. The medium set a new standard for representation of the newly commodified objects of the world, appropriate to the forms of desire they elicited.
Rae Klein, Never Talk About it, 2022. 72 x 60 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.
In the vaporous and multilayered paintings of “LOW VOICE OUT LOUD,” artist Rae Klein seems to be thinking about the medium’s economic history through form. The paintings of the show, all completed in 2022, range in scale from a dainty 12 by 16 inches to a mansion-appropriate 72 by 120, and take similarly mansion-appropriate hunting dogs, horses, elegantly-coiffed women, pearls, elongated silver tableware, and candelabras as their subjects, as well as other vaguely mythological landscapes and figures.
There’s also a pronounced hint of another century in these objects, even as their arrangement and spatial logic hail from the dimensionless but well-lit world of Web 2.0 graphics. This is not only achieved by her palette choices (browns, Prussian blues, ochres, sepia tones) and the visual language of the depicted objects (pearls, lockets), but also how she handles light. Everything in Klein’s paintings gleams faintly, as though struck at once by antique candlelight and an unplaceable ethereal glow. There’s a certain classical aspect in how she achieves that effect, too, especially with the accents of pure white on top of diffuse layers of paint. Seeing Klein’s candlesticks and glassy ponies, it’s almost natural to think of the glass stemware in 17th century still life painting.
Rae Klein, Or Was I Dreaming This?, 2022. 60 x 72 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.
The formal choices of Klein’s paintings also allow them to ask, among other questions, something like: “What might the visual expression of the object-oriented desire of the wealthy be now, in 2022?” For example, Klein’s compositions often feature richly rendered objects floating amidst non-dimensional surroundings. It’s as if the surroundings staged the objects, but were uninterested in constructing any habitable world. No one lives wherever these subjects are. This motif—of objects floating in a dimensionless void—has been one of the major ways contemporary painting seems to have incorporated the computer’s impact on the visual landscape (one might think of Rute Merk, for instance).
Klein is astute to employ that motif in such a historically-charged medium, one often designed to represent the desired objects of the wealthy. Objects floating in dimensionless voids for our consideration for purchase is by now a deeply naturalized part of our everyday visual languages. Capitalism always decontextualized and abstracted objects, but that has certainly accelerated since oil painting first began depicting hunting dogs and pearls and horses. With a lesser artist, this pairing might come off as academic, but in Klein’s work they intuitively converge through the medium.
Rae Klein, I’ve Accepted It, And I Forgive You, 2022. 72 x 60 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.
If these paintings ask, “What might the visual expression of the object-oriented desire of the wealthy be now, in 2022,” they also ask: “What does all that feel like?” The answer might be something like “eerie, lonely, discomforting, and kind of… beautiful?” One of the most interesting paintings in the show, I’ve Accepted It, And I Forgive You, seems to me to get at this question.
It’s a mid-size piece (72 x 60 inches) featuring a woman’s hair and bleary eyes floating in a goldened field, and in the space where her face isn’t: tiny ducks, a dog, and a butterfly which all hover like sticker-book style face tattoos. The piece is both lovely and off-putting, which seems connected to how impossible it is to reconcile the painting’s multiple frames of reading. Figures are staged at different scales; objects are situated in a dimensionless void; the background flickers into the space of the foreground figures, or becomes them. How are these objects and their grounds related to each other? Which, or what, is actually figure or ground? How do we understand them in space?
The painting offers tonal complexity, too. Features like the teardrop-like butterfly feel both internet-irony funny but also sincerely sad. I’ve Accepted It, And I Forgive You, like many of the works in the show, does that lovely cognitive shimmering thing good art does as it resists easy conceptualization, easy tonal categorizing, easy anything.
Rae Klein, Burn To The Ground, 2022. 72 x 60 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.
Surrealism is also a hovering presence here. Many of Klein’s figures offer themselves as (il)legible symbols, staged in settings whose vagueness might evoke something like “the unconscious” or “a dream.” Her multiple frames of reading, too, connect her work to Surrealism. But the way she uses them enables her to go beyond Surrealism.
Klein’s work presents a layering paradox like that of, for example, Magritte’s The Double Secret (1927) or The Human Condition (1935), where narrative “reality” is confused with what is “painted.” Like Magritte’s paintings, Klein’s draw attention to the ways pictorial illusion, context, and layering can be used to generate logically incoherent spaces. But Klein’s attention to wealth and materiality—and the odd “dimensionless” quality—takes her past this chime with Surrealism. Klein’s version of that layering paradox is not just spatial or symbolic, but also about oil painting’s history colliding with the desire, discourse, and economic structures of the present.
Rae Klein, Dog Resting in the Field, 2022. 72 x 120 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.
Like the oil paintings from the centuries before hers, these pieces would be perfect in the homes of the wealthy of their century. I can easily imagine any of these pieces in an elegant living room out of a jet-setting magazine, staged next to a fiddle-leaf fig by a white sofa on a gray marble floor. But in such settings, the painting would also smuggle in a certain unease, even as it beautifully complements the Danish teak coffee table or antique flat-knot rug. It feels naïve or a little silly to say that these paintings feel “haunted” or “off” or “poisoned,” but they do. And in that way, they feel slightly ironic, considering who will likely own her paintings. But I have no reason to suspect any ill-will on Klein’s part. If anything, it further connects her work to its subject matter and history, and in a not so comfortable way. This is important work. It finds deep intuitive connections between its medium, its world, and its history, and gives it a critical expression whose affective force and visual beauty speak, uneasily, for itself.
Kristen Ihns is completing her PhD at the University of Chicago, where she studies contemporary poetry and experimental film, and works as an editor at FENCE and Chicago Review. She also writes poems and makes films, sometimes as part of the video collective dunt project.
Rae Klein “LOW VOICE OUT LOUD” June 25th – August 13, 2022 Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160 Los Angeles,CA 90021 www.nicodimgallery.com
While the majority of Americans, 72% according to a 2021 poll by Yale University, believe global warming is happening, only 47% seem to believe that it would harm them personally. This alarming second statistic seems to prove the national disconnect as to why most individuals don’t seem to “feel” the same urgency as those who live in areas prone to extreme drought and fires like Los Angeles. How do we bring them into the fold? Apparently, it is not through statistics, news, or testimonials by expert scientists, which have been abundantly available, but likely will be through bold, thought-provoking images made by artists who conjure deeper emotional connections, as was the case with 19th century artistic movements such as the Hudson River School. Perhaps this is why the recent group show Mapping The Sublime:Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century, felt needed, as if it were answering a call to arms.
Rodrigo Valenzuela, Sense of Place 106, 2021. 43.25” x 40”, acrylic and toner on canvas. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.
Organized by artists Lawrence Gipe and Beth Davila Waldman, the ambitious exhibition included multiple artworks by each of the twenty artists working in a variety of media including: video, photography, collage, installation, and painting. Gipe and Waldman chose these artists —Luciana Abait, Kim Abeles, Fatemeh Burnes, Linda Connor, Rodney Ewing, Guillermo Galindo, Dimitr Kozyrev, Ann Le, Constance Mallinson, Ryan McIntosh, Liz Miller Kovacs, Deborah Oropallo, Andy Rappaport, Kit Radford, Aili Schmeltz, Alex Turner, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Amir Zaki—as their practices incorporated landscape and the sublime to reflect upon critical issues of climate change and the Anthropocene.
Ann Le, Tear x Scape / Terrorscape 6 (Green Monster), 2019. 24” x 27”, Photograph. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.
Meandering through the multi-roomed exhibition, one feels a sense of the scope and complexity of the obstacles we face as a civilization. We are confronted with mass extinction, melting glaciers, toxic waste, and vast regions negatively transformed by our human presence, among other issues. While these are all known and acknowledged problems, here they are reinterpreted in the context of the sublime, and then presented as physical objects for contemplation.
In Constance Mallinson’s installation, It’s Amazon, Stupid (2022), viewers are lured in by a glass vitrine of oil paintings. The paintings are made on neatly cut pieces of found Styrofoam, and depict pleasing images of “exotic” flora or fauna from disappearing landscapes around the world. Seeing such highly detailed and colorful paintings rendered on trash, one can’t help but think of how we often treat nature as disposable and expendable. One also can’t avoid the cruel sense of irony by using Styrofoam, as this human-made product will certainly outlast the living inhabitants of these natural habitats.
Constance Mallinson, It’s Amazon, Stupid, 2022. Dimensions variable, oil on found Styrofoam. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.
Another fascinating grouping was a series of photographic works by Alex Turner that explores both the sociopolitical and environmental issues at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Turner captures the hidden movements of animals and humans traversing the shared landmass by marrying photography and remote sensing imagery. In 29 Humans (Smugglers) and 12 Horses, 1-Week Interval, Patagonia Mountains, AZ, (2019), we see a jumble of figures with heavy packs and intermittently visible horse legs, all lined-up on the same path as documented over the one-week period. By depicting them as a ghostly mass, the artist transforms their presence into a fixture of these desert mountains. Yet the use of “spy” cameras to capture these previously unknown paths feels dangerous in the wrong hands, especially in today’s political climate.
Alex Turner, 29 Humans (Smugglers) and 12 Horses, 1-Week Interval, Patagonia Mountains, AZ, 2019. 36” x 36”, archival inkjet print, edition 2 of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.
Mallinson, who also contributed a must-read essay to this exhibition, stated, “There are no neutral landscapes.” In this show each artist takes full advantage of their license to delve deeper into the consequences and cautionary tales of our destructive behavior toward the environment and our “ungovernable technologies.” Yet, it’s their use of the sublime in landscape that tethers the viewer to a more personal and spiritual experience.
The exhibition’s theme also had strong art historical parallels to the father of Hudson River School painting and 19th century environmentalist, Thomas Cole. He too used the sublime in his famous landscape paintings to instill both a feeling of awe and power in nature, but also to help people comprehend what they were losing to industry and greed—a trend that continues today. In his 1835 Essay on American Scenery, Cole wrote:
I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away—the ravages of the axe are daily increasing—the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. The wayside is becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement. […] Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet—shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.
While it is not the artist’s responsibility to change the hearts and minds of Americans about climate change or encourage them to take action, this exhibition demonstrated that they can certainly provide the “map” for navigating our 21st century landscape. Here’s hoping that our “ignorance and folly” won’t keep us from asking for directions.
Ashley Ouderkirk is an independent curator & emerging artist advisor who splits her time between New York City & Los Angeles. She is currently the Curator-in-residence at Kunstraum in NYC.
“Mapping The Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century” Curated by: Lawrence Gipe & Beth Waldman April 2nd – June 11, 2022 Brand Library & Art Center 1601 West Mountain St., Glendale, CA 91201 www.brandlibrary.art
“Listen up, motherf*ckers! Now we’re having fun.” The lines come squawking through a speaker (as in, an object producing sound) on the floor, but who is the speaker (as in, the subject producing the thought)? Is it the African grey parrot, or the scarlet macaw represented in high definition on two vertically-oriented wall monitors? Do we take it to be the human who has voiced it in the style of a parrot? Or is it rather the medium itself that speaks; the speaker on the floor? In any case, these elements comprise Talk to Us (2021, dual channel video/audio) one of two video installations from Diana Thater included in “The Conversation” at 1301PE.
Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin
Complicating matters, each line is echoed in a different voice from another part of the gallery. Moving to the second floor of the gallery, one finds Listen to Us (2021, dual channel video/audio) a similarly constructed installation. Here, the two monitors face each other from opposite walls, and the African grey has been replaced with what is by comparison a diminutive Amazon parrot.
Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin
Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin
In both pieces, squeaks, whistles, and caws from a second speaker on the floor punctuate, interrupt, and distract from the spoken text. Is this background noise? A translation of the human speak into parrot squawk? Maybe the other way around? Or is the titular conversation between these two voices speaking in wildly different tongues? If it is indeed a conversation, it’s not one that is easy to follow. However, the rich color of the high definition video, the enveloping sound, and the scarlet macaw-colored gels covering the windows on both floors of the gallery provide an enthralling sensory experience to move through. We are having fun!
Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin
Beyond the fun, however, there are layers of meaning to unpack and to contemplate. For example, the conversation between human and animal is one that is fraught with difficulty. We speak for animals, and we talk over them. A conversation implies two or more parties that are equal in some way, and this conversation is held back by those who believe that between human and animal there is (to borrow a phrase from Jane Goodall) a difference of kind, and not simply one of degree. Additionally, the idea that nature is somehow “out there” and not surrounding us at every moment—whether in a gallery, at home, or in the outdoors—erects barriers to sympathy as well.
Thater’s work with animals has long pointed toward sympathy with the inhabitants of the natural world; sympathy that years of scientific classification and bifurcation have perhaps eroded in our culture. Layers of mediation and translation permeate the work, as do many of Thater’s video installations. She doesn’t shy away from revealing the technology that enables her immersive installations. Mediation itself is a key component to her thinking about the relationship between humans and the animals she films, whether it comes through a piece of equipment or through language itself. At this moment in history, the presence of the video apparatus may even heighten the experience. As so many of our day-to-day interactions with real people have been happening via screens, there is perhaps less of a barrier between mediated presence and actual presence. This lends the birds a sense of reality that viewers may not have been available two years ago. Even the occasional jump cut in the editing could be taken as evidence of a network hiccup rather than a preconstructed video feed. These birds feel both alive and live.
This also threatens to anthropomorphize the birds more than perhaps Thater would intend. Anthropomorphism is something Thater resists in her work, less the animals depicted simply become characters and not autonomous entities deserving of life and dignity. However, the piece never reaches the level of Disneyesque talking animals, and perhaps her close flirtation with anthropomorphism allows the viewer to realize how easily humans do the inverse—dehumanize one another.
One instance of this dehumanization is how in-power groups refer to displaced humans, be they refugee, immigrant, or otherwise. Here is another group that is spoken for, interrupted, and spoken over. These birds in particular provide an apt metaphor for understanding something about cycles of displacement. The birds are all labeled “exotic,” but are also common household pets far from their places of origin. These birds have lived through trauma due to commodification, abuse, and/or neglect. As birds living at the Intertwined Conservation Corporation as part of their avian rescue program, they are witness to just some of the horrors of global consumption. In the context of global climate catastrophe and the resulting ever-growing migration and refuge seeking, some of the dialogue (particularly “remove and replace”) takes on a menacing tone.
The connection to displaced humans is a parallel to contemporary society, and there’s a historical parallel one can draw as well. Birds remind us of a time when dinosaurs were the dominant inhabitants on the planet. That our current pending apocalypse is caused by burning the fossilized remains of that era as a fuel source has a certain morbid irony. Perhaps the tale of the bird is a cautionary one for us in the Anthropocene, one about how the mighty fall and the inevitability of change.
None of these interpretations are directly suggested by the work, but the balance Thater strikes between concrete language and vague context opens up space for multiple interpretations. The loop is only a few minutes long, enabling the viewer to hear the entire performance repeated for several rounds in a viewing. Recognizable sections emerge. A section listing action verbs (some relegated to human activity, some to avian activity “to perch, to stand, so sit, to lay, to throw…”) is followed by a listing of pairs of related words (“talk and listen” “up and down” text and poetry”) to a listing of the formal aspects of video work (“space time image color sound light”) and then a series of exhortations. The words, though vague, all relate to the installation in some way, be it the birds, the technology, or the title. Again, mediation itself is a key element to the work conceptually and formally.
There are meanings that are revealed via the initial unfamiliarity, and then others that are suggested only when one has a grasp of the cadence. Some phrases (i.e., “This is the good life”) are heard in varying degrees of sarcasm and earnestness. The copy seems as if it could have been lifted from a number of sources; one catches hints of Shakespearean text, Quentin Tarantino films, and advertising copy from the 1940s. The work hints at didacticism without becoming overly teachy, and the experience of the language is a bodily experience above a textual one. After several cycles of the looping audio, the exhortation that stands out most is, “Get out of this room. Get out of my mind!” Point taken.
“The Conversation” marks a welcome return to the gallery space for Thater, whose 2020 piece yes there will be singing was only viewable via streaming online video. Whereas that piece indicated a certain silence from humans, Talk to Us and Listen to Us are a cacophony of sound, and a spatial experience that encompasses two floors of the gallery. In conversation as well as in “The Conversation,” we communicate with much more than just words. The work is neither overtly optimistic nor pessimistic; just indicative that the conversation writ large goes on, and that we all contribute, in ways wittingly and otherwise.
“The Conversation”
September 25th, 2021 – December 4th, 2021
1301PE
6150 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048 www.1301pe.com
One of my favorite half-truths in the art world is that there really isn’t anything new, just variations of what’s come before. It’s true that what might appear undeniably “new” can be endlessly dissected into “old” components, merely recombined. This seems like a dispiriting process, but it reveals another truth: that something exists apart from the components themselves; something that develops relationally, between them.
That same principle applies to exhibitions, too. Based on how works are grouped, aligned and contextualized, an exhibition can charge art objects with new meanings, evoke ideas and feelings between objects, and summon themes from a group of them. The power in this unseen relationality—the connections between things—often makes the difference between a great show and a show merely with great art.
In “We are all guests here,” a group show at Bridge Projects about the Jewish tradition of Sukkot, the difference is clear. Sukkot commemorates the time the Jews spent wandering the desert after being liberated from slavery in Egypt, and is celebrated in a “sukkah,” which is a temporary walled structure of foliage resembling the shelter that once protected them. Each work in the exhibition was selected or created in response to the holiday, often through the motif of the enclosure. What emerges from that group effort is a meditation on tradition, time and human vulnerability that is so layered and moving, it appeals to far more than strictly religious interests.
SaraNoa Mark, “Prayer for Rain.” Carved clay, carved glass, aluminum, water collected from Lake Michigan, Mississippi River, Colorado River, and Castaic Lake. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
Much of the show’s success comes from how it cultivates not only a deep sense of human history, but a heightened awareness of the present passing of time. In SaraNoa Mark’s warped and rectangular abstractions of carved clay and stone, for example, there is something both ancient and tender, like seeing humanity’s first marks on the earth. And like the glass vessels of her “Prayer for Rain” series, they don’t fit the logic of artifacts, but conjure the feeling of them. Mark’s clay and stone works are cleverly placed nearby Brody Albert’s found photos of desert rock formations, which are faded to near oblivion. Albert re-reframed the photos to include their un-faded edges, indexing decades of sun exposure—turning time into subject, image into object.
A sense of human history and sensitivity to time comes from ritual, too, not just objects. In a video-installation around the corner from Albert’s photos, a procession carries bouquets down a desert road. To a dirge, they walk, they perform a ceremony, they lay on the earth. Mira Burack, the artist behind Sacred Bouquet (2021), intercut the scene with closeups of local insects and flora, elegantly conflating the cycles of nature with the repeated actions of ritual, and what each carries through time.
Mira Burack, Sacred Bouquet, 2021. Four-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
Almost like a ritual might carry something ancient, many objects in the show also combine and confound past and present, old and new, permanent and temporary, often through contemporary technology. Adam McKinney’s Shelter in Place (2021), for example, pairs augmented reality with tintypes, an early form of photography common in the nineteenth century. Viewing the antiquated scenes through a smartphone, their subject steps into the present. Other artists used 3D printing, like the artist duo Rael San Fratello, who used the process to make their Ombre Decanters. From an ash-colored base, each vessel blooms into such intricate geometry that they resemble something both computer-generated and artifactual. Brody Albert also used 3D printing in his series “We Buy Houses” (2021), in which he recreated weathered and discarded objects in wood. After balancing the objects on scaffolding and dyeing the entire structure the same color, the objects merge—precarious fuses into permanence, temporary becomes totemic.
Brody Albert, “We Buy Houses,” 2021. Dyed wood, 3D-printed wood filament, steel. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
The ways in which these works overlap and interact—which invite the viewer to simultaneously think of the past and the present passing of time—create some of the show’s most compelling effects. “We are all guests here” bends the arc of human history inward, allowing the viewer to commune with past generations, seemingly all at once. And as an awareness of the past and the passing of time grows, so does a commensurate awareness of impermanence, both as a matter of personal experience, and collective. In this context, the touch of past generations—through the long, branching, iteratively-twisted arms of ritual and tradition—feels increasingly like a comfort. Even as an atheist, I nonetheless felt the force of the religious tradition emanating from these works.
But there are no simple statements in this show. Even when it stirs compassion, it’s no feel-good or easy exhibition. Its response to Sukkot is challenging, and its focus on the sukkah, that emblem of shelter, is more contemplative and poetic than it is protective. For instance, sitting inside Rael San Fratello’s Sukkah of the Signs (2021), a temple-like structure shingled with the cardboard signs of the homeless, you can see its exposed construction and smell its freshly-cut lumber. But among the implied presence of the many without shelter, those percepts take on a darker note. Likewise, Adam McKinney’s Shelter in Place encircles its viewers with tintypes, swirling tree branches, floating video displays, and a dancing, augmented-reality apparition, but the space feels more haunted by its past: the sole black man in each tintype stands next to a cop car, gravestones, and a trailer with “cotton belt” emblazoned on it. The exhibition’s poignant socio-political commentary occasionally drifts into the unearthly, too. In Jenny Yurshansky’s We Are All Guests Here (2021), for example, its floating, latticed walls of glass embody the ethereality of a spiritual object, yet appear fragile and unwelcoming.
Adam W. McKinney, Shelter in Place, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
The show’s simultaneous contemplation of the past and the religious object is further complicated, subtly, by several works that turn attention inward—by how they confuse the object with what is seen through the object. In another piece by Yurshansky, Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory (Memoriam) (2015), a shadowy landscape droops from two nails. As the voile gently ripples, awareness shifts from the printed image to the object itself, conflating the object with the image “beyond” it. Brody Albert similarly flattens object and vision with his Untitled (2019) pieces, in which cyanotypes of tattered window screens are framed in indigo-dyed wood. Where one might expect to see through, there is only an opaque object. Similarly, in Cuarto de Estar (Living Room) (2021), Susy Bielak has replaced the mirrors in antique dressers with photo transfers. Where one might expect their own visage, there is only past.
Jenny Yurshansky, We are all guests here, 2021. Glass. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
While I love fine art—how it lets us explore human experience through combinations of what we already know—I often criticize it for being too insular, too self-referential. What enables “We are all guests here” to accomplish so much, and why it stands out in today’s art scene, is that it speaks through a visual language understood by more than just the art world. From deep within our lived experience, it can excavate something unusual and unfamiliar, yet still feel universal. “We are all guests here,” in the way it intones human vulnerability, echoes the shape of tradition, and loops time inward, works a spell that no studio dialect could. And maybe more importantly, it teaches us—attuned to its spell—all that we should listen for when we step back into the world.
“We are all guests here”
Curated by: Cara Megan Lewis, Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss, Vicki Phung Smith, and Michael Wright
September 3, 2021 – January 15, 2022
Bridge Projects
6820 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038 www.bridgeprojects.com
In a moment of acceleration and rapid climate change artists must ask what it means and entails to approach this moment—the Anthropocene—from the vantage point of art-making. How can artists recalibrate notions of art to respond to this new planetary epoch? And how can artists use the sites of art to imagine a new future? These questions have no defined answer, and many artists are finding new ways of exploring, investigating, and questioning the complexities of an ecology known or unknown to them. The wide range of exploration and recalibration in art-making is exemplified in Song of the Cicada at Honor Fraser Gallery, a group exhibition curated by Debra Scacco. The exhibition brings together all of the artists who have participated in Air Projects, a residency program founded in 2017 that supports artists who think strategically about climate and its implications environment and human interconnection.
The topic of humans and nature is far from new in the arts. In a way, art has always fundamentally been about relaying the human experience being in, and a part of, the environment as a living creature. It is often referred to as “eco-art” and “environmental art.” However, beginning in the 1960’s, many of the works were typically aesthetic interventions forced onto the environment by artists with little to no understanding of the geographical area in which they were working. Since then this genre of art-making has moved beyond context solely concerned with aesthetics and into an exchange with the environment itself.
Song of the Cicada is cleverly named after the Brood x Cicada that was hatched by the billions in 2021. Like the Cicada re-emerging after 17 years underground, humans are at a moment of re-emergence after a year of isolation. Motivated by a sense of urgency and care, the artists in this exhibition probe how we might move forward, imagining what the future might look like by questioning our purpose and interactions. And with Scacco’s curation, Song of the Cicada explores the depth and complexity of our relationship to nature in the Anthropocene.
Joel Garcia, polymorphic light eruption, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.
Polymorphic Light Eruption by Joel Garcia, for example, focuses on the capitalist abuse of land, which impacts Native Culture on a consistent basis. This work takes as its subject the poaching of sage from Native cultures by wellness industries, and how that demand has caused poaching problems on California public lands. When that happens, the sage is confiscated and redistributed to a number of community leaders of various tribes. Garcia’s piece is an isolated representation of one of the duffle bags that contain 100 pounds of unusable poached white sage. Set against the backdrop of the gallery’s white wall, the duffle bag becomes a symbol of appropriation and colonization.
iris yirei hu, Jorge Expinosa and Megan Dorame, Pakook koy Peshaax (The Sun Enters the Earth and Leaves the Earth), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.
Iris Yirei’s works focus on our relationship with land and how to be in consonance with living systems. Pakook toy Peshaax (The Sun Enters the Earth and Leaves the Earth) is one such work. Pakook toy Peshaax, which was a collaboration with Tongva community leader, Julia Bogany, and Tongva poet, Megan Dorame, and was originally shown as a functioning sundial at LA State Historic Park, considers the life cycle and rehabilitation of raw materials. Through Native symbols, eclectic colors and expressive brushwork, it harmonizes chaos, and merges past and present. It leaves one asking, “where do I lie in this cycle?”
Rebecca Bruno, Procession Relic, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.
Rebecca Bruno’s piece, Procession Relic, documents a performance she originally exhibited at the Bootleg Theatre during her residency with Air Projects. While its content does not directly point toward nature or landscape like the other works in Song of the Cicada, it nonetheless embodies nature through the passing of time. Procession Relic is an extraordinary performance, inspired by permaculture, wherein dancers move in and through layers of color, which transition as though signifying the passing of seasons. Its composition is a harmonious push and pull; a return to earth.
Britt Ransom, Singers of the Song that Sleeps Underground, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.
Almost contrary to Bruno’s piece, Brit Ransom’s Parallel Paths adopts a more clinical approach and aesthetic. Using 3D-printing, Ransom addresses the rapid rise of bark beetles and their devastating influence over California wildfires. Parallel Paths features an arrangement of 3D-printed branches, made to scale and in transparent material, that expose the paths of these beetles. But the intricate tunnels depicted seemingly resemble freeways, street patterns, and complex grids, illuminating our own invasive interventions on the environment. Parallel Paths begs the question: maybe we are the biggest pests of all.
Moving beyond strictly aesthetic concerns to an exchange with the environment itself, Song of the Cicada is not only an exhibition about conscious reemergence, but it also marks a new kind of art-making, one less concerned solely with aesthetics and more focused on the role and function of aesthetics within our living ecosystems.
“Song of the Cicada”
Curated by: Debra Scacco
July 17, 2021 — August 28, 2021
Honor Fraser
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
For more information about Air Projects, Visit AirProjects.Art, follow @Airprojects.Art or get in touch at Hello@AirProjects.Art
Perhaps it’s by default, reverence, or sentiment that we think of the progenitors of an art movement as having more difficult challenges than those who maintain it. But artists in the lineage of painterly abstraction increasingly face a new kind of problem, which verges on paradoxical: how does an artist advance an aesthetic when the features that defined it are now the very features that make it unimaginative? Artists are almost obligated to make moves that have been drained of vitality and meaning from decades of overuse. The answer is hard to know until you see it, which is why I’ve been following Los Angeles artist Maysha Mohamedi for several years, and why her first solo show at Parrasch Heijnen, Sacred Witness Sacred Menace, deserves attention.
Maysha Mohamedi, Left Hand Lucky Hand, 2021. 81 x 99 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.
Mohamedi’s faculty for mark-making is just one reason. Bringing an image into existence, and recording the instant it happens, has a certain wonder to it, and it’s part of what made painterly abstraction appealing. But that wonder often degenerates to self-absorption and has attracted a chorus of painters with the same exhausted and one-dimensional mark. Mohamedi’s marks, though, feel ambiguous and complex; sometimes they feel more like symbols or objects, sometimes both. They function like Cy Twombly’s part-mark, part-language, but in more directions. Sometimes, they even drift away from recording the movement of her hand. Her marks do what abstract painting is uniquely suited to do: refer to the real world without representing it; invite sense-making while withholding certainty. The viewer can phase through feelings and associations without ever knowing what they’re looking at.
Maysha Mohamedi, Aloe Cuts, 2021. 83 x 73 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.
Mohamedi often uses pairs or sequences of incrementally changing marks (or quasi-symbols) to reveal the part of the painting process that’s not on the canvas. By placing nearly identical marks next to each other, Mohamedi places attention on the slight deviations—what’s happening in between the marks. The physical mark still captures something immediate and intimate about the act of creating it, but the implicit is just as present.
Maysha Mohamedi, Cool Dreams Dropped Into Your Hearts, 2021. 81 x 99 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.
One thing that struck me about the works of Sacred Witness Sacred Menace was how Mohamedi took these qualities—which seem inherent and idiosyncratic to small-scale marks—and extrapolated them to large-scale compositional elements. In Cool Dreams Dropped Into Your Heart (all works 2021), for example, many of the solid-shaped elements have features within them that vaguely repeat and, as a whole, those elements vaguely mimic others in the painting. They also take on small-scale qualities because their edges seem carved from quick movements, like handwriting or sketching, even though they’re large and created slowly by filling in the shape with paint. And the fact that the large elements share certain qualities with smaller marks and sequences conflates the experience of each. The way the mind interprets smaller marks changes how larger elements are interpreted.
Maysha Mohamedi, Accrued Merccy, 2021. 83 x 73 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.
Mohamedi has also subtly worked body movement into these paintings. Most of her compositions hang on a scaffolding of long, thin lines and wide arcs, almost like a wireframe Motherwell. It might be hard to sense by looking at these large paintings on a screen, but when standing in front of them, the scale and quality of those lines and arcs imply a sense of body movement, especially when they swoop, repeat, or span the entire canvas.
But it’s not body movement in the traditional sense. Normally, with large-scale records of movement like this, the expectation is thick and painterly marks, or fast and continuous movement, or even lines that record the breath or wavering of the artist’s hand. Mohamedi’s lines, though, are wiry and segmented, patched together from small applications of paint, which, after they’re added up, suggest a larger gestural move. There’s only a phantom physicality, a schematic of movement without all of the usual seriousness and self-importance of huge gestural marks.
In the paintings of Sacred Witness Sacred Menace, Mohamedi has harmonized that “phantom physicality” with the small-scale sequences and other repeating elements. She’s conducted what would otherwise be cacophony of sketch marks into a ragged musicality; a scratchy galloping of unraveling rhythms, a tumbling of intimate moments.
Whereas the forebears of painterly abstraction might have sought a more uniform aesthetic, or a purer visual language (in this case, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner come to mind), Mohamedi can achieve more complicated effects like this because of her decision (and ability) to devise and orchestrate disparate elements. Features of one element warp the experience of another, and the painting becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Maysha Mohamedi, Honey Vertigo, 2021. 99 x 81 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.
Sacred Witness Sacred Menace also raises the question of how far an artist can move away from some of a tradition’s inherent qualities while remaining a part of that tradition. One of those inherent qualities, for instance, is the painting being a record of its creation. Many aspects of Mohamedi’s paintings refer to it: brush marks are left as-is; lines have a sketchy quality; underlying pencil marks and canvas remain exposed; solid features are sometimes only partially painted; repeated elements suggest time; and primary colors suggest nascence. But she does not always leave these features in their raw or immediate state. For example, she will trace over pencil marks with a thin line of paint, removing the original quality of the pencil mark. Or she will paint over canvas with a flat, near-canvas color. Even her marks sometimes mask the trace of her hand. With moves like this, Mohamedi simultaneously denatures and exalts features of the painting, maybe even the process of painting itself. She takes the principle of “to observe something is to change it” and applies it to the standardized moves of painterly abstraction.
This exalt/denature move, and others like it, risk creating flat and texture-less images instead of something that can only be made with paint, but they’re necessary if an artist wants to advance the aesthetic, further our understanding of painting, or renew our experience of it. Mohamedi, with her phantom physicality and denatured marks, guides us through an uncanny valley of painterly abstraction, but the risks pay off.
Desert X is an exhibition that exists in two modalities. One is in the physical world – the actual sites of the work scattered throughout the Coachella Valley The other is the virtual world of media – both that produced by Desert X, and the ad-hoc user-generated documentation via social media. After a year of existing primarily in the virtual world of online shows and artist talks via Zoom, the virtual mode does not feel as ancillary as it may have in years past.
I’ve come late to Desert X, partly by design. As someone who has recently taken to putting art outdoors, I wanted to see how the pieces were holding up. How they were doing, now that their work was almost done.[1] This is what’s exciting about art displayed in this way. The elements act upon the work over time, and no two visits to the work are ever the same. No track lighting, no climate control, the work lives and breathes outdoors the way it can’t in a museum, and It’s easy to oversimplify and consider the desert as a “blank canvas,” but the works this year (at least the ones I want to highlight in this writing) resist the temptation, and are site-specific in a way that is refreshing. The desert in this year’s show is a site where people live, where history has happened, that is connected in many ways to other deserts around the world.
It’s also late in the day as I make the short hike to Zahrah Alghamdi’s What Lies Behind the Walls. The sun casts longer and longer shadows, before they evaporate altogether as the sun dips behind the mountains, and will eventually leave me and the work in that still bright but directionless light that exists before actual sunset, but after the sun has disappeared.
Alghamdi’s piece is in part about human connection, though at the moment I find myself alone with it, and am grateful for that. I play in the long shadow cast by the wall (that calls to mind perhaps ironically the border wall prototypes of the Trump era). From one side, its lit side, the piece is very imagistic in nature. Layer upon layer of undulating material make up this monolith, all in hues of reddish-brown interspersed with grey-green. It both melds with and stands apart from the landscape, it is a paradox –– a concrete abstraction.
From the shadow side, the piece becomes more architectural, juxtaposed with the developed area surrounding it. Moving from one side of the wall to another is a key part of answering the question posed by the title. The scale of the wall – tall, but easy enough to walk around, suggests that the landscape is big enough so that any barriers are, ultimately, circumventable. We don’t need to fly, only to be willing to walk far enough.
As Zahrah Alghamdi’s work connects one desert with another, so does The Wishing Well, an extension of Serge Attukwei Clottey’s on-going Yellow Brick Road project. Clottey’s installation comprises two large cubes connected by a walkway, all covered with a mosaic of yellow plastic squares. The squares are from cooking oil jugs introduced to the artist’s native Ghana by Europeans for transporting cooking oil. That the jugs were largely repurposed to carry water suggests a shared fate between the two locales. Indeed, this connection struck a little too close to home for its initial intended locale, the city of Coachella in the eastern part of the Coachella Valley.
The piece sits in a park on the northern edge of Palm Springs, a location chosen after the city of Coachella denied the permit to stage the work within their municipality. This was due to concerns that Clottey’s work and the issues of water usage were deemed too sensitive and exploitative of the water issues in the eastern part of the valley. Perhaps the community is being too sensitive, and perhaps Desert X, as an organization, didn’t do enough outreach. An article from the Desert Sun can be found here.
The park is one of the few grassy spots I encounter on the trip. Grass has begun to grow out from in between the squares, in contrast to the unbroken yellow sheet portrayed in the official images. The cubes in this way take on a different meaning in this sense – they are the protectors of some measure of grass, as the area immediately surrounding the installation has been worn bare by foot traffic.
Alicja Kwade’s ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds) is another work that juxtaposes the architectural with the natural. Five interlocking steel frames of various sizes cradle 4 chunks of marble. The frames are not aligned around any particular center (perhaps thence the title – “near the pivot”?) The predictable perspective shift of a rectangular frame takes on a musical quality due to their varying sizes and asymmetrical interlocking. The positioning of the marble blocks feels more and less stable as one views it from different angles. From one angle, a chunk of marble feels secure, resting soundly on its steel support, but from a quarter turn around the piece, it appears ready to fall out at any moment. The piece has rhythm, it has contrast, and it does suggest a delicately balanced ecosystem.
Desert X is a festival that exists as much online in media as it does in its actual locations. This isn’t really a criticism, as our (almost) post-pandemic world has learned virtual existence is perhaps on par in importance with our physical one. The photos, videos, and other forms of documentation become a necessary part of the works, and some works can’t be fully appreciated or experienced without the images. One such example is Ghada Amer’s Women’s Qualities, with words drawn from the community to reflect femininity “planted” in the ground with native flora growing from them. It’s a very subtle piece – Amer makes no discernible comment on the words chosen, but simply roots them in the community from which they sprung (no puns intended). The words face the sky, and while legible from the ground, it is only in the overhead drone shots that the full composition is perceivable. Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger is similar in this regard; the stark triangle only becomes apparent at altitude; the shape’s wayfinding clarity contrasts with the disorienting experience of walking through the piece.
Xaviera Simmons’ Because Ultimately You Know We Will Band A Militia is another such piece, but for a different set of circumstances. As a series of billboards situated along the Gene Autry Trail in the northeast corner of Palm Springs, one is drawn through the exhibition space at the speed of traffic. Her work is arresting, but one is not able to stop and contemplate the words: “Rupture your guilt amnesia.” “You are now entering the reparations framework.” Some of the messages are at least perceivable from a passing car. Some – “You keep our most brilliant minds in a perpetual loop of articulating and translating the ramifications of your systemic generational plunder” – arre not. It uses the billboard as a familiar, comfortable form of communication, while simultaneously subverting our ability to perceive it in an instant and move on. The words are sticky, like burs one might pick up hiking through the desert. They grab hold of any fabric, and it’s only once one reaches the destination that one is able to unpack them.
In a conversation with Zahrah Alghamdi, Simmons says we “have to get comfortable with some of the language that lets the country understand itself.” The tendency to diminish the country’s racist legacy, and this I think echoes her response to many critics’ take on the 2019 Venice Biennale as not “radical” enough. This language shouldn’t be radical, it should be as commonplace as a Big Mac on a billboard. We should be as comfortable talking about abolition and reparations as we are about real estate and accident lawyers.
Nicholas Galanin’s Never Forget is another work that is initially encountered by car. It, too, is arresting. As I see it from the car approaching the stoplight at N. Palm Canyon from Gateway Dr., encountering the piece makes me catch my breath. It’s startling to encounter, and the piece is one that works as a grand gesture – with any foreknowledge of the Hollywood sign and the relationship of Palm Springs to the entertainment industry, the meaning of the piece is immediately clear. It works immediately, and is open to other interpretations and connections that never stray from the work’s original intent.
The piece is a call to action for the Landback Movement (you can contribute to the GoFundMe here), and points to the history of the development of Hollywood as initially a whites-only development on stolen land. He speaks more on this in this video, and for further reading David Treuer’s recent article in The Atlantic is well worth a read.
My last stop is Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger. I don’t have a timed entry ticket, and it’s 8 am, before any of the ticketed times anyway. However, the piece is open and accessible, and I once again have the art to myself. I walk amongst the makeshift walls, made of panel of woven palm fibers, and the moment is a physical one. In the morning shade created by the walls, the panels creak. It’s timeless, and evocative of movement, and the experience is transported across deserts, and the mythologies of travel across deserts that fill our history and mythologies. When I reach the central courtyard of the piece,the area is half in shadow. I step up on the steps, and feel the sun and hear the traffic and see the developed areas adjacent to the site. I’m firmly back in my own time. I leave the piece, taking a shortcut through a panel that has come detached at one corner from its support. The desert wind has gently worn this piece as well.
Jackrabbit Homestead is phenomenal. The installation as part of Desert X is a welcome addition, but alone doesn’t really do the whole project justice. Seeing her lovingly reconstructed Jackrabbit homestead with the images of the dilapidated ones she has photographed is quite an experience. You can (and should) view more of this project at Kim Stringfellow’s website – https://kimstringfellow.com/portfolio_page/jackrabbit-homestead/.
This project serves as a nice inversion to the physical/virtual relationship established in the other works. Stringfellow’s photography is a record of the effects of time on such a homestead, while the physical presence is the idealized version of its subject.
Time, and light. Wind, and temperature. Sound, and touch. To borrow from the title of a Rackstraw Downes essay and eponymous book, “nature and art are physical.” So is knowledge, and surely so is the desert. It’s good to be back out in the world.
[1] Though the exhibition is officially over, several of the works remain on display for a few more weeks. Check the website for details.
Each of the five exhibitions currently on view at the California African American Museum (CAAM, www.caamuseum.org) stands on its own, but it is the sum total that makes the trip to Exposition Park worthwhile. On the whole, it’s intellectually, emotionally, historically, and contemporarily engaging. There’s a lot to see, but it’s digestible and not as overwhelming as some of the big-ticket museums in town. The fall offerings at CAAM find a balance between the “history” function of a museum and the “art” side of it. Art without history has no context, and history without art lacks emotion.
*The Notion of Family* traces African-American identity as defined through notions of family over generations. It has context and feeling. The exhibition features a number of artists and a variety of works, from historical documents, to documentary art, to art. A number of Gordon Park’s photographs from the mid-twentieth century complement documentary photos by Tracy Brown from the beginning of this one. William E. Pajaud has a couple of powerful monochromatic lithographs, while the serigraphs of Faith Ringgold explode with color and community. Kadir Nelson’s large oil painting *Stickballers* (2016) is a tense, cinematic scene of early nineteenth century children playing in the street. The vivid complementary reds and cyans bring an immediacy to the nostalgic scene.
It is unbelievable to think that we once had slaves in this country, that is of course until one looks around and sees its legacy alive today. *California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier 1848-1865* engages with the subject of California’s involvement in slavery; first enforcing, later rejecting the Fugitive Slave Law. *Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963* documents a moment in the Civil Rights movement when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of 40,000 at Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field (yes, we had a Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles – it was torn down in 1969). Both exhibitions were curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates (History Curator and Program Manager) and Taylor Bythewood-Porter (Assistant History Curator).
Nina Chanel Abney’s paintings are at their strongest when didactic, such as *Untitled (XXXXXX)* and *Untitled *, which reverse the typical power dynamic of white cop/black man. They’re at the most interesting when that same visual vocabulary is applied in less straightforward ways. The colors and repeated shapes evoke a system of communication, but one that is not predetermined. In this, one sees her inspiration from emoji. Pictographs that are meant to communicate, but in open-ended and combinatorial ways. She applies bold, supersaturated colors in solid fields. Like any good story, the full effect of each piece unfolds over time. Layers of reference from pop culture, the news, Internet terminology, cartoons, and scenes of racial inequity vibrate next to each other as do her impeccably selected hues. Abney’s paintings all seem just about to get out of hand, but a deft sense of humor keeps it all together. The pieces create this layering effect similar to having multiple screens and windows open at any one time: syntax gets jumbled, letters become shapes become colors, and yet something coherent still manages to come forth.
Layers of history, personal reference, and spiritual symbolism permeate the works of Robert Pruitt. Like Abney, he’s a figurative painter as well. But whereas Abney’s figures are highly chromatic, graphically abstracted, mediated figures — Pruitt’s large-scale figures rendered in charcoal, conté, and coffee are immediate, and evoke empathy and emotion. The title of the show is *Devotion*, and religious practices is a recurring theme in the work. In Pruitt’s world, the spiritual is omnipresent. *I turned myself into myself* depicts a woman in repose, her face glowing with what appears to be a heavenly, blue light. The light actually is emanating from a clip-on reading light, clipped into her own hair. A page from a Silver Surfer comic depicting that character’s origin suggest that spiritual revelation can com from the most unlikely of sources. There’s also a strain of techno-optimistic Afro-futurism within the work, embodied by a piece title *Archangel*, which depicts a drone carrying, among other things, a shirt with the words “I can’t breathe” emblazoned on it. The piece suggests the power of inverse surveillance, or sousveillance, may have for correcting injustices visited upon the black community by the criminal justice system. This piece sits directly across the gallery from John Thomas Riddle Jr.’s 1973 mixed-media assemblage *Pieces at Hand, Spirit versus Technology Series*, which also suggests a link between technology and spirituality. Mar Hollingsworth, curator of the exhibition, points out that Pruitt selected certain artifacts and pieces from CAAM’s collection to supplement the work (among them a John Outterbridge sculpture, two John Biggers lithographs, a headdress from the Yoruba of Nigeria, and a wig belonging to Ella Fitzgerald). This combination of museum artifacts and art pieces remind the viewer that art is never divorced from the culture and history that give rise to it. Still, the real stars of the show are the figures themselves. There’s a real sense of individuality – highly specific and yet fir The drawings are layered, figures rendered in charcoal on coffee ground, adorned with clothing and other accoutrement rendered in rich red conté. Though rendered in humble materials, the figures carry themselves and hold the page with a regal elegance. Pruitt is a superb draughtsman, able to capture gestures that are but tics, a fleeting glance, a loaded exhale. The figures flit between poised concealment and spontaneous revelation.
*Robert Pruitt: Devotion* is on view through February 17, 2019. *Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush* is up until January 20, 2019; and *California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848-1865* comes down the day after. *Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963* and *The Notion of Family* are both on display until March 3, 2019. Admission to the museum is free, and CAAM is located in Exposition Park, Los Angeles.
Memory, nostalgia, duration, rhythm, repetition — time. A Journey That Wasn’t purports to show works of contemporary art that “[consider] complex representations of time.” It’s a pretty open brief, but one that allows for an unexpected and playful grouping of works from in and around the vast Broad collection. I’ve been a couple of times now, including once with a group of my film students. It’s an exhibition deserving of repeat visits.
A series of trompe l’oeil paintings by Ed Ruscha are the first to greet the viewer. The diptych Azteca/Azteca in Decline (2007) sets up one of the show’s primary themes — decay. Three smaller paintings, Atlas, Index, and Bible (all 2002) suggest a guidebook of some kind, but give only the exquisitely painted surface of such on raw linen.
Seated Woman (1999-2000), a life-like, but not life-size, old woman by Ron Mueck sits contemplatively next to the fireplace of Toba Kheedori’s wall-sized Untitled (Black Fireplace) (2006). The woman is small against the vast white wall, and there is a tension between her size and her level of detail, a tension reflected in the foreboding black surrounding the warm fireplace.
The docent was discussing Mueck’s sculpture with my students, and it’s use of scale as a perceptual point of friction. She went on to expound upon another phenomenon of the work that only becomes apparent in the photographing of it. When photographing the sculpture in profile, another person can stand just beyond the woman, and in the resulting photograph (due to the camera’s flattening of depth) the woman appears to be life-size. However, in shooting the same subject, this time with the person on the same plane as the sculpture, her true small scale is revealed.
To a group of film students, this was an interesting aside, but not a revelation. We’re all familiar with the technique of forced perspective; the cinema has been making small things appear larger than they are since the beginning. What was striking about this demonstration is that it called attention to the realtionship of photographic (or at least photorealistic) representation to the work in the exhibition. Perhaps it is an assumption taken for granted that in representing time in the ways the exhibition does, concrete objects are necessary. We can consider the effects of time on things more easily than we can as an abstract phenomenon. Aging and decay are processes that act on people and things. And much of the subjects represented are indeed humans, which are, to use Heidegger’s term, beings-in-time. That is, to be human is to experience time. We have memories of things past, an awareness of the aging and death that awaits us, and in between a slippery conception of the present, of time to be spent, used, wasted, etc. Photography and cinematography both have direct, formal relationships to time, and so it is fitting that much of the work falls into these categories.
Andreas Gursky’s F1 Boxenstopp series is on display. The large-sized frozen moments of Formula One pit crews have all the drama and visual density of a high Renaissance tableau, while strong horizontal lines and symmetry provide visual stability in the works. Elsewhere, the black and white Water Towers (1972) series from his teachers, Berne and Hilla Becher, share a room with Gregory Crewdson’s (also black and white) photographs of Rome’s derelict Cinecittà Studios from 2009. Seeing the site of cinematic production in decay through the lens of an artist who uses the tools of cinema to evoke scenes of suburban decay. It’s an interesting inversion of his conventional oeuvre (I’m thinking here of his Hover series, which is also black and white, and his Twilight and Dream House series), like flipping the card over and seeing the other side of an artist’s work, or like some perverse making-of featurette.
The eponymous Pierre Huyghe film, A Journey That Wasn’t (2006) operates with its own internal inversion. The film is part documentary, part operatic performance of light and music, intercutting Huyghe’s journey to Antarctica in search of an albino penguin with a staged recreation of that journey on an ice rink in Central Park. Slow, undulating icescapes in washed out blue contrast with pulsating tungsten stage lighting in Central Park. The cold, misty Antarctic is replaced in its recreation with fog machines pumping out atmosphere. In Antarctica, the camera does find the elusive penguin, whereas in Central Park an animatronic version of same is presented exclusively in silhouette. Viewing the actual event with the dramatized memory of it juxtaposed in real time suggests that perhaps reality, or the human experience of it, resides in the mediating of an experience – a necessary precondition for the sharing of an experience. The story behind the piece is that during the course of this journey, Huyghe was able to encounter lands previously inaccessible due to the ravages of climate change. In this way, the journey that was planned is perhaps the titular “journey that wasn’t,” and the journey as staged in Central Park is also clearly not the journey that happened.
In cinema, the camera is always encountering its subject – whether that subject is sought out by the operator documentary style, or whether it is placed deliberately in the lens’ field of view. There is a phenomenological cohesion between the shots of the actual journey to the Antarctic and the staged recreation in Central Park (simply put, they’re both sets of filmed images, and the camera never questions the veracity of what it captures). In a work that questions where the reality of the journey lies (what was the journey?), its filmic presentation provides some clues. The heat, the fog, the smoke in the Central Park recreation say something about climate change that the mute Antarctic landscape cannot. However, the documentary evidence of the voyage is as important to the meaning of the work as is the emotionally inflected restating, as the film is a response to a very real encounter with the effects of climate change.
Reality necessitates fiction in its expression, documentation requires imagination in (re)presentation. This juxtaposition between documented reality and recreated memory also serves as brackets for the rest of the exhibition.
If A Journey That Wasn’t offers a juxtaposition between the filmed reality and the cinematic presentation, then Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) creates a unified transformation of one space into another. Specifically, a farm house in disrepair is transformed into the installation comprising nine high-definition projections, each with its own audio feed. The tableau include musicians with their instruments in various rooms of the Rokeby farm house in upstate New York. The musicians all wear headphones, and are all contained within the bounds of a frame (though one or two may break those edges at various times), thus isolating themselves from each other visually, but united aurally. The ensemble all play the same song, drifting in and out of unison, building and releasing intensity over the course of roughly one hour.
“There are stars exploding around you,” begins one line of the song.
The view within each frame does not move. The subjects inside do, minimally. They smoke, they fidget, they sing, they play an instrument. Space is evoked via sound, and the viewer is compelled to move amid the silence by its call. The viewer can consider each individual (though some frames are occupied by more than one subject), but never outside of the context of the rest of the set. Any “lessons” drawn from the piece feel too simplistic to articulate — it’s a complex emotional experience of the conflation of aloneness and togetherness that one must feel for herself.
“And there’s nothing, nothing you can do,” it continues.
Maybe the cinematic subject is always a tragic subject — its fate always already sealed. Once an event is captured on camera, it always unfolds in a way that is phenomenologically real, yet already predetermined. The piece is movingly sad and exuberantly joyful. The imagery is very nice, but it is the three-dimensional experience of the music, the unexpected voice rising above the others from the other side of the installation, that gives the piece its emotional impact. But, like most of the works in the exhibition, that impact unfolds slowly over time.
What you can do is visit the exhibition — it’s up until early February 2019 — and give yourself plenty of time when you do. There is much more to see than mentioned here, including Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat Portrait Studio Series (which also occasions a screening of the documentary film in October at REDCAT in conjunction with the exhibition), and works by Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, and more — over 20 in total.
General admission to the Broad is free, advanced reservations are recommended. www.thebroad.org
The space is cavernous. The machinations at work creating the abstract play of light, shadow, and geometric shapes on the enormous floor-to-ceiling screen on the opposite end of the room are not readily apparent. The sound betrays only the occasional hint of having been designed – a chorus of construction sounds, piano strings, ratchets, and ambient noise that feels natural to the space. The initial experience of the room is overwhelming, the body dwarfed by this gigantic presentation of light and sound.
This is Olafur Eliasson’s Reality projector.
There are a few benches at the back of the room, I sit for a moment. The view from here is cinematic – a screen in front, a darkened room, an overwhelming audio/visual presentation. The “subject matter” is reminiscent of the avant-garde, I’m reminded of the architecture of Shirley Clarke’s “Bridges Go Round” (1958), and the non-representational cinema of Stan Brakhage, Pat O’Neill, or Harry Smith. The shapes onscreen are triangular, sliding and shifting across the screen, separated by thick black lines at right angles and 45° angles. Primary reds, greens, and blues lay across yellow, cyan, and magenta shapes on screen. It is primary in its entirety – the primary colors of cinema, and the primary elements of light, shadow, space, and movement. The piece relies on a Modernist sense or reduction – only the most essential elements are used. And the piece is compelling, and as a work of cinema it is interesting and beautiful.
But this is not a work of cinema.
It is an installation, it is sculpture. As one’s eyes adjust to the dark, and wander as they do, I see other people in the space. In fact, the silhouettes of other audience members walking across the floor seem an integral part of the piece. The piece does not, as cinema does, create a diagetic world just on the other side of the of the flashing images, forever out of reach. Reality projectorcreates a world within the space. Where cinema promotes seated disembodiment, this installation invites the body to be active within its bounds. Some people sit, some move continuously. A boy with blinking lights on his sneakers seems an apt visitor, adding an element of chance to the experience. People enter and exit without interrupting any kind of narrative flow. I spend a good half an hour in there, and have no sense of any kind of looping or pattern repeating itself.
Where cinema hides its artifice, Reality projector exposes its machinations freely. Looking up, one can see the trusses lit in the same colors as the screen, and looking toward the back of the room two bright stage lights moving laterally on a track. These lights project white light through colored filters (as would be used in theater lighting) to create the effects onscreen. It is deceptively simple – these shapes on screen are simply projections of the already existing architecture. We are treated to an up-close view of the irregularly textured surfaces of the beams’ insulation vis-a-vis the two projecting lights. The idea of the ancient Greeks’, that visions occurs via light projected from the eye, rather than light receiving reflected light, crosses my mind. Plato’s Cave does as well, and like any good metaphor Reality projector trades being accurate for being instructive. The most salient aspect of the metaphor is that the viewer is able to negotiate her own experience, her own relationship, to the piece, much like we do with reality. What is important here is not the physical circumstances that make it up, but our relationship to that set of circumstances.
Reality projector is on view at the Marciano Art Foundation now until August 26, 2018.
marcianoartfoundation.org for tickets and more info.
