Artillery Magazine

Byline: Jody Zellen

  • Uta Barth 1301PE

    Uta Barth
    1301PE

    As part of her career-spanning 2022–23 survey, “Peripheral Vision” at the Getty, and in honor of the museum’s 20th anniversary, the German-American photographer Uta Barth presented an expansive commission entitled “…from dawn to dusk” (2022). Twice a month for a year, the artist visited the Getty to photograph the entrance to its auditorium, making an exposure every five minutes from sunrise to sunset. The resulting series of square-formatted photographs, extended as grids across multiple walls and enveloped the gallery. For the project’s February section, Barth also included a subtle time-lapse video that documented the transitions on the facade. This show at 1301PE highlighted three months—November, December and February—of the project. Even excerpted from their original context, they evidenced the precision of Barth’s observations, becoming an evocative meditation on the relationships between light, color and architecture.

    The grid formation of “…from dawn to dusk” formally parallels the square blocks of Getty architect Richard Meier’s design for the compound’s facade. In this work, Barth continuously transforms the same square image by presenting it in different sizes and with different emphases such that the overall piece explores ideas of absence and presence, as indicated by the ever-changing fluctuations of light and shadow.  

    Uta Barth, Untitled #12, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

    In the upstairs gallery was a display of new depictions of the front of the auditorium, installed across numerous walls with their top edges aligned. Here, Barth was coy and playful, unabashed in foregrounding her blatant image manipulations. For example, in Untitled #4 (all 2024) a bright white circle covers most of the image, allowing only the dark lines of the architecture to show through, making the work more about this strange, foreign shape than the setting. In the approximately 10 x 10 inch vertically hung diptych Untitled #10, an orange extension cord occupies the lower portion of the top image. In the bottom image, the extension cord remains, now surrounded by a darker orange that completely obscures the building. In Untitled #9, the site’s architecture is viewed through a blurred quasi-transparent screen that resembles a chain-link fence. It becomes a study of depth and spatial illusions. The two images that include Untitled #7 are presented side by side. One appears to be a solarized night view and is deep blue; the other is an abstracted blur of the building that reduces it to areas of color: white-gray in the middle, blue on the left and a light orange yellow at the top right. It is almost as if what appears on the right is what one sees when squinting at the image on the left.

    In these pieces, the emphasis is not on the individual picture, but on the myriad ways it can be transformed and what those transformations imply about the difference between what the eye sees and how the camera records. Barth goes beyond the act of looking by manipulating the visual cues (the passage of the sun and its shadow) by which we map our days: She draws our attention to the subjective nature of our own passage through time and space, contingent on our perception of it. 

  • pascALEjandro Blum

    pascALEjandro
    Blum

    The nonagenarian artist Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known as a filmmaker, while his wife, the 40-something Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, works as a painter, photographer and designer. Together, they operate under the name pascALEjandro, fusing their names as well as their sensibilities to create colorful works on paper they cumulatively refer to as a “spiritual child born of love.” In these works, Pascale applies color to Alejandro’s illustrative lines. The 20-plus works gathered for this show create fantastical narratives when seen together. Many feature two characters—a male and a female—who traverse surreal settings. There are images of death and love, struggle and escape. As the duo states in the show’s press release, “Our working material is the material of our lives … pascALEjandro is the synthesis of two beings, who form alchemy’s androgynous union.”  

    In The Essential Point (2016), two figures float on their sides, hovering in a blue-green sky above a green hillside, their outstretched pink tongues meeting at “the essential point.” The woman’s arms have been replaced by  yellow-orange wings, which support her tent-like body while her long hair dangles limply below; her eyes and that of her partner, who wears a purple hat, are interlocked. In contrast to this beatific coupling, The Difficult Union (2021) depicts a barren desert landscape, in which a man and a woman push gray carts toward each other. One carries a giant orange hand, the other supports a hand that is yellow. The bare feet of both figures have been nailed to the ground, making movement of bodies and carts alike impossible. Yet it appears as though the hands join forces to assist them in some way, as the orange fist belonging to the woman clutches two fingers on the yellow hand emerging from the man’s cart. In this work, pascALEjandro tenderly probes the difficulties and complexities of partnership, and the importance of working together no matter what the situation. 

    pascALEjandro, The Essential Point, 2016. © pascALEjandro. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York.

    PascALEjandro Forever (2021) is a collage that features a black-and-white photograph of the couple hugging. The photo is encased in a drawn tombstone marker that emerges from a beehive populated by 3D facsimile bees that surround the couple in a light blue, cloud-filled sky. This work is hopeful as well as commemorative. It illustrates pascALEjandro’s enduring love, as well as their significant difference in age. This theme is revisited in March against Absence (2016), in which two figures battle a wind that causes buildings to tilt and wooden chairs to be tossed and turned in every direction. The man, a clown or jester, holds the hand of a younger masked girl with a red balloon, helping her navigate the elements. 

    The pictures were installed close together so that related images inform and create a quasi-narrative. While individual pieces stood out, the overarching feeling of love and connection, regardless of circumstance (be it prosaic, imagined or allegorical), shone through most brightly when they were taken as a whole. The works are delightful and enchanting, albeit also uncanny and strange as viewers tried to navigate the particular relationships between man and woman, demon and beast, and real and imagined worlds that are illustrated through exacting and confident lines.

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Karla Diaz 18th Street Arts

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Karla Diaz
    18th Street Arts

    Karla Diaz has been drawing since she was a child. The title of her current exhibition, “Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” is something her aunt would say to her when she would draw on the walls of the family home. Consisting of 37 paintings and works on paper that, when seen together, become a personal narrative about the many facets of Mexican American identity, Diaz combines figuration and abstraction to explore and revisit her memories of growing up in Los Angeles. In these compelling works—many of which have the feel of posters from the 1960s—Diaz paints flatly rendered portraits and figures into abstract landscapes and cityscapes. The pieces reference Mexican, as well as Mexican American, traditions, and depict intimate moments with family and friends. The watercolor and ink-on-paper pieces oscillate between vivid and muted tones, giving them a soft, dream-like quality.

    On the building’s exterior walls are five colorful, large-scale banners, each a self-portrait. One depicts Diaz as Frida Kahlo surrounded by a halo of red roses, while in another Diaz wears a bright blue eye patch. In Self Portrait with Raised Fist, Diaz holds a portrait of a male revolutionary in front of her face—his eyes obscured by dark sunglasses and his fist raised.

    Moving from outside to inside, the works become smaller yet have a similar impact. Installed in a line along the gallery walls, the images begin to tell a story that weaves through Diaz’s life and relationships to familiar locations, be it the 99 Cent store, a swap meet, a park or subway interior, or significant moments like when family members crossed the border. In one of the smaller spaces, Diaz presents an installation that pays tribute to the civil rights activist Rubén Salazar, who was murdered on August 29, 1970, the day of the National Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War. Diaz not only paints a watercolor of the Silver Dollar bar, the location of his murder in The Silver Dollar (2021), but she also includes a separate painting of his bloodied body in Rubén Salazar (2023).

    The backgrounds of Diaz’s works are a patchwork of splotches or loose gradients of bright color — pinks, oranges, greens, and yellows — that serve as a quirky and illustrative ground for her portraits and scenes. The figurative and narrative elements often merge with the background shapes and palette to create a layered effect that is more formal than content driven. Diaz’s drawn lines emerge from these color fields to depict people and places with admiration, wit and intensity. For example, in Dona Juana (2023), Diaz paints a woman in front of a stall holding a shoe in one hand and a cell phone with a portrait of a child as the background in the other. Her bright pink shirt is decorated with back-to-back exotic women with piled black hair, long eyelashes, and extended tongues. Dona Juana stares at the viewer and smiles.

    No Te Metas Con Mi Cucu (Don’t mess with my ass) (2022) is an image of protest. Assembled are women holding pro-choice signs in front of a courthouse juxtaposed with a colorful rendition of an older man, who resembles Huey Newton, wearing a suit and pink tie and seated in a chair. While Diaz allows the forms and figures to overlap, the focus of the image remains intact. Although That Fire (2021) is acrylic on canvas rather than watercolor on paper, the intensity of the moment is deftly portrayed as Diaz tenderly captures the agony and dismay on the woman’s face while flames engulf the building behind her.

    Diaz’s seductive images tell personal and universal stories. They are humble without being didactic, colorful, and to the point. The pieces are about domesticity and urban life while exploring how the two are intertwined. As a Mexican American, Diaz draws from her heritage and the world surrounding her. Her pieces fuse fact and fiction, dreams, and reality to create narratives about her experiences growing up and living in Los Angeles.

     

  • GALLERY ROUND: Pat Steir Hauser & Wirth

    GALLERY ROUND: Pat Steir
    Hauser & Wirth

    The point of departure for Pat Steir’s exhibition “Painted Rain” at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and the vivid colors of the sky and sea which were in sharp contrast to the muted tones of New York. This aura permeates her current paintings and, coincidently, the pieces (which feature driplike) also evoke the recent weather—the violent storms and torrential rains that have pounded the region this season.

    The background of All the Colors (all works 2022-23) is reminiscent of the azure essence of twilight just before night. The painting is divided into quarters by two white chalk lines that meet in the center of the canvas. Just above this intersection are six horizontal brush strokes that occupy the center and take command of the work. Orange, deep red, green, yellow red and light blue stand as elements of color in an otherwise barren ground. In Thin Air, she covers a cobalt background with textured layers that are a lighter tone of blue. Wide horizontal bands of red, white and yellow are painted just above the center and allowed to drip and meld together as they cascade down the length of the canvas toward the floor.

    While most of the paintings explore the relationship between striations of color against a range of blue backgrounds, Steir’s piece Green on Top covers a dark rust ground with overlapping stripes that trickle down to become veins of intermingling green, orange and dark red. In Some Blues, white lines divide a deep red background into a grid of rectangles. Toward the center of the work, are thirteen separate horizontal lines that transition from light to dark blue to create the illusion of a gradient. The works shows Steir’s exploration into the tensions between texture and color, as well as the playful relationships between foreground and background.

    As Steir’s new works are a celebration of the color blue it is somewhat ironic that eight years ago she was diagnosed with color blindness and learned she couldn’t see that hue. Nevertheless, Steir still mixes her paints to maximize the subtle differences of blue and, through an exploration of both gesture and chance, has created a powerful and emotionally complex body of work.

  • INFINITE VARIETY David Em Finds Endless Possibilities

    INFINITE VARIETY
    David Em Finds Endless Possibilities

    Digital art pioneer David Em, whose work has been published and exhibited internationally, was the first to make images with pixels at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1975. He then went on to build articulated 3D creatures with mainframes at the ­company Information International Incorporated in 1976. As an Artist-in-Residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1976 to 1988, he became the first ­artist to construct navigable virtual worlds, following that with another Artist-in-Residence at the California ­Institute of Technology from 1985 to 1988. Em’s recent creations engage with the ­myriad possibilities of AI. We first spoke in June 2023 about his history and relationship to technology. Inevitably, we arrived at AI and his recent forays into working with it. We continued the discussion in early January 2024.

    JODY ZELLEN: Tell us a little about your -involvement with AI.

    DAVID EM: The AI experience for me has been very much like working with a writing partner; I’m putting stuff out there, the system is responding to it, and the system does unexpected things I never would’ve come up with, just like when you’re working with someone in a creative way. And it’s changing things ­perspective-wise in any number of interesting ways. One of which is the way I look—not at the pictures—but at the process of looking at the pictures.

    How is working with AI and the incredible -number of “images” generated? Part of the art making process becomes about selection.

    With AI, I’m making more and more images I consider “not bad.” Images come quickly using AI—in literally a minute I’ll make a half-dozen variations on an interesting idea. At the end of a night, I’ll have 200 to 300 ­pictures to assess. The curating now becomes as important as the actual act of creation. The pacing of how I look at the pictures has changed as a result of that.

    David Em, “Kreaturae.” Courtesy of the artist.

    Could you share the process of creating your 2024 New Year’s card, as well as the surprises the AI generated from the elements you fed it?

    One subject I work with is fluid dynamics. By the time I generated the New Year’s card, I had a body of work with lizard people doing different things. I also had images of oceans and waves, so I put them together. I wanted the image to be celebratory, so I had them drinking champagne out of flutes. I probably made 40 images, of which I selected maybe number 25. The process is iterative and one thing leads to another; then it is about choice. But as you can see, the AI sometimes makes mistakes. “Happy” is spelled H-A-P-Y. I thought that was cool, but that isn’t what was supposed to ­happen. That was the AI. I’ve always loved accidents in art.

    For another series, I began with jaguars. I managed against the AI’s wishes to get the jaguars involved in a battle against each other. We haven’t gotten into that, but if you want to say what are the main things to talk about with AI right now, it’s that this is not an art tool. This is an interesting experiment because it will not allow me —without fooling it—to have anything to do with violence or nudity or affection. Those are off the table. Two of the artworks in museums and galleries that you see now can’t be created with the major AIs. They just won’t let you do that.

    Getting back to my jaguar picture, there are Mayan-looking temples in the jungle with a body of ­water between them, and coming out of the body of water is this crocodile-snake thing. I had asked the AI to put a couple of crocodiles in the scene, but I hadn’t asked it for the crocodile-snake combination. The AI created this surrealist creature­. I zeroed right in on that. Now I’m going down a path that was not predictable. That led me to make a series of pictures based on creatures that are mashes of other beings.

    AI is the tool I always wanted. Whether you’re ­doing things that are generative or that are more ­design-oriented, it’s work. To be able to say, “Make this happen, make that happen,” is very attractive to me. With the AI, I’m finding I can take still imagery to a whole new level and that is very satisfying. It’s basically infinite. There’s no end to how many things you can do.

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Louise Lawler Sprüth Magers

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Louise Lawler
    Sprüth Magers

    Since the early 1980s, Louise Lawler has been making photographic works that focus on the collection and presentation of fine art, and the various meanings of “in-situ.” Her early images were straightforward, black-and-white photographs that documented artworks in museums, auction houses and collector’s homes. Over time the photographs became larger and full of color and, eventually, she used digital tools to manipulate the images. With her work, Lawler creates social commentaries on the juxtapositions she frames, emphasizing the context and relationships between the items on display, as well as the infrastructure and curatorial practices of those exhibiting them.

    “GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS,” Lawler’s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers, begins outside the gallery with a quasi-generic sign placed among the building’s landscaping that reads “Louise Lawler / False Compensation / This Weekend.” The significance of this sign is obtuse until one sees the exhibition inside, which includes photographic works from three of Lawler’s series, “swiped,” “adjusted to fit,” and “traced,” respectively. To create the images that form “swiped,” Lawler moves the camera during long exposures to create a partial blur effect. The blur is unsettling and disorienting, especially when applied to well-known artworks. The piece 1994-N No.2 and One: Number 31, 1950 (swiped) (all works 2022/2023) features a double exposure of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31 hung on a wall adjacent to a semi-transparent and faded depiction of Clifford Still’s 1994-N No.2, both on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Similarly, The Palace at 4 a.m.(swiped) is a dark, blurry and shadowy photograph of a fragment of Alberto Giacometti’s iconic sculpture. In Lawler’s image, the blur makes the bird-like creature appear in motion as if taking flight.

    Louise Lawler, 1994-N No.2 and One: Number 31, 1950 (swiped), 2022-2023. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

    Covering several of the huge gallery walls are pieces from Lawler’s “adjusted to fit” series. For these works, Lawler instructed each exhibitor to digitally manipulate and re-scale the original images to match the width and height of a given wall. Works like Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Abraham (swiped) (adjusted to fit), and It Spins (adjusted to fit) are distorted beyond recognition and fused onto their respective walls.

    In the upstairs of the gallery, Lawler again presents large-scale images, those these are tracings of Lawler’s photographs which simplify the spaces and images contained within into lines. These tracings beg the question: what does a trace reveal or leave out? Moreover, why turn something seemingly objective into something subjective and gestural? Some of the works—like Damien Hirst’s severed goats in Dots and Slices (traced), Jeff Koon’s balloon dog in Egg and Gun (traced) and Felix Gonzales-Torres light bulbs in Bulbs (traced)— are easily identifiable and allow the viewer to imagine the original. That these works exist as digital files that can be scaled to any dimension is in keeping with the practices of numerous conceptual artists whose works are presented as instructions. (Congruent with Lawler’s practice of re-presenting and re-framing, twelve of her tracing images can be downloaded from MoMA’s website for children to color.)

    Although Lawler’s photographic practice appears straightforward, it is always changing as she continually devises new ways to manipulate her subjects. Lawler questions authorship by “swiping” work from others. While these works are not “false compensation” as the signage outside the gallery proclaims, they knowingly and slyly re-present the works of others to become evocative and telling documents of collections and exhibitions.

     

     

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Terri Friedman Shoshana Wayne Gallery

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Terri Friedman
    Shoshana Wayne Gallery

    Terri Friedman’s wonderful woven tapestries are on display in “tomorrow is just a thought,” the artist’s solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Friedman has been creating her “yarn paintings”—applying formal principals of color, shape, and texture to her compositions as if they were traditional “paintings”—for years, and her stunning installation showcases these works and a new series of woven “portraits” each titled after a different feeling or emotion. Her works respond to internal and external uncertainty, and she presents positive possibilities through bright colors, unusual materials, and open-ended, non-objective abstraction. While some of the compositions contain words, they are meant to be suggestive rather than didactic. Friedman’s visual emphasis on positive suggestions is indicative of her interest in neuroplasticity—the capacity humans have to reshape their brains toward a more optimistic outlook, which she cites as one of the motivating forces behind her endeavors.

    REFRESH (2022) is a large tapestry of undulating forms and shades that resemble a mountain landscape or seascape dotted with droplets that dangle above zig-zagged and cross-hatched lines. Woven areas of green, pink and purple overlap with one another beneath dark stitches that spell out the word “refresh.” The five-panel composition What can go right (2023) filled with floral imagery that is reminiscent of children’s renderings of gardens. Trees and flowers populate the mostly yellow-hued background filled with swirls, circles and triangles that recede into a distant landscape. The more abstract tapestry, Sometimes OK is good enough (2022), features eye-shaped ovals at the composition’s top, nested within which are the letters “O” and “K,” which exude an aura of positivity. Though busy and frenetic, the soft colors and suggestion of facial features offer a sense of calm and encouragement.

    Terri Friedman, Homesick, 2023. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

    In the back of the gallery are seven works by Friedman in which faces depicting “elevated states of emotion” fill the small tapestries. Though brightly colored, they are messy, confrontational and a bit disconcerting. In Whoa (2023), a deep purple background surrounds the lighter purple and green face of a man with black hair, magenta eyes and an open mouth. Outlined in yellow thread, the is actually a hole in the weave. To the right of the mouth is a stained glass inset in the shape of a tear that echoes the golden tears that fall from the figure’s eyes.  The tapestry Homesick (2023) exudes sadness. Here, Friedman weaves the head of a girl with black hair—a curl on one side and four different length dreadlocks on the other side of her face. Her open mouth shows her gritted teeth. She has one open blue eye with dark purple eyelids. The other, a weave of dark red and yellow threads, is vacant, held open by a vertical piece of stained glass that creates a void beyond it. The figure in Atonal (2023) spews multi-colored threads from their mouth that dangle at the right edge of the composition, whereas the two heads in Ditto (2023) are mirror images of each other. The space between their multi-colored and thickly textured faces is an abstract gradient filled with orange, pink and yellow.

    Though at first glance, Friedman’s tapestries appear unwieldy, they are thought-out compositions she finds calming to fashion. The tension between the process of making and viewing gives the works a commanding presence. They are colorful, gestural, soft, tactile, beautiful and disturbing all at once. They catch your eye and hold your gaze, engaging with the language of painting and textiles on complex and multiple levels.

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Julian Charrière Sean Kelly, Los Angeles

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Julian Charrière
    Sean Kelly, Los Angeles

    Julian Charrière is a Berlin-based artist whose work often focuses on nature, ecology and the changing climate. For his first Los Angeles exhibit at Sean Kelly, “Buried Sunshine”, Charrière was drawn to the subject of oil and researched the history and photographed the oil fields that dot the L.A. landscape. He has beautifully crafted these investigations into a seductive, mixed media installation that includes the spectacular video projection Controlled Burn (2022) and a new series of heliographs titled Buried Sunshines Burn.

    Controlled Burn is a 32-minute video that cycles through the sights and sounds of numerous implosions, flames and fireworks that fill the darkness of the night sky. Shot from above by drone, the footage documents ambiguous and quasi-military—yet now abandoned—spaces such as the cooling towers, rocket silos and oil platforms that are surrounded by ricocheting projectiles. Amidst thunderous roars, attentive viewers who look carefully may suddenly realize that what they are seeing is impossible and that Charrière is projecting the footage at varying speeds and often in reverse, making the footage bewildering. Amidst the beauty and the spectacle, there is an atmosphere of dread and foreboding intensified by the roars of the accompanying soundtrack.

    Along the walls in the darkened gallery space are heliographs (photographs on steel plates) of scenes shot on location around Los Angeles’ oil fields. These images are imprinted on high-polished stainless steel with light-sensitive emulsion that incorporates tar from the LaBrea, McKittrick and Carpinteria Tar Pits. Charrière traveled around the state to document local oil fields from above and presents them as subtle, reflective abstractions that need to be viewed in low light to see the nuances of the depictions. These heliographs hover between abstraction and representation, as well as art, history and science as Charrière considers Los Angeles’ dependency on oil and the city’s conflicting relationship with it, especially given increasing environmental concerns.

    As the title “Buried Sunshine” suggests, Charrière’s images do not depict sun-filled skies and receding horizons or colorful sunsets. Rather, he is interested in how cities like Los Angeles appear from above and investigates how the intricacies of the natural and man-made worlds intermingle. While amazingly beautiful and seductive, the photographs are about industrialization and the black fluids that travel beneath the earth’s surface. Coupled with Controlled Burn, the exhibition serves as a warning of an imagined apocalypse.

     

  • Deana Lawson David Kordansky Gallery

    Deana Lawson
    David Kordansky Gallery

    While Deana Lawson is known for her individual, staged photographs depicting  African-Americans communities in interior and exterior environs, she also conceptualizes the entirety of her presentations, which often include casual snapshots displayed as collages. In this exhibition, titled “Mind’s Eye,” the photograph Cardeidra (all works 2023), which depicts a topless woman seated on a couch giving the finger to the photographer, sets the series in motion.

    The central figure is joined by another woman who holds a sleeping child in her arms, but what stands out in the image is a mirror located in the back left corner of the room that captures the reflection of the photographer surrounded by a surprising flare of light. In her statement for the show, Lawson remarks that seeing the light reminded her of a dream of being in a plane that was suddenly surrounded by an ominous white light. Whether prophecy or coincidence, this dream almost became a reality two years later on a chartered flight to photograph Ivanpah—a solar farm in the Mojave Desert with 173,500 mirrors—as her plane was forced to make an emergency landing. Phantom reflections, fields of mirrors, appropriated snapshots and ancient statues—these connections pervade “Mind’s Eye.”

    Deana Lawson, Arethea, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.

    Lawson uses the gallery space as a stage. Not only does she frame each image with thin mirrors reminiscent of 1970s decor, an obvious reference to the Ivanpah site, but she also includes objects. For example, spread across the floor below the image Afriye is an array of small glass elephants. The photograph is intimate. The setting is a living room in which a young girl with an ornate hairdo, wearing a frilly white lace dress, stands on an ottoman holding her mother’s hand. Dressed in black, the mother sits calmly on a couch. Both stare at what one assumes is the photographer. The background includes a Tiffany-like lamp, as well as a framed image of a white flower. A styrofoam container of leftovers rests on the couch. Closed vertical blinds separate the room from the outside. In many ways, this is a typical Deana Lawson image: Every detail is thought out, carefully composed and staged. But the relationship between the large group of glass elephants and the image remains ambiguous.

    A similarly obscured connection occurs in the corner of the gallery. On the floor between the photographs Olmec Negroid Stone Head and Arethea, Lawson placed a large white unpolished cluster of crystal, referencing the spiritual and creating a bridge between the images. She states, “Each of these works is born of an anticipation or meditation on some riddle that lies between this world and some other place.” While Lawson is particular about what is presented in each image and how they are displayed in the gallery space, she is also interested in what happens between and across these photographs, how the unknown and unanticipated can resonate through an image and across time, no matter how controlled the setup may be.

  • Joni Sternbach Von Lintel Gallery

    Joni Sternbach
    Von Lintel Gallery

    In much of her work, New York–based photographer Joni Sternbach experiments with historical photographic processes, specifically tintypes, direct positive images created on thin pieces of metal. Tintypes were popular in late-19th-century photography studios since the immediate results meant sitters could quickly see their likeness. To make her modern-day tintypes, Sternbach carries a large-format camera all over the world to photograph surfers at the shorelines of beaches. Included in the exhibition, the photographs in her “Surf land Series” are representative of her travels to Australia, Uruguay, England, France, Hawaii and America’s east and west coasts. Sternbach’s subjects include the female body and themes of domesticity, gender, identity and feminism as well as abstract images of the ocean (seen in her series Ocean Details). That said, she is best known for later series depicting surfers and their surfboards—current-day surf culture. While these images feel historical and antique because of the processes Sternbach uses, in actuality they represent the present.

    The exhibition features a selection of tintypes from 2009–22, as well as a nine-minute, two-channel projection, Making Pictures (2023), that documents her experiences in the field and the process of posing her subjects and creating the images. What is striking about this presentation is the contrast between the color film, the awkwardness of her subjects—who are required to stand still for very long exposures—and the highly detailed, small-scale, monochromatic photographs on the wall.

    Joni Sternbach, 11.03.17 #3 The Mers (Kazzie + Max), 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery.

    It is impossible not to smile and wonder what is going on when looking at 11.03.17 #3 The Mers (Kazzie + Max) (2011), an image of a man and a woman posed as mermaids at the sea’s edge. Facing opposite directions, the long-haired figures’ lower bodies and legs have become mermaid tails. For 16.08.18 #3 Georgica Line up (2016), she posed one female and five male surfers on the sand, with all but one holding their surfboards on their heads. 15.07.14 #2, 3 & 4, Dirt Lot (2015) is a triptych, the panels of which depict bikini-wearing surfers on the sand by their giant surfboards in front of miscellaneous trucks and other surfers and surfboards. Most of Sternbach’s images show surfers with their boards on the beach rather than catching waves. The work is about the pose, encapsulating a moment of stillness, and presenting it as a monochrome on a piece of coated tin, rather than about the nuances of the colors of the sea or the motion of the waves.

    What is remarkable about Sternbach’s project is not only the range of subjects and locations she has visited but the relationship between the contemporary and the antique. While her subjects are immersed in modern- day surf culture, her work harkens back to the 19th century. In many ways, the process is a celebration as well as a public performance between subject and photographer who engage in a collaborative moment during the making of the image.

  • Dawoud Bey Sean Kelly

    Dawoud Bey
    Sean Kelly

    Throughout his long and distinguished career, Dawoud Bey has used his camera to document his surroundings, looking closely at people as well as the places they live. Interested in the natural, social and political landscape, Bey has made multiple series that trace a lineage from past to present. This exhibition provides a chronology via selected images from 1976–2019, beginning with the series “Harlem, U.S.A.” (black-and-white photographs Bey shot in between 1975 and 1979) and concluding with the 2019 series, “In This Here Place,” which features eerie and haunting large-scale black-and-white images taken on plantations in Louisiana. Aiming to preserve African-American history and culture through photography, Bey also captures specific moments in time as a celebration of life. Shot on the streets of Harlem with a 35mm camera when Bey was 22 years old, the 10 images from “Harlem, U.S.A.” portray groups and individuals going about their lives: Some are aware of Bey’s presence, while others are not. The viewer’s eye dances across the composition of Four Children at Lenox Avenue (1977), which depicts four formally dressed schoolchildren caught in mid-action as they pause on the sidewalk. 

    Shot on the fly, these photographs successfully capture the daily goings-on of the neighborhood, whereas his street portraits, shot 10 years later, convey more confidence, seemingly the result of more direct interactions with his subjects. With the later series, Bey’s aim was to create a studio in the streets, which allowed him to forge a relationship with his subjects (even if it was only for the duration of the shot). For example, Buck (1989) presents a young boy wearing a Batman T-shirt posed against a brick wall, his stance aggressive, self-assured and vulnerable. 

    Dawoud Bey, Picket Fence, Tree, and Cabin, 2019. © Dawoud Bey. Courtesy of Sean Kelly.

    Bey returned to the streets of Harlem in 2014 to create “Harlem Redux,” a series that documents the beginnings of gentrification and economic changes in the neighborhood. Harlem has become a different place, and through his photographs, Bey tracks these shifts. In Patisserie (2014), a white man using his laptop is juxtaposed with a Black woman working behind the counter of an upscale bakery. Young Man, West 127th Street (2015) documents a construction zone where a figure wearing a hoodie stands before a prominent No Entry sign. Clothes and Bag for Sale (2016) shows clothing hanging on a chain-link fence, laying on the sidewalk atop blue tarps that obstruct the view of a vacant lot. The absent people, represented by the hats, jackets and shoes, allude to ongoing displacement. 

    The timeline ends with examples from two recent series: “In This Here Place,” composed of photographs of plantations, and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” which features dark, unspectacular landscapes shot at night. According to Bey, the works “imagine the flight of slaves along the underground railroad racing toward freedom,” evoking the history of injustices toward the African-American community. Without being overly didactic, Bey poetically invites audiences to contemplate the past and its relationship to the present moment.   

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age
    Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    With Artificial Intelligence, or AI, on everyone’s mind, it seems pertinent to go back in time to 1952 and think about a pre-digital world, a time before the personal computer, cell phones and social media. The exhibition “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982,” conceived and curated by LACMA’s Leslie Jones, harkens back to this era, showcasing early experiments in graphic arts, conceptual art and art made with primitive computers. The works span from the creation of the first purely aesthetic image made on a computer to the replacement of the main frame by the personal computer. While terms like mathematics, generative and informational appear often in the exhibition, Jones’ keen awareness of aesthetics has led to a show not about information, but of stunning artworks influenced by and created with the aid of available technologies of the time.

    The exhibition features paintings, sculptures, drawings, and projections that weave through the different ways artists were experimenting with what was new and inspiring. In the first room, viewers see Edward Kienholz’ The Friendly Grey Computer—Star Gauge Model #54 (1965) and Lowell Nesbitt’s I.B.M. Disc Pack (1965)—neither of which are works that use technology. Kienholz’s piece is an assemblage made from industrial parts, while Nesbitt’s is a hyperrealistic large-scale painting of I.B. M. disc. As the show progresses, Jones juxtaposes art output by plotters, like Frederick Hammersley’s Computer Drawings (1969), with more conceptual by artists like Sol LeWitt who created hand-made pieces that followed specific algorithms. Examples of Minimal and Op art are shown alongside generative patterned works created on computers by artists like Vera Molnar, as well as Colette Stuebe Bangert and Charles Jeffries Bangert. As Hans Haacke’s News (1969)—a telex machine that prints headlines from newswires in real-time—endlessly spews text printed on ever-flowing rolls of paper that spill onto the gallery floor, one can’t help but think of how things have changed from when getting news in real time was not available to the general public.

    An underlying theme in the exhibition is how artists work with code and think about motion and movement. Pausing to watch one of the video and film works—be it Sheila Pinkel’s Intuition (1977) or Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version) (1967) or Permutations (1968) by John Whitney Sr.—takes viewers both back in time, but also forward as they compare current high-tech animations with the inventive low-tech experiments on display.

    While Jones relies on a specific trajectory through the exhibition, the takeaway is about the relationship between now and then: how ideas are generated, what inspires artists, and how they use what is available—be it paint, pencil, words or a snippet of code. The process of creation from inception to execution is what drives these artists, and with all the talk of AI, it is interesting to ponder the process and whether AI (now in its infancy) will transcend the evils that surround it in much the same way art made with computers or code has come to be appreciated, respected and valued today.

    “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982” poses and answers questions that are as relevant now as they were then. It is doubtful that in 1952, or even in 1982, one could have predicted that most everyone would carry a small computer in their pocket and be globally connected at all times. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to each of us. Regardless, the ways technology has inspired creativity continue to grow.

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Karla Klarin Vielmetter Los Angeles

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Karla Klarin
    Vielmetter Los Angeles

    A native of the San Fernando Valley, painter Karla Klarin has long been interested in the Los Angeles cityscape. She depicts the city’s sprawl as an abstraction, and she fills her scenes with different colors that extend across her compositions. In her early paintings like Valley View (1983) and Monster Twins (1983), Klarin captured expansive freeways and modern high-rises. Her recent, large-scale cityscapes LA Boogie Woogie (2022) and For Piet (2019) are, as their titles suggest, Mondrian-esque works with crisscrossing diagonals that reference the planes of landscapes leading towards a horizon filled with mountains and the sky beyond.

    The works that comprise “Big Pink” explore Klarin’s memories of a pink-hued house that belonged to her neighbor Natalie. In the series’ earliest paintings, Klarin combines architectural precision with broad, washy brushstrokes to depict a typical Los Angeles tract home; a one-story house with an attached garage and low-pitched roof. Klarin’s illustrations appear as arrays of rectangular, textured shapes filled with swirling lines. The house’s particular pink color works as a point of departure for Klarin’s subsequent paintings.

    In her later paintings, Klarin delights in abstraction—allowing the planes of architecture to morph into a more expansive landscape of interlocking triangles and trapezoids in shades of gray against a light pink sky. While she creates both small and large paintings, it is the larger works (more than 90 inches across) like Big Pink LA 1 (2017), Big Pink LA 2 (2016), and Big Pink LA 4 (2021) that evoke the sprawl that characterizes the terrain of Los Angeles.

    The thick black brush strokes that crisscross Big Pink LA 1 are reminiscent of the freeways that cut the city into oddly shaped pieces. Klarin’s works have a map-like presence with the paintings unfolding as irregular grids beneath an impasto sky. Klarin cites Richard Diebenkorn and his Ocean Park paintings from the 1960s as an influence and there are parallels in how both artists abstract the landscape into geometric shapes and striations. While there is no “real” pathway to navigate Big Pink LA 4, an area of dripping black brush strokes toward the bottom left of the painting suggests the on/off ramps of a freeway as it extends across the composition and fades into a pink haze. The painted sections are assembled like pieces of a complex puzzle combined to create what Klarin terms “spacial vistas” and “gridded neighborhoods.”

    Klarin’s smaller paintings are more intimate and can be thought of as excerpts from the larger works. These numbered “Landscape Studies” range in size from approximately 13 x 27 inches to 25 x 53 inches and have the same colors and fragmented perspectival space as the larger works. For example, Landscape Study 88 (2018) is simultaneously a geometric abstraction filled with gray and white trapezoids of differing opacities, and a representation of a slice of urban sprawl that’s focal point is the horizon line—where flat land becomes mountain and meets the sky. The large triangular shape that dominates both Landscape Study 125 and Landscape Study 140 (both 2020) recalls sci-fi excavations drawn in perspective. In Klarin’s imagination, these are undeveloped and uninhabitable places, rendered in black and white and set against a faded pink horizon, foretelling the future of Los Angeles.

    Klarin has been a longtime resident and astute observer of how Los Angeles changes. While she portrays LA as a decentralized concrete jungle and a barren, people-less place filled with an uncanny pink sky above an ever-changing grid, it is done with admiration and respect rather than disdain. Klarin loves to paint what surrounds her and to represent the sprawl as an evocative geometric abstraction.

    Vielmetter Los Angeles
    1700 S Santa Fe Avenue #101
    Los Angeles, CA 90021
    On view through July 8, 2023

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: George Pocari as-is.la

    GALLERY ROUNDS: George Pocari
    as-is.la

    The subject of each photograph in George Porcari’s exhibition “Things: A Story” is a narrative that is constructed from the relationship between what appears on the cover of a book and the objects Porcari has placed around. Shot with natural light in Porcari’s Los Angeles apartment, the pictures have wide-screen proportions to reference cinema but are tightly cropped to juxtapose the books with carefully arranged commonplace household objects. While many of the volumes are about filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni or Roberto Rossellini, others are works of literature by authors like Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, Charles Bukowski and Georges Perec. The choice of books is specific and in many of his photographs, Porcari has chosen a book where a black and white portrait of the author or filmmaker is centered in the frame.

    Though referred to as “still life’s,” the photographs in Things: A Story resonate as extended portraits that use the title of the book and its cover image as a point of departure. For example, in Still Life With Books 2, Porcari chose the edition of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes where the author is depicted in a black and white photograph with his right hand gently placed below his lips as if in a moment of contemplation. The book rests on what appears to be a slim, silver DVD player or radio receiver next to a pair of headphones, a green ceramic bowl with Asian calligraphy, as well as other miscellaneous objects that are cut off at the edges.

    The focus of Still Life With Books 40 is Joan Didion’s The White Album. Porcari places the hardback book in an empty freezer and stands it upright on one of the shelves, perhaps in reference to this passage: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” During a conversation with Porcari at the opening, he intimated that he put the book in the freezer based on his close reading of it.

    Still Life With Books 47 features a paperback version of Godard on Godard face up on a table surrounded by various computer cables and hard drives. The bright red lettering on the books cover is echoed by the round top of a pill bottle as well as the red heart in a “I Heart…” button that is partially obscured by the aluminum arm of a desk lamp. The black and white photograph surrounded by red text on the cover of the book depicts a couple gazing into each other’s eyes with the woman’s hand gently placed on the man’s neck. Underneath the book is a drawing of a white gloved cartoon hand (perhaps from Bugs Bunny) on blue material, that appears to be an extension of the man’s arm, adding a touch of humor and irony to his representation.

    Still Life With Books 130 contains César Vallejo’s Aphorisms placed in a grimy sink and shot from above. The book is next to the drain and adjacent to a soapy cup from which an orange handled utensil emerges. Again, Porcari selects a volume with a black and white portrait of the author with his hand curled around his chin. The grainy image has an affinity with the texture of the sink. Why it is placed there is anyone’s guess, but like Didion’s book in the freezer, this strange juxtaposition makes for an interesting image.

    Although Porcari’s photographs are filled with cultural icons and references, they are not one liners directed to those in the know. They are intimate and personal images that include books that are significant or have personal meaning for Porcari. They are  beautiful and intriguing photographs that invite viewers to think about the bigger picture and perhaps the relationship between their books and the other objects that surround them.

    as-is.la
    1133 Venice Blvd.
    Los Angeles, CA 90015
    On view through June 3, 2023

     

  • Arthur Simms KARMA 

    Arthur Simms
    KARMA 

    Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to the States, as well as what he learned as a child in Jamaica watching artisans make vehicles and other functional objects from found wheels and boxes. At an early age he began to make his own toys from wood, plastic and other discarded materials, and these sources remain essential to his practice today. 

    “The Miracle of Burano” is Simms’ first exhibition in Los Angeles. It feels like a mini-retrospective as it introduces the LA audience to his practice, including works from the 1990s to the 2020s. Many of his sculptures allude to carts or ships, while some incorporate wheels and bicycle parts, as well as toy cars. Chester, Alice, Marcia, Erica And Arthur Take A Ride (1993) is one of the earliest pieces in the exhibition. The title refers to the trip that brought Simms, his father and three sisters, from Jamaica to New York. In this sculpture, a web of thin rope encases wooden cross-beams that suggest the shape of the figurehead found at the bow of a ship. This assemblage balances on a tan milk crate and, because it is situated in the middle of the gallery, it can be viewed from all sides. While Simms does not illustrate the nuances of the journey, the rawness of the work hints at a difficult voyage. Red Bird (2008) features irregularly shaped bamboo rods fashioned together to create the outline of a sailboat. At the helm sits a small plastic red bird that first gives viewers pause, then elicits a smile. The work is simultaneously humorous and delicate.

    Arthur Simms, Caged Bottle, 2006. Courtesy of Karma, New York.

    Simms’ signature style is to wrap incongruous objects with wire or rope and assemble them into either large or small-scale towers in which they take on new meaning through juxtaposition. Apollo (2011) could reference the Greek God, as well as NASA’s rockets. In this work, Simms combines wood, glass jars and bottles, tying them together with wire so they appear like a cartoon figure floating in space. What could be seen as the figure’s head is a wire-mesh globe that is bisected by a piece of wood shaped like a police baton. The work has a freeform feeling of lightness despite its rough-hewn materials. Caged Bottle (2006) is another playful amalgamation of rope, wire, bottles and bicycle wheels. The sculpture resembles a dysfunctional cart filled with recycled detritus.

    In this elegant display, some of the works sit on the gallery floor, while others are placed on a low elevated white, curved shelf, separating the large from the small works, giving them all equal due. 

    The use of dysfunctional and abandoned non-slick materials infuses Simms’ works with a sense of nostalgia and history. Though recently created, they hearken back in time and draw from both his Jamaican heritage and his current surroundings. His poetic works speak to issues of relocation with both grace and humor.

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Robert Russell Anat Ebgi

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Robert Russell
    Anat Ebgi

    Robert Russell is a Los Angeles painter whose conceptually based process often begins with an internet search. Be it for other people named Robert Russell, artist’s monographs, tea cups, or for his current exhibition, Allach porcelain figurines, Russell culls online sources for imagery which he then transforms into large-scale paintings.

    The images that comprise “Porzellan Manufaktur Allach”, come from auction catalogues offering the few remaining, and now extremely rare, figurines produced in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s using concentration camp labor in factories funded by former Nazi party leader Heinrich Himmler. Originally, the figurines were meant to celebrate the ‘purity’ of German culture and were given as gifts among SS soldiers. They often took the form of cute animals like rabbits and deer and were depicted with large eyes and complacent expressions. Cognizant of the figurine’s loaded history, Russell wanted to contrast the horror with the beauty of his paintings.

    Russell speaks about his works as “painterly interpretations of photographic images.” To create the final compositions, he manipulates the originals in Photoshop, removing backgrounds and replacing them with somber colors while adjusting the contrast so the painted animals ‘pop’ in relation to the blank spaces they occupy. What is so striking—as well as off-putting—about the painted figurines is their scale, and the shifts that occur in the process of transforming the original objects (which are around twelve inches high) to their photographic documentation on a computer screen to giant-sized paintings.

    Robert Russell, Liegendes Rehkitz, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi. Photo by Matthew Kroening.

    Junger Hase (2023) features a bunny in a crouched position. The white/tan bunny, with brown around its feet and eyes, has a glossy and reflective surface that Russell has perfectly preserved. Situated in a purple-gray ‘no mans land’ Russell paints the animal very close to the edges of the canvas, giving it very little breathing space. It is simultaneously repulsive and something to cherish. Junger Hase Sitzend (2023) is another painting of a bunny, though this time it is seated and looking in the opposite direction. Liegendes Rehkitz (2022) depicts a fawn lying down (a sympathetic Bambi-like creature) that elicits a sense of compassion. Among the ten paintings are also statues of a puppy, a bird, seated and standing dogs, as well as a large bear on a pedestal. These are creepy chotzkies with a history usually found in antique shops.

    Russell paints in a vanitas and memento mori style, making faithful reproductions that are hyper-real. The size of the paintings removes the preciousness of the original porcelain figurines and imbues them with a disturbing power and dominance that is reminiscent of their Nazi heritage. The unsettling history of the objects and their manufacturing can’t be separated from the paintings and that is Russell’s intent: to fuse the beauty and the horror and to let the viewers come to terms with how they chose to interpret what they confront on the canvases.