Byline: Estelle Araya

The meeting of Covey Gong and Monique Mouton at Bel Ami is like watching the contact of two elements transforming one another. While their respective works are satisfying on their own, together, Mouton’s mixed media on paper and Gong’s tactful sculptures, spotlights a transitional and unsettled nature that resignifies the experience of fully emerging without committing to a definition. In Gong’s work, a sculpture such as TRD-RDDL01-HP (2024), with its delicate stainless-steel assembly and sequenced acrylic rods, oscillates between feeling talismanic like an I Ching hexagram and embodying the function of an architectural maquette. In Mouton’s Zones (2024), an asymmetrical floating paper touched by horizontal gray brushstrokes and a subdued fluorescent lemon wash, counters what I expect—yet is seemingly right. Their separate and complimentary tenderness towards materials and the construction of each work is technical without requiring a complete sense of fixity.  While one could say these works are ephemeral or understated, that suggests a softness and short-lived quality that doesn’t capture the fortitude in their fragility nor their finely tuned approach. Propelling together with a sharp clarity, “a vista,” is steady and penetrating. 

Bel Ami
709 N. Hill St. Suite #105
Los Angeles, CA
On view through October 12, 2024

Somewhere between warfare and entertainment, sports as a spectacle is deeply rooted in the ways modern societies organize, present and consume events and expectations. Pacing through “SECONDARY: commencement,” there is a sense of nostalgia that belongs to a media golden age when image and appearance began being prioritized over genuine reality. Matthew Barney’s installation might be a MedSpa-inspired rendition of a football field. A zingy crimson carpet spread nearly wall-to-wall with a marked center zone ready for scrimmage: benches fit for a modern gym are perched on the edges of the room; heavy breathing sounds from active, hard-working bodies fill the space; multiple TVs hang from the ceiling, preparing audiences to digest a film depicting the brutal moment when Jack Tatum changes Darryl Stingley’s life forever. This combination creates a sense of drama and game and yet something is missing. As I think, much of this focus on violence being a precondition for human spectacle is not changing and will remain a phenomena, however, the illusion in how we interact with it is. While Barney’s presentation is dutifully clear, coherent and well-executed, its setup is focused on a public fascination that—I’m not convinced—accurately reflects where we are now and the updated social expectations and dynamics that come along with this interaction. Barney recycles the topics in which we associate with him, such as physical endurance, bodily transformation, corporeal violence and mythology-fetishism. The value in this exhibition lies in demonstrating the commodified experience, except, the commodified experience today is incredibly different from the period from which he is recycling his ideas. Though I will say, this specific lack gives the show a kind of ardor I didn’t expect as I inventoried my engagement, which was provoked.

Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through August 17, 2024

In this group exhibition of 15 artists, Rashid Johnson splendidly arranges ablaze and brooding drawings, paintings and sculptures into a pristine playlist. From Huma Bhabha’s uneasy cork, wood and cardboard ancient being and Bill Traylor’s acutely simple and lyrical drawings to Isa Genken’s trouble-free assemblage mannequins, the works span vastly different periods and mediums. My favorite thing about artist-curated exhibitions is seeing how artists make other artists, that is, a method of finding and becoming family. It’s a great pleasure to witness who is chosen to encircle an artist’s imagination, a most intimate space. At “Bruts,” it is the world according to Rashid Johnson and it discharges a callous and omniscient antiheroic disturbance that is simultaneously distinguished. In an almost old-fashioned and stubborn way, the constellation of these works is packaged together with pressure-fitted relevance—not a hair out of place, making complete sense—a rarity for a group exhibition. This quality of precision speaks to distinctive qualities in Johnson’s own work: an intense focus, nothing arbitrary, organized chaos, deep feelings that are both obvious and difficult to describe, a crisis and its effect.

David Kordansky Gallery
5130 W. Edgewood Place
Los Angeles, CA
On view through August 24, 2024

A life lived in the midst of harrowing times of chain gangs, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws in the Deep South is the bullseye of Winfred Rembert’s exhibition, “Hard Times.” In hand-carved and debossed painted leather, the late Rembert creates striking patterns from the identifiable violences of our racial caste system: limitless and maze-like white cotton fields, the hierarchical order of plantation life, high contrast stripes of prisoners hammering in the field together and a ridiculous amount of crackling earth moved by prison labor. With respect to the pain of these truths, Rembert is an excellent storyteller, making figurative and metaphorical motifs from bodily dispossession.  Despite these scenes being pulled directly from Rembert’s personal experiences, he primarily illustrates his life through groups of people he had once clung to and endured existence with. Amplifying the sense of peril and devastation, he shows us that many others have lived his life too. Here, the act of depicting memory is also the act of depicting history, all the while, his narration becomes a necessary form of witness to suspend the unnatural horror of those times. In punishment’s undoubtedly current and mutated form, Rembert provides a stunning visualization that I fear makes it easy for the unchallenged viewer to avoid a vital question: In the wake of mass and robust maltreatment, how do we meet what we see?

Hauser & Wirth
901 E 3rd St.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through August 25, 2024

With unruffled confidence, Paige Jiyoung Moon’s, “Gen 3” reveals small-scale acrylic paintings depicting informal rituals from her daily life with a profusion of care. Most of the time memories get packed away, but in this case, Moon’s style of painting makes the details of life itself known, allowing audiences to become better observers of life. In Three Generations (2024), two women, likely a mother and daughter, lay in a bed tenderly together with a child nearby.  Disorder is upon the bedroom they rest in, where objects are distinctly littered across the surfaces of the room. Each item, from hair dryer, table fan and diapers to backpack, phone charger, Tylenol and many more objects, are imbued with their own narrative space. It’s as if you can picture how they arrived in their tousled state, adding a sense of task in an already busy scene. The amount of stuff Moon fits into a painting embraces inventory in a way that positions the work somewhere between document and memoir. In this hybridity, I sense Moon wishing to create a record of her life, restoring its honorable condition through her subjective nature of reportage. With simple yet highly intricate renderings, it seems Moon begins with painting events to then derive meaning from them as opposed to the other way around. Life differs from painting in that it is brimming with hazy details, however, everything that is included in Moon’s painting summons significance because she directs us towards it and entrusts us with seeing how domestic ceremonies add to the amenity of the world.

Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 22, 2024

Intertwining tradition, identity and memory, Jordan Nassar’s exhibition, “Surge,” turns large-scale Levantine embroidery and mosaics into sites of tactile continuity, connection and solace. These works serve as a means through which to understand his transnational diasporic Palestinian heritage. Struck by the sheer labor evident in these carefully composited cross-stitches, arrangements of glass tiles and deliberately organized colors, texts and symbols, it’s clear Nassar’s practice is propelled by equal parts resistance and longing. Works like Al-Atlal (The Ruins) (2024), where animals find a hieratic home in formal quadrants against a backdrop of mountains and water, is how Palestinian motifs become deeds of recollection. The act of tiling and embroidering are a means of resistance against the erasure of memory, both of traditional practices and an ontological experience rooted in what Nassar can imagine and study of his origins. Simultaneously, the act of each work embodies a sense of yearning, where all of his exerted industriousness brings the artist closer to where and who he wishes to be near. At the core of Nassar’s practice lies the profound sense of tangibility, dedication and patience which reveal to us what he hopes to keep alive. His work not only reveals who he is and what he desires but also aims to evoke, for himself and others, the distinctive space between memory and experience, reflection and an immediately familiar and cherished world, of being Palestinian and of not being in Palestine. Through the labor-intensive processes of weaving and tiling, Nassar encapsulates a sense of home and identity that defiantly resists the dislocation wrought by diaspora.

Anat Ebgi
4859 Fountain Ave.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through July 20, 2024

There’s no trick of the moonlight at Rhea Dillon’s show, “Gestural Poetics.” Inside and out, each work happens twice. Dillon’s drawings, nestled in sapele mahogany boxes within the white cube gallery, enact two histories at once. While the moniker “sapele” hails from a Nigerian city, the hardwood was once used to build slave ships, consequently disrupting how to read Dillon’s works against the supposedly neutral space of a gallery. Inset in boxes propped against the walls, her oil-stick drawings of spades emerge in clamorous flesh tones or occasional bursts of yellow or purple. If this exhibition intends to release the recognition of Blackness from an object or commodity and lean into Blackness as a natural form of abstraction, the entirety of the show is clever, verve and precise. Dillon’s sensitivity to Black hyper-visibility recovers a sense of amorphicity for Blackness through reconfiguring canons of representation. In probing questions about this long crisis of recognition and addressability, an intimate relationship between imaging, the world and “the way things are,”  I came to the contradictory question: Is it wonderful that she has created these works or should I be outraged that the world is this sinister?

Paul Soto
2271 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 1, 2024

Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture. In Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (2007–24), Henry’s compositions made up of legos, miniature collectables, action figures and dolls and handcrafted elements, are excellent at narrating the multiple realities in and outside of the art world. In this multiroom scene, there’s a storage room of tools, boxes, journals and supplies, admirably arranged as if the space was truly utilized. Adjacent to it lies another room with black and white flyers scattered on the ground, a homage to Ana Mendieta, bearing the text “¿Donde está Ana?” Cutting and joyful, Henry’s well-dressed and eclectic figurines gather for food and music, while a Christmas tree is fully decorated and a dog approaches the garbage bins outside. Surrounding these dioramas, there are meticulous and brightly colored notebook scale drawings and collages that capture the same fantastic and peculiar sensibility that oscillates between an ironic and earnest use of camp. Reveling in the absurd with heightened alertness, Henry holds a discursive position leading viewers to question, probe and laugh at the places where the politics of culture occur.

Stars
3116 North El Centro Ave.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through May 11, 2024

In “Biel Lieb,” Olivia van Kuiken’s inaugural exhibition at Château Shatto, oil paintings of untamed, bold color and mark-making swing between styles of ink wash, graphic novel, pixel and gestures on the verge of becoming scripture, spellbinding the gallery. Fuchsia, aubergine, canary yellow, vermillion and lilac burst forth on the canvases, contained by artist frames and room dividers, allowing multiple works to be sistered together. In terms of portrayal, an important element of van Kuiken’s work is that within a singular canvas, there is no sense of one singular realm. Instead, it seems as though multiple provinces or domains—corporeal, notebook, cosmos and delusion—are peeled back and dripped into one another. Influenced by Unica Zürn’s 1968 novel, The Trumpets of Jericho, her paintings similarly guide viewers through surreal landscapes where reality and a sense of self disintegrate. Welcoming mania, angst and alienation, van Kuiken’s paintings become a psychic apparatus with fluid confines. It’s a kind of madness that would be mentally paralyzing in real-time, but in painting, the disorder shines like a perfect secret we aren’t meant to understand, where the journey may be to become a stranger to oneself.

Château Shatto
1206 S. Maple Ave. Suite 1030
Los Angeles, CA
On view through April 6, 2024

Last week, an abandoned home in the hills of Mt. Washington, once infested by raccoons and possums, transformed into “Revel Hall,” a temporary exhibition space showcasing Amelia Lockwood’s raw, altar-like and talismanic ceramics alongside Chris Lux’s admirably crooked and crude domiciliary sculptures. Renounced of drywall and touched up with unmethodical white paint in only a few rooms, the house serves as a refreshing reminder of how little is needed to present art, especially when the works of the artists engage in a determined conversation with each other and a space can cradle that dialogue. In the room furthest from the entrance, Lux’s french door-sized, choppy and thrashing compositions of blue, red, yellow and clear stained glass, embedded in the door frames, filter colored light onto Lockwood’s torso-scale ceramics, which rest on a pile of stacked bricks. Lockwood’s high-fired, mostly earth-colored works with a fringe of color, like her other pieces in the show, are feverishly layered and compress one architectural ornament style on top of another while entangling floral and animal-like forms. Meanwhile, in the same room, the scent of burning dinner candles and incense floods the space from the fireplace, fostering a sense of hospitality between two artists who both wield a wealth of unbroken energy in their works.

Guerrero Gallery
1832 Burnell Dr.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through March 24, 2024

Stepping into the realm of Ozzie Juarez’s paintings at his exhibition, “OXI-DIOS,” is akin to entering a bustling industrial cityscape, where citizens are invited to gather around modern homages to the illustrious tradition of Mexican murals. Juarez, a torchbearer with a paintbrush and airbrush, depicts various references from contemporary pop culture to mythic scenes from classical painting and pre-colonial times on fabricated, rusted metal gates with welded barbed wire along the top of each work. Rooted in a revolutionary spirit, each object has an unmistakable sense of energy, whether it resembles a neighborhood advertisement, a larger-than-life popular Hallmark card or reclamation of power through wild horses rising up. At the heart of Juarez’s work, there is a deep reverence aimed at fostering a sense of collective identity. In Zayayin (2024), the title of the work is airbrushed behind two painted figures, a dark-hair brunette female sleeping on a knobby rock with a kneeling pre-Columbian dancer by her side. The dancer’s eyes are closed, perhaps dealing with a loss while the bold blue, white and yellow text nods to an iconic transformational process in Dragon Ball Z where a character obtains greater power. In a world characterized by perpetual change, this fusion of old and new creates a dialogue between past and present while inviting viewers to investigate the evolving nature of Mexican identity and culture.

Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Road,
Los Angeles, CA
On view through March 2, 2024

Step into Jairo Sosa’s installation, “Be True to the Game” and it feels as though you’ve stumbled upon the conclusion of a journey, an archaeological site or a moment of collective surrender. Room 3557, a small and mighty artist project space, is brimming with eight tons of sand and partially buried earthenware, stoneware and porcelain basketballs in various shapes of mishape, deflation and rupture, along with one built-in corner pedestal. Sosa’s basketballs range in color from metallic and leather-like glazes to capturing the oozing minerals of a cave. The one-room exhibition space acts as a crucible for the fired materials, where the earth tones give the basketballs a purpose beyond decoration amidst the sand dunes. Just as the ceramic basketballs are too fragile to bounce, too deflated to serve their intended purpose or too deeply buried to be prominently displayed, it seems Sosa responds to performance expectations with a sense of resistance, yet he doesn’t disengage from “The Game” either. Instead, he aims to complicate it, suggesting a landscape devoid of players, a season where all the purpose falls away, retracting from a heightened sense of performance and evoking a sense of winter. Sosa establishes conditions wherein he can engage in refusal and decelerate spectacles, both in object and ambiance, in order to disorder conditions of recognized subjugation.

Room 3557
3557 1st St.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through February 23, 2024

Cristina Iglesias’ exhibition, “Ellipsis,” features otherworldly, large-scale sculptural environments crafted from materials such as casted aluminum, bronze, copper, glass, steel and various pigmented materials. This collection draws inspiration from Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel, Solaris, continuing Iglesias’ distinctive approach of materializing imaginary proportions into architecturally elaborate forms that evoke a co-existence with paranormal conditions. In her piece, “The Pavillion of Dreams (Elliptical Galaxy),” viewers navigate a labyrinth of 52 iron-braided trellises suspended by steel cables.  At the end of the maze, I turned around and became aware of English script woven within the construction of the iron lattices. At times, reading familiar words like “AGAIN” and “HIDDEN” countered the sense of downfall I felt while traversing through the chamber, while at other times, the text wasn’t enough to dispute the sense of loneliness and isolation, a feeling more powerful than the material and scale of her work. Though it’s difficult to decipher at first, the forms of Iglesias’ works are successful at constructing an idea of cosmos that are rooted in desire for connection and understanding. The bewitching tension lies in inventing sculptures that exist as interventions of human and earthly space, never fully assimilating and remaining superb at maintaining alien qualities.

Marian Goodman
1120 Seward St.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through January 27, 2024

One half of Moskowitz Bayse’s gallery is dedicated to “Impossible Apprentice,” a sublime inaugural solo presentation by Matthew Gallagher composed of intensely delicate and labored drawings made by fusing drafting film onto a molten wax surface. From a seemingly humble distance, these postcard to post-it sized drawings are exalted facsimiles of portraits, objects, flowers and bodies produced by a diverse range of artists between the Renaissance to the 1970s. Through Gallagher’s own technique and exertion, his translation and study brings these objects into the realm of sacrament as well as being in their own right original too. Sustaining luminous depth and tonal range in graphite and wax, Gallagher spends at times hundreds of hours meticulously crafting a drawing, reminding viewers of both an unadorned vulnerability captured in mark-making and drawing’s historical role as a genesis for an artist’s scholarly transformation. Despite the title of the show implying an apprenticeship, the paradox lies in the fact that the drawings do not feel like they are driven by a mastery of the original artist or original work.  Instead, into and out of his very own proficiency, the exhibition as a whole reflects how special Gallagher’s enhanced comprehension of the world is. As light traverses the page, we witness optical blends, and Gallagher, in turn, shows us what light is meant to do. 

Moskowitz Bayse
743 N. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through February 10, 2024

Suspending the administrative and bodily powers of fences and safety cones, Fin Simonetti’s sculpture exhibition, “Hardening,” at Matthew Brown quizzes viewers to ponder, “Am I safe, am I scared, or am I in love?” Perhaps it’s a bit of all three. The gallery features a black steel fencing switchbacking through the space, adorned with life-sized, chrome-coated, hand-carved ceramic and concrete rabbits. They are devoured yet love-locked to the stand-alone railings or scattered across the floor. The installation is bookended with black and orange marble, meticulously carved safety cones that also bear delicate depictions of feathered friends and foes. Simonetti’s creation borrows elements from protective and peace-bearing symbols, ranging from gothic spires and aviary claws to doves and love-locks, turning the fundamental human need for safety into a counterintuitive process. From a distance, Simonetti’s fence eases the immediate urgency into dissenting into worry, suggesting that perhaps these fixtures are meant for us. Yet, a closer look at Simonetti’s renderings of the mutilated locks compels the audience to reconsider the installation. At play within the exhibition is another uneasy question: Should we be uncertain of our invitation? To engage with Simonetti’s installation, I am prompted to recollect the rules governing my fragile physicality and decide where I wish to position myself within her resignation of symbols.

Matthew Brown
712 N. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through January 13, 2024