Byline: Estelle Araya

Inclining towards controlled madness while also surveying the forces to which we may dutifully acquiesce, Sascha Braunig’s painting exhibition, “Poseuses,” at François Ghebaly, vividly replicates matrices of power that one can experience both personally and within the world, particularly if under the umbrella of woman-identifying individuals. Employing at times flimsy and at times impotent female silhouettes, Braunig’s figures, cutouts and outlines of negative space, bend with an immutable and regulatory will in colorful stage-like environments. Causing furor, her use of an amplifying color palette animate her feminine figures to signal a sense of unsettlement. Braunig captures a precise, anxiety-provoking realm: the real acts of conforming to illusions of gender with the hope that they might be unreal. This not only invokes the mimetic relationships we have with our predetermined gender illusions, but also reminds us that gender truths are constructed through sustained performances. Integral to her work is the internal psychological exchange facilitated by her figures, demonstrating that the difficulty lies not in the difference between real enactments and highly socialized constructions, but rather in their shared proximity to each other.

François Ghebaly
2245 E. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through December 23, 2023

Persuaded by her alchemist rhapsody and teetery yet unshakeable assertion, Isabel Nuño de Buen’s exhibition, “Now and Away” at Chris Sharp Gallery instills in me a yearning for more. Her intricately crafted wall sculptures, characterized by their personable scale and meticulous intensity, consist of paper mache, wire, yarn, graphite, watercolor, muslin, hand dyed fabrics and more, forming a collection of tightly woven palimpsests.  Indecipherable and yet complete, Nuño de Buen’s meandering formations display a determination and rigor in their material sensitivity, paralleled only by their intent to encode. Tasking observers to take turns and follow her path through an integration of components, Nuño de Buen presents multiple forms that carry varying social interests. At times, the conditions of her construction become a bindle or a fragment of a structure, while at other times, they accumulate into a gift, net or tapestry. The way she builds requires careful consideration of access, exchanges – circulatory, visual and energy – between layers. What and who is it for? What happens when it is received or given away? Must we carry it? Could it be that Isabel Nuño de Buen’s exhibition is a structure, a system, a figure, a DNA, a type, a body of distant planes suddenly collapsing into its own regime?

Chris Sharp Gallery
4650 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through November 18, 2023

“Have I ever felt strange suddenly being myself?” I thought after leaving Simphiwe Ndzube’s exhibition, “Chorus” at BLUM. If I integrate all the parts of myself into the world I believe in and want to see the most, maybe I too will find ordinary enchantment. Perhaps I will reach magic. Ndzube’s vibrant and vigorous figurative paintings and drawings of groups and of individuals represent a distinct maturation of his past works.  Looking around the room, I find myself surrounded by his exuberant singers. The faces of his figures have a saccharine and matter-of-fact Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head construction while being placed in an indeterminate landscape without verifiable time. They conjure a world between worlds, seemingly salvaging personages from past subjects, stories, and history. With greater control, he continues to build a lexicon of mythologies arising from his respective experiences growing up in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing both absurdity and divinity, Ndzube’s mode of storytelling is delivered through Magic Realism. This is compelling not only as a narrative system familiarly catalyzed from postcolonial literature by destabilizing dominant forms of storytelling, but also as a device for highlighting a range of phenomena that can feel impossible to reconcile individually, let alone intertwined.  Family, joy, love, pain, the individual, the community, unconscious desires, political and racialized atrocities, collective beliefs and more are submerged in Ndzube’s surfaces. Although it’s not a new way of illustrating stories, Simphiwe Ndzube’s world of devotion provides ground for traversing everyday moments of cosmic pleasure and affliction, which protect and suspend vital elements of life that require acceptance, not explanation. 

Blum
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through December 16, 2023

The theatricality and malaise of machines characterized by abundance, repetition, necessity, error and expansion, come into full play in Analia Saban’s latest body of work, “Synthetic Self,” which is simultaneously exhibited at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Saban offers a restless existence mediated by technology in this transdisciplinary exhibition. Her work, existing neither as entirely biotic nor purely mechanical, narrates an unceasing negotiation between “nature” as represented by earth-based mediums, forms of machinery and materials that signify technological advancement. At once sublime, efficient, and feverish, the experience of Saban’s work results in a low-level existential distress where functional objects and images emerge as sources of everyday desire. She brings attention to a dysphoria underlying the sense of compulsion, exalted alienation, overwhelming excess of energy in her frenetic details and highly controlled outcomes in her engineered forms. Saban’s work compels us to question our progress and the tedium of our needs. Are we winning? Have we won? In order to live with great satisfaction, must the matter of our lives be literally scattered by fans? If errors and instability are inherent to a machine’s compromised nature, do I have to inhabit a world filled with errors? Have I always, almost instinctively, understood what Saban is possibly suggesting: that it was a mistake to think I couldn’t live without machines when, for a long time, I wasn’t entirely certain that machines weren’t actually sharing life with me?

Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
1010 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA

On view through October 28, 2023

“Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow,” Jasper Marsalis’ exhibition at Kristina Kite Gallery, directs me to hear its entirety with my body. The visitor is tasked with arriving and making contact with his process of transcoding a glitch-like quality of life with apparitional impact. Through the importance of having various forms, Marsalis mashes up sculptures, screens, paintings and more, offering a memoir matrix anchored in disappearance and emergence while delivering a sense of plurality and reckoning. It’s as if the installation itself is a fissure, a counter-monument and a web. He arranges compositions of dissonance into consonances that simultaneously suggest the possibility of the body—or his body—without fully representing it. Wood and stick forms are jammed into and protrude out of bowling balls. There is a large self-portrait, clothed ghosts backboned by tripods, a laptop with a circuit map, stacked and strapped speakers and paintings with a techno-focused color palette, all networked in a style that is not nostalgic but does suggest a personal account in transformation. Marsalis, a storyteller who mediates between many mediums, finds the conditions for showcasing something remnant and past while also reconstructing a world for memories to announce itself. Instead of pointing to how these memories may have been produced in the first place, the exhibition considers how to recast a shadow into a subject that is not diminished.

Kristina Kite Gallery
3400 W Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through November 4, 2023

Who has not asked oneself at some time or another: Should I disappear into the abyss or should I emerge and be seen? It’s a concern that is, at times, about recognizability and addressability, and if we are ready to situate our bodies which contain the raw materials of our psyche, in a mode that’s accessible and inseparable from others. Straddling between these choices, the shine and hum of the works featured at Sea View by Charlotte Edey (b. 1992, Manchester, UK) and Azadeh Elmizadeh (b. 1987, Tehran, IR) turn our attention to the mysteries of what is made visible, the value of hideaway places, and restoring states of disappearance as a play of inwardness and cosmic attendance. Materially, Elmizadeh offers delicately and ever-deepening layered paintings on the brink of becoming fog, regenerating relationships between form and color as fluid figures, while Edey creates possessed interiors by combining jacquard weaving and fine beading alongside firmly intimate paintings of incalculable daze. In their emergent states of plurality, both artists offer methods for understanding their respective dilemmas. Stirred by hydrofeminism and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Edey’s self-contained illuminating scenes press viewers to almost weep from its exquisite execution as it exits a world of rational thought and feeling, paths of necessary transformation. Elmizadeh’s inquiries are sprung by inspiration from allegorical Islamic manuscripts and illustrations, paintings that make aqueous forms of flora, fauna, and objects on an earth a source of diffused becoming.

Sea View
4166 Sea View Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
On view through October 21, 2023