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Byline: Max King Cap
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The Many Shades of Kerry James Marshall
It’s cold. He looks even larger in his winter coat. He is a large man. Tall and broad-shouldered. In football, he might be a tight end; I’ve stood next to several players for the Bears. He would not seem out of place among such large men except that the hair on his head and beard is flecked with gray. He has just arrived at his studio—a swift bike ride from Soldier Field (yes, Chicagoans ride their bikes in winter, even in weather this cold)—and hasn’t even taken off his coat.
The Bears’ season was over a long time ago, but the season of Kerry James Marshall—from its home opener at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to its blowout performance at New York City’s Met Breuer, to the eagerly anticipated matchup at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—has been an unqualified success. Yet the schedule has been exhausting, and the long, successful season has taken him away from the studio. Marshall seems delighted with the weather, though. He was a Californian in his youth but has shed that skin; after enduring two-dozen Chicago winters he is made of sterner stuff. “It actually warmed up today,” he says. “Yesterday was really cold, but you know what it’s like.” As a Chicagoan for 30 years, I do. He continues, “19 degrees is like a heat wave because it was nine below zero the other night. Now it’s actually going to be in the mid-30s for the rest of the week.” Still, I’m glad this is a video chat.
Today is a studio day. Marshall and I are going to talk about painting. Not the painting that most of the recent articles—and there have been many—have focused upon, not about the refusal to paint any more white people. That is by now too easy a journalistic hook and it doesn’t delve into the complexity of his motivation and means. We are talking about the artist in the studio and the research, physical labor, experimentation, failure and invention that takes place there. “In a way, the studio’s a kind of refuge,” Marshall tells me, “It’s the one place where you have a certain amount of control over whether people can get at you or not. I go into the studio every single day. If I’m in Chicago, I’m in there. After taking care of some of the mundane everyday things you have to take care of, you take care of your stuff at home. And then I get to the studio; and for the most part, once I’m in there, then it really is like a sanctuary. I can do any of 100 things that I might want to do. The less contact I have with people while I’m in there, the better.”
Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg
tempera on paper, 8 x 6.5 in., Steven and Deborah Lebowitz, photo by Matthew Fried, © MCA ChicagoMarshall’s studio is in Bronzeville, a section of Chicago’s Black Belt, a region of the city that has since the Nixon administration been home to a nearly undiluted concentration of black people. There are pockets of whiteness though: The Illinois Institute of Technology, home of Mies van der Rohe; and the University of Chicago, home of Leopold & Loeb. According to Steve Bogira of the Chicago Reader, “This African-American subdivision of Chicago includes 18 contiguous community areas, each with black populations above 90 percent, most of them well above that.” The blackness of Chicago’s Black Belt would seem impenetrable. It has, however, been nibbled at its edges. The University of Illinois-Chicago, where Marshall was a professor until seven years ago, has enveloped its surroundings including the notable Maxwell Street area, refuge for Eastern European Jews and Dixie-fleeing Bluesmen—it produced Benny Goodman and Jack Ruby. The South Loop, the neighborhood of Marshall’s old studio, featured light industry and SRO hotels. It now has macrobiotic brew pubs, sushi bars and million-dollar condominiums. Marshall’s new, purpose-built studio is now more than 20 blocks south of this relentless creep.
Like these neighborhoods, the population of Marshall’s paintings has been resolutely black. Yet if one considers the complexion of all the people in the paintings of Fairfield Porter it hardly bears mentioning. We are talking mainly about form now, not content. How though, I ask, does one go about the representation of figures that, pictorially, have both absence and presence, in both form and content, and how does the form engender the content? Marshall explains, “I tried to figure out how much of a suggestion of volume you could get out of a thing that was essentially flat without any modeling in it that required you to do a light and dark value scale. I was trying to preserve an essential flatness in the images, and by using a variety of textured marks while I was making the painting, try to figure out if there was a way I could suggest there was volume in the thing. I worked that until I felt like I reached the limit of where I started to think I needed more definition—because the silhouettes by themselves just never quite got to the place where I wanted the image, the way I wanted the image to resonate.”
Kerry James Marshall, Frankenstein, 2009, Acrylic on pvc, 85 x 61 inches, ©Kerry James Marshall, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Marshall micromanages the tension between hard-edged shape and illusory volume: “That’s almost the way I started out, trying to do a simultaneity where you have simultaneous presence and absence, but with an emphatic presence. This has to do with lighting. I started trying to figure out a way to not compromise the fundamental blackness of the figure but create enough density and volume so that the thing seems solid as opposed to simply a kind of cut-out. By really exploiting what you could get from the already available three different colors of black, from the Mars black, which is iron oxide, to bone black, which they call ivory black, to a carbon black. They look the same in the jar basically, but they’re really different from each other, especially when you stack them on top. Then I started further modifying those by adding a cobalt blue into the carbon black and then adding a yellow ochre and then adding alizarin turquoise, so that gave me six or seven different value and chromatic changes that I could work with.”
Ambivalent flatness creates much of the visual tension in his work. While the subtleties of his blacks can make a Barnett Newman seem garish, his placement of very warm colors in the background often forces his figures aggressively toward the picture plane, requiring the viewer to feel equally observed.
Kerry James Marshall, Supermodel, 1994, acrylic and mixed media on canvas on board, 25 x 25 inches, ©Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Two images, painted 15 years apart, vividly illustrate the stylistic change in Marshall’s approach to rendering portraits as dexterously black as the pearlescent dermatological surrealism of Ingres. Supermodel (1994) and Frankenstein (2009) both possess a Kool-Moe-Dee-How-You-Like-Me-Now brazenness, but the former is linearly defined, pressed against the window, framed in high contrast by his funereal nimbus. The latter, however, grippingly modeled as if carved from obsidian, maintains a spatial détente. He doesn’t expose his wound, Christ-like, as does Supermodel; Frankenstein, in all his nakedness, is not standoffish but indifferent because he has no fucks left to give. Yet these figures, now blacker, often glossier, exist and perform within a defined picture box. In this way Marshall becomes a director and set designer, deciding what goes in the scene and what remains offstage. Those figures must also be costumed.
“I [was] building on those [Garden Project] paintings almost like…doing a collage, but once I started working on the comic strip project [Rythm Mastr], a whole series of challenges started to present themselves that made it really hard to do. I needed to find solutions to that, and where I found the solution was actually something I had experienced while doing production design for [the 1991 independent film] Daughters of the Dust.”
Marshall struggled at first to do that comic strip, but soon realized that the problem was being unsure of how to place these various objects and characters in a manipulated yet believable space. Studying set design and perspective drawing for theater taught him the formulas. “You have to have locations, scenery, interiors that are dressed and decorated,” he tells me. “And then you have to have costumes for your characters.” His initial searches through photographic sources were inadequate, so he turned to creating the costumes himself.
At the time Marshall had a studio assistant who helped him make the tiny costumes, but the process became so elaborate she went back to college to study fashion design. After completing her degree, he turned over all of the costume design to her. He discovered there are patterns for those tiny doll clothes.
“I started using 12-inch action figures as mannequins. Then I started taking things that weren’t meant to be clothes and making them into clothes for these action-figure mannequins. When you see the figures wearing sweaters, a lot of those sweaters, in the beginning, started out as socks.” The artist learned from another artist: “Tintoretto used to set up stage settings with little wax figurines and use those as a compositional tool to develop his paintings. He would light them; that’s how he got that dramatic lighting he used with candles through a small-scale model set with wax figurines draped with cloth.”
Kerry James Marshall, Vignette, 2003,acrylic on fiberglass in artist’s frame, 72 x 108 in., Defares Collection, photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London. This attention to detail, this mise-en-scène deftness is particularly visible in the “Vignettes,” 2003–07 series where in five paintings a man joyously lifts and twirls a woman. The action is a 360-degree sequence, but the setting is different in each of the five images. It is as if one is witnessing the climactic scene in five different productions of the same musical. The lovers are bordered by the word “LOVE” in outsized letters and the artist’s florid signature. These subliminal prompts suggest 19th-century illustrators denoting 18th-century paintings referencing early cinematic melodramas. These repurposed motifs—still carrying their birthmarks—visually connect these tableaux to the revered canon in not simply an art-historical sense but in an artist-to-artist-how-did-you-devise-this-solution sense. “If you accept that the canon has any value at all,” Marshall elaborates, “that the baseline foundation of the whole idea of progress and development and mastery in our history, that upends our relationship to the narrative and to the museums and things like that… That always appealed to me—being able to deploy a classical technique for contemporary purposes, perfectly.”
Kerry James Marshall, Slow Dance, 1992-93, ©2015 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. Although he stopped teaching years ago he continues to be generous to artists seeking advice. “I still talk to a lot of people. As far as going forward, I think if I have any influence on anybody’s perception on what they want to do as an artist, I think it’s to reinforce the idea that you can be more in control than you think you can be. If you want to reach a certain level or certain place, you shouldn’t think that being programmatic is a problem—that being programmatic is a limitation. Being programmatic is just the strategy that will help you be clearer about what you think your objectives are and whether or not you get there.
“I never miss a chance to say to anybody who feels like they’re not sure if they’re being understood or insufficiently recognized: If you pick clear objectives, go for those one at a time. When you get to one place then that will tell you whether you should zig left or zag right. It’s clearer than people think it is, I believe. As human beings, we don’t really do anything that’s really incomprehensible to other human beings because we’re operating within cultures that have history and precedent.” Marshall seems really concerned with your success in your lifetime.
Kerry James Marshall, Many Mansions, 1994, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 114 x135 in., The Art Institute of Chicago, Max V. Kohnstamm Fund, photography ˝The Art Institute of Chicago” Years ago, he had his first retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He felt he wasn’t ready, that the body of work was not yet deep enough, so he used the opportunity to experiment with his work—sculpture, photography, installation—and he invited other artists to participate as well. He was fully hands-on in the planning and installation. For this current exhibition, “Mastry,” this coast-to-coast survey, his participation in the planning and curating was minimal. On this occasion, he submitted to being curated: apotheosis complete.
Yet there are two developments that belie this apparent anointing; The Image of the Black in Western Art and the Chicago Cubs. The Image of the Black in Western Art is a 50-year project of Reconquista against erasure. Its 10 weighty volumes are not a secret. They are, after all, published by Harvard University Press—no small imprint. The Chicago Cubs have now, after a 108-year period of futility, won the World Series. The first is a reckoning. A recognition of something we knew but ignored because, let’s face it, we considered it of tertiary value. The second is merely the end of a statistical aberration. Yet we cleave to our prejudices, vile and tender, until they become as undeniable as physics.
Kerry James Marshall has been here all the time, busy in his studio all along.“Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles March 12–July 3; moca.org.
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The Broad Museum:
Creature
“Creature” springs from the same Latin root as creation, yet the two conjure polarities. The former suggests a beast, a lower animal, or if human then a distinctly lower form of human; a savage, a bestial Mr. Hyde. The latter implies a divine force, a desire or idea made palpable. In that interpretation, though, rests a conundrum—it would describe both a messiah and a golem, a redemption or a curse. That is where this exhibition begins.
Piotr Uklański, The Nazis (1998), courtesy of the artist and The Broad Museum. Piotr Uklanski’s 17-foot wide collage, The Nazis (1998), was vexatious when shown in 2000 at the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw and again, more infamously, in “Mirroring Evil“ at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum in 2002. Yet here in Los Angeles, movie capital of the western world, visitors seemed content to name the movie stars pictured in the 164 images of actors costumed as German SS soldiers. Perhaps viewers in Los Angeles, so immersed in entertainment culture, may have celebrity recognition as their default response while viewers in Warsaw and New York, cities respectively scarce and abundant with Jews, more readily recognize associations with themselves in this work, and the dreadful reasons why.
Takashi Murakami, Nurse Ko2 (2011), coutesy of the artist and The Broad Museum. Standing six-foot-two—more than half of that legs—Takashi Murakami’s K02 (2011) is a hentai mannequin of pain and salvation; dripping syringe in one hand, Bible in the other. This hyper-sexed moppet broadcasts proscription and allure. Woman infantilized, girl sexualized; the tyranny of male desire is not upended but stoked—making this a work of comical prurience that grows less humorous by the second.
Leon Golub, Interrogation I (1980-81), courtesy of the artist and The Broad Museum. The nucleus of Creature, is Leon Golub, whose six vast paintings surround us, like debauched tapestries, creating a perverse Rothko Chapel. These works, the smallest of which is over 13 feet wide, transform Creature to monster. Rawly visceral, and as prescient as they are historical, they evoke Abu Ghraib freelancers and School of the Americas graduates. A pair of torturers, in Mercenaries III, 1980, pause from their cruel labors to chat, smoke, drink, perhaps discuss football. Stress positions (not considered torture in W’s administration) are employed in Mercenaries V, 1984. His pistol aimed at three men locked in knuckle push-up posture, the persecutor smiles at us, presuming our approval. A uniformed guard, in Interrogation I, 1980-81 truncheons the torso of an inverted prisoner. Another guard looks on, giving instructions. This new guy, the instructor thinks, may possess natural skills but he lacks finesse. He will learn.
Though we, it seems, never do.
Leon Golub, Mercenaries III (1980), courtesy of the artist and The Broad Museum. “Creature,” November 5 – March 19 at The Broad Museum, 221 S. Grand Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90012, www.thebroad.org.
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Wilding Cran:
Karon Davis
During a Cabinet Council meeting three years into her mourning of the death of her husband, the still distraught Queen Victoria “rose from the table declaring that she could come to no decision without consulting with Prince Albert.” That display moved one of her Lords to suggest that she abdicate, having been so clearly driven mad by grief. The Karon Davis exhibition, “Pain Management,” is also a display of public lamentation, and a purgation, related to the death of the artist’s spouse, a visual shiva to which we are all invited.
Karon Davis, “Pain Management,” installation view, courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran. The exhibition is in two acts—in the main gallery and the appropriately claustrophobic project room—and chronology is reversed. Entering, one encounters a papier-mâché boy, reclining on a patch of artificial grass the size of a cemetery plot. Additional figures are funerary sculpture and, because the sorrow has become so outsized, a mausoleum in the form of a giant tissue box. The engaging corner section is plowed earth, with scrub-clad scarecrow, and planted with paper tissues. Is this a harvest or a sowing of grief?
Karon Davis, “Pain Management,” installation view, courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran. Dolefully, the project room reveals the source of the paper in the papier-mâché figures—shredded medical bills from the cancer ward. This waiting room, with dreadfully upholstered chairs and factory wall art mimics the forced cheeriness of hospital waiting rooms yet remains tedious and dreary. Here, though, we also find a park bench on a carpet of, again, artificial turf. It is perfectly smooth until it finishes abruptly, crumpled at the end of the room. This is not the road not taken but the path interrupted; it is the bookend of the boy reposed on his runner of time run out.
Karon Davis, “Pain Management,” installation view, courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran. It is upon exiting, however, that one discovers that twinge that will continue to revisit. In most galleries there is a small table or shelf with exhibition information, price lists, artist CV, as well as arts district propaganda. This gallery shelf is no different except it also contains a box of tissues, just sitting there like an urn on the mantel, normalizing the pain, making it commonplace, and reinforcing the tragedy of time and memory and forgetting.
Karon Davis, “Pain Management,” September 17 – November 12, 2016 at Wilding Cran, 939 South Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021. wildingcran.com
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CB1 Gallery:
Susan Silas
There is a feud taking place at CB1 Gallery; it sets in conflict the looking-glass and the hour-glass—our waning but resistant vigor versus our inexorable putrefaction. In her exhibition, revealingly titled in lower case the self-portrait sessions, Susan Silas wrestles this feud to an uneasy détente in order to tell us that the elaborate view of ourselves in the mirror—the one that at just the right angle and in the virtually perfect light, hides the fat under our chin and the bags under our eyes and the skull beneath the skin—is ritually essential as it reveals our vanity to us when we are alone, so that our anxious insufficiencies may be kept private.
The title series in the exhibition, eight quadruple self-portraits, are Rorschachs of the artist shoulder to shoulder and cheek to cheek. All are similar enough to cause repetitive confusion but reveal the subtlety of posture and eye contact (or not) that was the strategy of the silent film star. Indeed, the entire exhibition has a Sunset Boulevard patina, particularly the life masks the artist has made of herself at various ages, some represented merely in photographs.
Susan Silas, plaster casts (2016), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery. There are also ten sculptural versions in two sets of five, one fashioned in beeswax and the other in bronze. The renderings of just the face are surprisingly small, bordered by an edge that defines her chin, cheeks, and forehead, like a nun’s coif and bandeau. Otherwise smoothly curved and suggesting Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse, they seem ideally sized to fit into a pair of cupped hands, ready to be kissed good morning or, alternatively, rest in peace.
Susan Silas, self portrait video still (2016), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery. The self-portrait here is a time keeper. Ms. Silas’s self-portrait, 1979 is included. It is one of the heavy bookends of the exhibition. She was 26 at the time and would soon be turning 30 (an age beyond which no one should be trusted), but her gaze was, even then, set upon a farther horizon.
Susan Silas, self portrait (1979), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery. Her stare in this early self-portrait suggests the unflinching scrutiny she has directed at herself over her career, as participant, witness, and chronicler. Yet artworks change as we age; as they reveal to us what we were previously unprepared to acknowledge they also forgive us for the living fast that didn’t produce the dying young.
Susan Silas, “the self-portrait sessions,” June 4 – July 17, 2016 at CB1 Gallery, 1923 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90021, www.cb1gallery.com
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TWO VIEWS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANSEL ADAMS AND LEONARD FRANK
Liberty Cabbage. Freedom Fries. Whenever a reactionary quorum congregates one can be certain no good can come of it. While our senate stages a work stoppage on judicial appointments, and a viable presidential candidate—best known for his government shutdown antics—suggests patriots patrol Muslim neighborhoods just to keep an eye on those people, it is instructive to review the bigotry of our past selves costumed as defense of the realm. The photography exhibition “Two Views,” that ends its run at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles this Sunday, is a timely mirror in which we can all reflect.
This traveling exhibition organized by the Nikkei National Museum in British Columbia recently made its 12th and final stop here in Los Angeles. It features the work of two North American photographers, the world famous American Ansel Adams and a lesser known Canadian, Leonard Frank, examining the same subject: the internment of people of Japanese ancestry as a response to the attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Adams’s work on the subject is well known; we’ve seen his books of internment camp photographs Born Free and Equal, (1944) and Manzanar, (1988), as well as last year’s exhibition at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, “Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams.” His iconic images, well represented here at JANM, evoke anew the moral outrage and incredulity of seeing American citizens confined in a concentration camp, though at the time his sympathetic portraits found numerous detractors.
Of the Adams photographs three are exceptionally poignant. Roy Takeno, editor, and group reading paper in front of office (1943) shows the editor of the Manzanar Free Press reading the Los Angeles Times for news from outside the camp. Another, Baseball game, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif. (1943) shows the internees enjoying the most American of pastimes. Finally, Chicken farm, Mori Nakashima, Manzanar Relocation Center (1943) shows an inmate deceptively casting an indistinguishably human shadow.
Roy Takeno, editor, and group reading paper in front of office (1943) Library of Congress Baseball game, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif. (1943) Library of Congress Chicken farm, Mori Nakashima, Manzanar Relocation Center (1943) Less known is the work of Leonard Frank and Canada’s similarly hysterical xenophobia concerning the descendant Japanese population of British Columbia. A German immigrant of Jewish heritage, upon whom the cruel irony of his documentation could not have been lost, Frank died a year before the war ended but fully five years before the Canadian interment program was terminated. Far different from his typical landscapes and street scenes of British Columbia, Frank’s photographs of the internment camp, 100 miles from the militarily vulnerable Pacific Coast, show an unmistakably severe detention. Building A, Hospital Ward-Livestock Building (1942) shows the stained floor planking and crudely constructed room dividers in an infirmary devised for a population for whom comfort was not a consideration. Building K, Men’s Dormitory (1942) depicts a vast auditorium for the exhibition of farm animals, now crowded with bunk beds no more than two feet apart and rising up through the raised seating area. Most sinister is Japanese Evacuation Hastings Park—medical building interior (1942) where, between two rows of patients waiting to see the doctor, a uniformed Mountie stands.
Building A, Hospital Ward-Livestock Building (1942) Vancouver Public Library Building K, Men’s Dormitory (1942) Vancouver Public Library Japanese Evacuation Hastings Park-medical building interior (1942) Vancouver Public Library Long held anti-Asian sentiments in British Columbia certainly contributed to the unemployment, exile and imprisonment of Japanese Canadians alongside the confiscation and liquidation of their property to finance their incarceration. The highest ranking B.C. parliamentarian stridently proclaimed, “It is the government’s plan to get these people out of B.C. as fast as possible. It is my personal intention, as long as I remain in public life, to see they never come back here. Let our slogan be for British Columbia, ‘No Japs from the Rockies to the seas.’” Yet it is those who gave the appearance of stolid sensibility who were most responsible for this mass ethnic displacement and captivity. We here in the U.S. tend to ascribe richly cordial sensibilities to our neighbors to the north, yet in this election season—when there is assertion and rejection of whose lives matter—we should recall that Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King admitted in the House of Commons in 1944, “It is a fact no person of Japanese race born in Canada has been charged with any act of sabotage or disloyalty during the years of war.” However, he later confided in his diary, “It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.”
Ends this weekend: April 24, 2016TWO VIEWS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANSEL ADAMS AND LEONARD FRANKJAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM
100 North Central Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90012 -
CB1 Gallery:
Tight Ass: Labor Intensive Drawing and Realism
The aggressively mimetic realism that crowds this exhibition, curated by one of the gallery’s artists, is exceedingly white. Nearly every work is completed on white paper and color is employed by only four of the fourteen artists included. This makes the exhibition rather elemental in its approach to drawing—figure/ground, black/white—and suggests a cluster of crook-backed scribes toiling to register every flower mentioned in the Old Testament.
Katherine Vetne, American Brilliant (2015), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery. Photograph by John Janca. This medium definitely influences the message in that past thematic traditions are revived. We see an updated vanitas of glassware by Katherine Vetne; her silver point drawing American Brilliant (2015) is particularly strong. Peter Mitchell-Dayton creates a genre drawing worthy of 17th century Leiden but twists the notion to 1970s Los Angeles. His graphite rendering of The Rockford Files character Gretchen Corbett, File Cabinet (2012) is so tender it suggests a childhood TV crush (mine was Daphne from Scooby-Doo).
Peter Mitchell Dayton,
Gretchen Corbett (File Cabinet), 2012, courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery.Going full Neo-Romantic, Jacob Kenchiloe’s nude shepherd—Untitled (2016) and Untitled (2011)—idylls with rabbits and lions. Works by some of the other artists are less successful because the form does not bolster the content, leaving only their richly rendered imagery to be admired.
Jacob Kincheloe, Untitled (2016), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery. Jacob Kincheloe,
Untitled (2011), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery.Most engaging are two works by artifact forger and shaggy-dog historian Eric Petitti. His richly detailed drawings, in ink and graphite, imitate those archive-dwelling 19th century etchings of tragedies and battles that occurred before the advent of photography. The events he depicts, however, occur only in a speculative history of his own devising. Displayed recto/verso in one of the exhibition’s two galleries, this pair of works records incidents of an invented future’s past, when ocean-going city-states rose and fell, making these two 22” x 30” drawings, The Liu-Casco Theory About the Loss of the Golden Pear (2013) and The Fall of the Great Southern Flotilla Natori (2014), the standouts of the exhibition.
Eric Petitti,
The Liu-Casco Theory About the Loss of the Golden Pear (2013), courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery.Eric Petitti,
The Fall of the Great Southern Flotilla Natori (detail), 2014, courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery.Tight Ass: Labor Intensive Drawing and Realism, February 27 – April 9, 2016, at CB1 Gallery, 1923 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90021, cb1gallery.com.