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Category: **SEPT-OCT 2023
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“Solid Projections”
LarderDiving into the past to ground contemporary viewers in the ever-advancing here and now, the four artists in “Solid Projections” present a grouping of dubious memory objects—newly-minted souvenirs of moments alluded to rather than experienced. Beth Collar, Coleman Collins, Nevine Mahmoud and Jeffrey Stuker step into the role of revisionist historian in this exhibition that questions the lines between art and artifact, narrative history and fragile memory. Each artist’s work rebuts, ciphers or builds upon the meaning implicit within artifacts associated with antiquity, the recent past or timeless traditions, reminding us that history is just a story that we, as a culture, tell ourselves.
In the gallery’s namesake larder, or pantry in American dialect, Stuker’s Daphnis nerii caterpillar, Grand Sud, Madagascar, 1991 (from the Botanist’s Satisfaction) (2023), lit from within, presents as both a traditional column and Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic monolith. When viewed from above, this work tells the fictional story, placed in the 1990s, of a daphnis nerii caterpillar who, when feeding on a flowerless vinca (periwinkle), produces excrement that is harvested for making cytotoxic drugs used in chemotherapy for cancer. Stuker, who underwent chemotherapy in the early 1990s, uses computer renderings to wax poetic on his unlikely would-be hero. Collins, likewise, references technology to draw the past into the present. The artist’s wall-mounted relief, Untitled (Niche) (2023), evokes both ancient stone slabs with inscriptions and the generic background of most modeling software. Emblazoned with the bust of Nefertiti, this work builds on both the initial artifact and Isa Genzken’s 2012 sculpture series of the Egyptian queen to imbue this iconography with yet another layer of meaning.
Mahmoud’s Anima (2023), an earless fawn’s head brought forth from Turkish Sivec marble and placed upon brushed aluminum, seems to float outside of time, in that it contributes to the tradition of marble sculpture that can be traced back to ancient Cyprus and the origins of Western culture. Mahmoud’s Vanity head (2023), a floral and phallic form that was 3D printed in Accura Xtreme White 200 resin, sits close by on an identical brushed aluminum shelf. One is hard-pressed to find the difference in the finished quality of Anima’s ancient medium and Vanity head’s new printing technology. Collar’s sculptures in plaster also straddle recorded time and verge into the speculative space of prehistoric studies. Molded in the form of the Liver of Piacenza, a 5,000-year-old bronze artifact and the most notable record of haruspicy, Salvation and Silence (both 2022) are adorned with pencil drawings of pterosaurs, asserting that all readings of times past—heavily supported by material proof or not—are, to some extent, conjectures.
Existing in our contemporary moment can, at times, feel like hopelessly staring into Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library—as if everything to be written or created already has been, thus nullifying our present. What Borges offers as solace—and what the artists in “Solid Projections” also champion—is the power inherent in both annals and archive longevity. Combining precursory narratives with subtle indicators of the early 2020s, each artist advances a lineage and conveys history anew.
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Molly Segal
Track 16 GalleryLike many other pictorial artists, Molly Segal is a storyteller. Her preferred medium is watercolor applied in various degrees of thickness to a special plastic-coated paper that is less absorbent than conventional papers, but also more easily re-worked. The titles of these works—variously satiric, scabrously funny, foreboding and matter-of-fact—function essentially as captions to her narratives. Her show, “What We Whispered and What We Screamed,” is the apocalyptic Anthropocene—social disintegration in the wake of the collapse of the biosphere and civilization—already in evidence everywhere from city-wildland interface to derelict patches of urban and suburban real estate.
Her approach is both technically and narratively irreverent. She stains, shadows, swipes, swirls, sponges, even salts the surfaces of the paintings. And certainly (with a built-in assist from the plastic surface)—leaving no 20th-century painting trope unexploited—she drips; but the gesture here serves the narrative first, underscoring its absurdity. Her draftsmanship occasionally suffers in her apparent haste to get the picture. In Gobble Me, Swallow Me (2023), a fire scissors down a kind of ravine and back up a hillside, billowing black smoke up a foamy backdrop of turquoise and amethyst.
Molly Segal, I Am Truly Sorry About All This, 2023. In another, Make It Rain (2022), she takes a more minimalist approach, crisscrossing the paper with slashing brushstrokes, raising an embankment with a palisade of vertical black strokes, hatching out foreground and back with umber horizontals, while fiery yellows and reds bubble up against it. The Old Familiar Sting (2022) is by far the most specific—an explosion among a chain of electrical transmission towers—and, not coincidentally, the most texturally and chromatically variegated.
Her eye is drawn to the fraught and sometimes fatally flawed human intervention. In I’m Gonna Make Noise When I Go Down (2023), a dozen scattered firefighters appear with threads of hose, hiking up a smoky hillside, the terrain of which is barely discernible in the purple haze of smoke and fire. But her real penchant is for the human figure in its less-than-heroic posturings and the unrelenting ferocity of its carnal appetites. An image that looks composited from more than one source, I Am Truly Sorry About All This (2023) features human figures (male and female, but mostly male) clustered around a beached whale (not an uncommon sight in recent years), most of them with their hands clutching their crotches, which I confess made me think first of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
She isolates a heterosexual couple in a related pair of 2023 paintings—with the titles When Smoke Changes the Color of the Sun and There Is No End to What A Living World Will Demand of You—with faces blurred, extensions somewhat crudely elided. The figures seem to literally consume themselves—mirroring, as in other works, the apocalypse as a self-cannibalizing spectator sport. As a corrective to the blithe optimism and “forward thinking” encountered in so much of the art world (and its press), Segal’s vision is refreshing in its blunt honesty. The problem here is that art demands “whispers” to be registered as dramatically as “screams.” The real-world stakes warrant nothing less.
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Mònica Subidé
Nino Mier GalleryNew portraits and still lifes by Mònica Subidé channel the aesthetic of circa-1906 Paris and Barcelona with such organic authenticity that they could credibly pass for recently discovered works by an unknown genius of that era’s avant-garde—yet they are imbued with an urbane air that belongs to the present. Stylized in a schematic mode that deploys nearly abstract shapes as elements of image, her portrait subjects’ physical aspects, such as hair, facial features and anatomy—as well the garments, adornments and furnishings that surround them—are all rendered with strong, minimal lines containing chromatic pieces like the solder in stained glass.
The evocation of Picasso is intentional and well met, fluently speaking the language of lofty arched eyebrows, aquiline noses flanked by pure color, bone structure by means of planar color forms, and chunky flowers in flat-fronted vases. Further, Subidé’s The red ear (2023) expresses its melding of physiogonomy with abstract gesture very much in the manner of Matisse’s 1905 woman in The Green Stripe, and there’s even a pensive Harlequin in her piece The yellow room (2023). Picasso’s portraits of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired the exhibition title “Teresa’s wings,” as well as Subidé’s From Marie Thérèse (2023)—a painting that depicts a charming figure with a cantilevered armature set against a bruised purple background. The subject’s wide lovely face is half blue and a quarter green with her head quixotically cocked, all balanced on a strong cylindrical neck and haloed by dark sculptural tresses.
Mònica Subidé, The yellow room, 2023. © Mònica Subidé. Photo: Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery. Elsewhere, a ghostly sketched-in bowl of oranges holds space for whichever of Cézanne’s you can also imagine or might prefer (I’m partial to the one in the Art Institute of Chicago, but those at The Met and MoMA both have their charms). It scarcely matters which particular bowl of oranges you have in mind; Subidé functions as an art-historical wormhole, an avatar for a way of painting that explores our world by going beyond realism. Subidé’s disarming oil palette of rambling rose, cornflower blue, taffy yellow, felted gray, veined black, a rather imperious lavender, disconcertingly chipper green and fruit-punch red is saturated, but not at all intense. Not quite dusty—though there is an old-soul quality to them that further speaks to their art-historical lineage—but the effect is somehow both ashy and bright.
The works have a surface texture that’s flatter than impasto, but it still speaks to the body mass of oil paint itself, occasionally augmented by elements of collage using her own drawings. This depth of surface amplifies the textural quality as an optical matter, breathing air back into compressed pictorial space. It also opens up a dimension of experiential depth and nuance, giving narrative even in the absence of context, and imparting, if not emotion, at least mood, without drama. That’s what the eyes are for. Despite their schematic nature, whether making contact, pointedly averting their gaze, or simply lost in thought, her paintings are brimming with enough feeling to make each one feel alive.
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Will Thornton
Nicodim Annex, Los AngelesThere are dark recesses of art that draw us into something we may think we want no part of: images that weave the repulsive into skeins of elegance that we do not fully understand because the understanding resides only within the artist, if anywhere. The effect is both disturbing and comforting. Disturbing because we are drawn in—though we are also kept out—and comforting because we can stare with impunity in the gallery from a safe distance.
Will Thornton seems headed to be a master of this practice, like Francis Bacon and Joel-Peter Witkin, with his new show, “Hypnagogic Sex Idols.” The question hovering behind this exhibition is how Thornton got here.
A haircutter by trade, he apparently taught himself to paint, and paint well—like Velázquez even—by watching YouTube videos, and then he became a society portrait painter in Charleston, South Carolina. His portrait painting crashed during the pandemic, at a time when he and his wife were trying to conceive. As Thornton would have it, the threat of the pandemic, the loss of livelihood, and attempts at conception all converged to yield dreams and images between wakefulness and sleep. These dreams became fertility fetishes: idols to empower the soul and calm anxieties.
Will Thornton, “Hypnagogic Sex Idols,” Installation View, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery. “Hypnagogic” is defined as that which accompanies the act of falling asleep. The show features 25 paintings of Thornton’s sex idols, each painted from an actual object crafted by Thornton himself with obvious skill and finesse. The range of form and iterative invention is impressive. No two are the same, yet they all seem to be part of a very tight-knit visual language consisting of abstracted, caricatured sexual organs and parts that share a common set of properties.
Many of them seem to have internal gyroscopes allowing them to hover or balance themselves on pointed legs. (Like the Venus of Willendorf that came before them, they have no feet.) Often, they are personified like small figurines squirting and performing for an audience while simultaneously provoking the viewer with their profanity or their fertile, oozing viscosity. The breasts, the clitoris, the anus and phallus seem to fit in an uncannily natural design, following unstated laws of the logic or illogic of dreams.
With quotes from Carl Jung and Cronenberg’s character Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome (1983), Thornton locates the source of this project deep within the psyche, suggesting a portal into the unconscious mind. Jung speaks of a little hidden door in the secret recesses of the soul. Brian O’Blivion, a less reliable narrator, speaks of emergent visions capable of causing tumors. “Hypnagogic” itself seems a word unearthed from beneath other ancillary meanings, like the soul and the collective unconscious, relative to its usefulness for the artist’s imagination. Thornton has clearly found them both relevant and useful in delivering a remarkable body of work for his first exhibition. In the end, we don’t really have to understand because we have looked, unflinchingly—possibly against our will—and have
accepted that this may have been the point all along. -
Brian Cooper
Rory Devine Fine ArtTransforming the gallery into a performance space for his installation “Things Thinking,” Brian Cooper constructs an environment for contemplating the ideas of cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, whose theories posit that our perceptions of the world are mental models or “maps” of reality, rather than actual space, time or material things. Consisting of three sections, the installation includes 13 paintings hung salon-style on one wall; two soft sculptures that function as furniture in the center of the space; and a stage abutted against a grommet-lined trompe-l’oeil painting of a synthesizer shaped like a curtain, suspended on the opposite wall. Throughout the exhibition, Cooper scheduled concerts in which he and other musicians played experimental electronic music on a synthesizer set up on the stage.
Iconographically, the artist sets up a dichotomy between consciousness and physicality. The synthesizer painting is Cooper’s conceptualization of perception: titled Perceptions Delusion (Whoever Felt It Dealt It), it features a blue synthesizer with switches, dials and cords that refer metaphorically to the networks and interactions of our senses—a clever allegory for the brain and all its synapses. By contrast, the group of paintings on the opposite wall explores how consciousness affects our bodies. In the larger examples, Cooper creates biomorphic abstractions made up of elongated, curvy forms that resemble folded-over gym mats, piles of blankets, pencil erasers or tongues, as well as contorted human figures in high-energy activities such as wrestling or sex. The connection to human exertion in these works is reinforced by the fact that several of the biomorphic beings are wrapped in sweat bands or draped with white towels, and their surfaces are covered with liquid droplets that could be perspiration or tears. In the smaller paintings, the “creatures” look like contraptions that hold reams of white paper—a reference to writing, language and thought, byproducts of the mind. Collectively, the paintings are monochromatic, which unifies them as a group. Painted in various shades of rust-red signifying different skin tones, they are also incredibly seductive, as their soft radiant internal lighting establishes an overall sensuous tone.
Brian Cooper, Close Quarters (La Familia), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Rory Devine Fine Art. The two sculptures in the center are essentially 3D representations of the forms imagined in the paintings. During the concerts, audiences could sit on them while gazing alternately at the paintings and the performance on stage. In creating a place for simultaneous engagement with sumptuous visual art and immersion in the vibrations of electronic music, Cooper provided an unconventional and inviting vehicle for musing on the nature of being.
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Faith Ringgold
Jeffrey DeitchMaya Angelou’s words You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise speak to Faith Ringgold’s origins—as a college student in the 1940s, she was told by her professor that she had no talent for art. According to Dr. Lisa Farrington’s 2004 monograph on the artist, such words served as a slingshot of unwavering optimism.
“Faith Ringgold: A Survey” reveals her to be a prolific, trailblazing artist, storyteller and activist whose practice interrogates art his-story. Through works on canvas and paper, quilts, sculpture and printmaking, Ringgold demonstrates aesthetic autonomy in the face of the patriarchal bias inherent within the art canon as well as early male-centric discussions about the Black Arts Movement. In fact, along with Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, Carol Blank and Pat Davis, she became a founding member of the New York–based collective “Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc.” in 1971.
Made that year, Woman Free Yourself (1971) is an offset poster that appropriates a banner style of lettering, stating the work’s title in grape purple and taffy green. It correlates in composition, hue and text style to Unite (1971), a print created by Barbara Jones-Hogu, a founding member of the Chicago-based artists’ collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). Echoing the sentiments of Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” the work makes a direct application of the Black Power theme of self-determination.
Faith Ringgold, Sugar, 1978. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch. Ringgold’s practice includes textile works known as “Story Quilts.” Tar Beach #2 (1990–92) is made of silks pieced together, upon which Ringgold printed a surreal scene: a Black family sits on a city building rooftop with a violet-blue evening against the skyscrapers. Two figures lie on a blanket staring up at the sky, while another figure, a girl, soars freely among the stars. Present in the scene is the character Cassie Louise Lightfoot from her children’s book, with whom Ringgold mixes her own memories of growing up in Harlem to narrate her-story.
In Jazz Stories: Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #8: Don’t Wanna Love You (2004), Ringgold—using acrylic on canvas with a patchwork fabric border—captures the magic of musical improvisation. At center stage is a Black female lead singer adorned with a purple and tangerine spirograph print dress. This queen—with a confident, captivating gaze and hands on her roller-
coaster, brickhouse hips—eliminates any hint of competition. Orange brushstrokes dancing around a jazz band and a blue background framed with geometric shapes almost inspire the audience to foot-tap in participation.Ultimately, “Faith Ringgold: A Survey” represents the complete version of an artist who spoke in her own voice responding to and transcending the thought leaders of her day. So, whether it is expressionism, abstraction, conceptualism, feminism or Black Nationalism, Ringgold uses her creative tools as a weapon of agency. To be sure, this retrospective is a once in lifetime experience worth playing over and over again, like Aretha Franklin’s version of Respect.
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Joni Sternbach
Von Lintel GalleryIn 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.
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Maria A. Guzmán Capron
Shulamit Nazarian“Pura Mentira,” the title of Oakland-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s exhibition, is a statement on people’s propensity for multiplicity. Using textiles as her medium, Capron merges the figures in her pieces together, their bodies often winding together to create circles like a colorful ouroboros. Her exhibition reflects on queerness by playing with traditional male and female signifiers. Also inspired by the drama of telenovelas, Capron explores how lies and deception affect our beings and how we present ourselves. “Pura Mentira” asks: Which parts of ourselves do we celebrate, and which parts do we try to push down? As I walked through the show, I found myself thinking: Are the stories that we tell about ourselves really true? Are we deceiving ourselves by denying our multiplicities?
In No Soy Florero (all works 2023), the figure’s head and torso lie flat on the wall, while its legs are filled with stuffing and emerge slightly from the wall. Floral patterns abound in the figure’s eyebrows, hair and neck; its hands are placed on the cheeks in a shocked expression, though it feels contrived and slightly coy. The title, which roughly translates to “I’m not a vase,” seems to hint at the decorative—at our self-fashioning. Floral patterns do not make one a vessel for flowers; feminine, bright clothing doesn’t make one a purely feminine figure.
Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Gata Salvaje, 2023. Photo: Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. A sense of fluidity between genders appears throughout the show. Desátame features three figures crouched together, their limbs long and tangled. The central figure is flanked by feminine characters. A couple of the toes in the group look more like claws, suggesting either animal or otherworldly identities. Capron uses the fabric in clever ways, giving the illusion of flowing hair and fabric unfurling in the wind, lending more drama to the unlikely trio. Capron stitches together these scenes to give her figures, in her words, the “freedom to be constantly changing and becoming.” That “becoming” might also mean giving in to our more wild instincts. Gata Salvaje features fabric with zebra stripes, and a long tail, bringing a wildness to the figures, even while their features still read as human. Each soft sculpture seems to change as you notice another detail here, another tiny piece of fabric there. These creatures are unlike any you would see walking down the street, yet they might also seem eerily familiar.
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Linda Arreola
Avenue 50 StudioCurated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, Linda Arreola’s “Abstract Wanderings From the LA Borderlands: 2020–2023” comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings, some in multi-panel formats with varying scales, can scarcely be contained in the gallery’s unassuming space—a testament to her formidable command of form, color and bridled ferocity. Reflective of her architectural training, her techniques culminate in complex and symbolic narratives. It’s a common misconception that Chicana artists are identified with—and manifest ideas within—a realist, figurative framework. Not so—or at least, not all. Historically, abstraction, with its focus on nonobjective elements of shape, form, color and line, is frequently positioned as the purview of certain mid-20th-century artists—the West Coast established its own hierarchy with such artists as Karl Benjamin, Helen Lundeberg and Sam Francis.
Arreola’s practice is often placed within the rubric of “Chicana abstraction,” but I’m not convinced that is an appropriate descriptive. Fundamentally she breaks new ground as an alternative tradition within American hard-edged painting. As the artist states: “… my interest has been in honoring the simple, the common and the elemental.” Her current series is seething with vibrant color—which is its own reward—as well as grids, text, phrases, glyphs and indigenous symbology as consequential structural elements. Her paintings often entice the viewer with a compelling elusiveness while maintaining an inherent connection to the everyday, the communal and the contemporary social milieu.
Linda Arreola, Little Gray Hairs, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. The sentimental, if symbolically complex work, Sereno (2023) gets to the heart of Arreola’s personal motivations. An homage to her Los Angeles neighborhood, El Sereno, the picture weaves the area’s complex social dynamic with striking uses of text and color, indigenous cyphers, gang-tagging signs and cosmology, all coexisting and backgrounded by an energetic palette acting as narrative guide. It’s an alluring optical juggling act.
Dump (2022) echoes the existential menace of the 2017–21 presidential administration; the picture employs a muted palette reading as a threatening military insignia. It’s a sobering take on a historical aberration. The diptych Little Gray Hairs (2021) confronts the specter of aging and mortality—something many contemplated during the pandemic. But it’s rooted in an authentic desire to embrace what is ahead of us. This is not a fatalist or somber picture, rather one with a fair degree of optimism—a poignant, universal expression. We all travel that road.The exhibition is rife with an adventurous sensibility and skillful virtuosity, and Arreola—in full control—takes us along for the ride.
