Category: Pick of the Week

“A Piebald Era” at Garis & Hahn showcases Lisa Adams‘ latest explorations of painting’s potential for capturing modern life’s contradictions and irrationalities. Evoking derelict urban landscapes filtered through surreal reveries, Adams’ new paintings lead viewers on imaginary peregrinations through dreamlike realms suffused with inklings of dystopia. Quizzical fauna are beset by human obtrusions; while mysterious flora daintily encroach dilapidated constructs. Tensions between nature and artifice are further emphasized by spatial incongruities and disjunctions between representation and abstraction. Blue goo oozes from a circular wound in chartreuse sky as strange green vines invade a deserted building high on stilts above a flooded landscape in The Flat Hope of Exile (2018). The promise of amusement in Anthropogenic Carousel (2017, pictured above) is overshadowed by balefulness as a pink dolphin writhes impaled on a shadowless pole over a gaping black hole in an oceanic pool. Other works more explicitly treat of contemporary issues, such as A Hidden Fear of Veracity (2018) where an American flag shrouds a vaguely human form. Complementing her paintings, an installation titled Summary of Escalation (2018) includes dying tufts of straggly grass surrounding a graffiti-adorned ladder to nowhere atop a dismal concrete block. At heart, much of Adams’ work seems driven by her desire to distill latent curious beauty from questionable scenarios. This is most eloquently emblematized by The Expiration of Icons (2018) and several other portrayals of vibrant blooms in beleaguered environs.

 

Garis & Hahn
1820 Industrial St.
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Feb. 17

The first thing one notices upon entering Caitlin Cherry‘s show at Luis De Jesus is her sensational palette so improbable that it seems to have dropped from outer space. Clashing vibrant colors contrast, oscillate and dazzle as though her paintings were a laser light show. As the shock of hue subsides, you find yourself drawn into a bizarre alternate world ruled by curvaceous mystic black women who exude eccentric glamour while confronting discriminatory stereotypes. Dressed like pop stars in halters, leggings and high heels, Cherry’s female protagonists appear eerily spotlighted by feverish intermittent beams that play across vibrant rainbow striations evoking oil spills and luminous digital bursts. The more you gaze, the creepier Cherry’s mesmerizing world seems. Some of her women, such as the model-esque subject of Ultraviolet Ultimatum Leviathan (2019), exude a languid allure, while others hold mirrors to society’s sexism and racial bigotry. The suggestively posed, bespectacled woman of grossly distorted facial features in Sapiosexual Leviathan (2018) serves as an incisive retort to the derogatory absurdity of blackface and “sexy librarian” clichés. Cherry titled her show “Threadripper” after a brand of powerful computer processing unit; through her paintings inspired by LCD technology, she reflects and processes exploitation of black female bodies. Tangential to this notion, LCD mounts brandish ostentatious canvases at humorous odds with the quotidian office furniture to which they are attached. In the smaller gallery, “Mother Comes to Venus,” Zackary Drucker‘s entertaining short film featuring real-life stars, resonates with Cherry’s work from a transgender perspective.

 

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Feb. 9

Michael Benevento‘s website is devoid of a bio for Anthony Burdin, a reclusive artist whose work is as intriguing and enigmatic as his mysterious persona. Untitled, Burdin’s show encompasses works from 1992-2018 in a wide array of media. Each of Benevento’s four connected galleries is curated almost as a show of its own, with every room evoking a feeling distinct from the others. Most haunting is Gallery 2, where Blupsych Portal Pond (2018), an aqueous indigo video projection, wavers like a rectangular pool in the center of the floor, surrounded by walls dotted with dreamlike C-prints of artificial lights blurred into vibrant wavy squiggles against dark backgrounds. Spotlighted in the dimmed gallery, these framed pictures (example above) confer an eerie reverence upon the photographic trope of taking a picture while moving one’s camera amid artificial lights at night. This installation’s elegance is a far cry from a separate room containing works such as Ed Ruscha’s Dad (1992), where Burdin’s crude, whimsical doodles upon reproductions of famous paintings sport a playfully irreverent Dada-esque vision of art history. Another painting series consists of multi-layered expressionistic abstractions bearing painterly passages, frenetic squiggles, scratches, sgraffiti, and collaged ephemera including playing cards and notebook pages. Burdin’s strange, multifarious art seems to incarnate a frenzied determination to transmute mundanity into mystery.

 

Michael Benevento
3712 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Show runs through Jan. 26

 

 

 

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Up an elegant staircase in the Los Feliz mansion that is Parker Gallery, Alexandra Noel‘s paintings delineate rural scenes appearing very different than the verdant residential realm visible outside diamond-paned windows in the small chamber they currently occupy. Noel titled her show “Theatre Road” after a highway expanse in western Pennsylvania around which her parents grew up. Her paintings here are little, rarely much larger than a smartphone or tablet, and arranged on walls in a linear, serial manner. Some are firmly depictive, others more abstract. More pocket-size than easel-size, these pictures almost appear cramped to fit too-small panels; but their minuteness imparts an unsettling feeling that cascades as you peruse one painting after another. Recalling printed snapshots or digital photos viewed on smartphone screens, their diminutive scale brings to mind ways in which expansive scenes and intricate pasts are boxed into small, one-size-fits-all frameworks. Titles often allude to time or seasons. Noel’s representational scenes tend towards straightforward depictions of highways, people, or animals; but their apparent simplicity gives way to tense mystery: in Towards the end of a short life (pictured above, all works 2018), a brown dumpster-like contraption appears as a trap, but what for? What of the glowing-eyed cow and deer in And your sweet face came before me? Via improbable juxtaposition alongside such paintings, brightly hued panels appearing as geometric abstractions compound the mystique of Noel’s representational scenes. Downstairs, Alan Turner‘s captivating show exhibits a similar, slightly sinister bizarreness; among his “Paintings, 1979-2009,” a pitcher pours a hair braid; and disembodied limbs form strange mishmashes.

 

Parker Gallery
2441 Glendower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Show runs through Jan. 12

Rosa Loy’s paintings in “So Near and Yet So Far” at Kohn Gallery delineate a mysterious fairytale world desolately populated only by women. Initially, the women appear to be engaged in habitual activities such as farming or playing; but the more you look at them, the more an ambiguous sense of kookiness unfurls from their deceptively normal-looking settings. With old-fashioned hairstyles, simple clothing, and relatively generic miens, the Leipzig-based artist’s stoutly posed figures’ idealized appearances recall Communist propaganda painting; but surrealist elements burst the bubble of their Socialist Realism style. Many of Loy’s paintings feature two similar figures, one of which could represent the other’s imaginary friend or self-reflection; but it’s difficult to tell real from imagined, just as it’s difficult to tell exactly what the figures are supposed to be doing inside their dreamlike realms. Whatever they’re up to, they bear smug expressions, with sparkling eyes seeming to betray self-satisfied awareness that they’re engaged in something illicit. Or perhaps the joke is on the viewer whom they sometimes gaze at with impish smirks. Loy’s surreal elements often take on a decidedly sinister character, especially in Tulpenzwiebeln (2018, pictured above), where two nocturnally gardening girls are either planting or exhuming tulip bulbs appearing as evil fetuses. Loy paints with casein, giving her pictures’ surfaces a rich matteness matching their moody atmospheres. Muted washes somberly evoke gray Northern Europe days as well as the political ravages whose gloomy specter haunts the artist’s native East Germany even today. Collectively, Loy’s open-ended allegories seem to express the message that a little imagination can help one unbury intriguing possibilities from adversely circumscribed options.

 

Kohn Gallery
1227 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through Jan. 9

Cleverly titled “Tryouts for the Human Race,” Max Hooper Schneider‘s show features only four works, each of which exists as a wondrous self-contained realm inside Jenny’s, a diminutive Silver Lake gallery whose absence of outward signage makes the sight inside all the more surprising. On either side of the gallery is a specially lit aquarium harboring live creatures surrounded by human discards. As if their glass tank weren’t confining enough, the fish in Genesis (all works 2018) are sequestered by obtrusive aquarium decor of garish plastic and metal oddments agglomerated into hulking mounds rising above the water line. Cramped as live sardines in a can, crowded little schools of freshwater ichthyofauna dart nervously to and fro within their man-made ecosystem, not knowing where to turn within the dire straits of their bewilderingly artificial reef. Across the room, Lady Marlene showcases anemones, starfish and other marine species enveloped in whitish underwater masses of lingerie that overstretch the water’s surface and languidly sway as factitious seaweed in the aqueous current. Each aquarium’s dual humps of sculpted junk vaguely resemble looming heads or bodies, symbolically embodying the human factors behind extant oceanic islands of floating trash. Both artworks fancifully evoke animals trapped within cataclysmal tide pools in some peopleless apocalyptic world. Aquaria reappear in miniature inside Mommy and Me (facade pictured above), a charred dollhouse ruled by sadistic fiends. See if you can spot the decapitation scene among this macabre microcosm’s many elaborately detailed vignettes. Completing the show’s anthropogenic theme, Utopia features a model train endlessly circling a fleshly landscape predominated by pathological phallic protuberances.

 

Jenny’s
4220 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
Show runs through Dec. 29

“Objects of Desire: Reflections on the African Still Life” is a tour de force of technical versatility, showcasing Meleko Mokgosi‘s multifarious painting skills alongside written testaments of his art’s heady conceptual foundations. Mokgosi’s paintings and sculptures span so many different genres, subjects, time periods, and styles that one having just entered Honor Fraser could be excused for initially mistaking this solo exhibition for a group show. There are figures; prehistoric cave paintings; still lifes; barely-recognizable cropped realistic portrayals, apparently of wood, that function as mysterious abstractions; and 3D sculpture-paintings fashioned of fondant on Styrofoam. Close examination reveals that all of these paintings bear Mokgosi’s singularly contemplative, delicate touch. More significantly, many of them depict African subjects in a manner of painting stemming from classical European traditions. The Botswana-born, New York-based artist devotes his work to questioning ethnocentricity and exposing the problematic nature of many historical accounts assumed to be authoritative. This installation completes his 4-year, 8-segment body of work titled “Democratic Intuition.” Printed pages among his paintings, inscribed with Mokgosi’s handwritten annotations, serve as a treatise critiquing ways in which African art has been historically misunderstood and treated as a pawn of Eurocentric ends. In notes interspersing texts relating to MoMA’s notorious 1984 “Primitivism” show, Mokgosi disputes the museum’s curatorial perspective that subordinated non-Western objects below the Modernist works that they ostensibly had inspired. Challenging that paradigm, Mokgosi engagingly employs European painting conventions in the service of uplifting African subjects from historically marginalized positions.

 

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA   90034
Show runs through Dec. 19

Calling all Kimberly Brooks fans: A short time remains to catch “Fever Dreams,” her mid-career survey at Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery. More than 20 pieces, from small studies to watercolors on paper to large-scale oil paintings, sketch Brooks’ artistic progression over the past 15 years. Upon entering the gallery, the first paintings you encounter are among her newest and shiniest. All opulence and emptiness, these recent interiors evoke the desolate nostalgia of attending long-uninhabited historic sites such as homes, temples or palaces now unused except by visiting tourists. In paintings such as Altar (2018), Russian Room (2018, pictured above) and Chandelier (2018), thin washy passages of bare underpainting peep through mirror-like lattices of crinkly gold and silver leaf. Conveying an antiquated effect, the impromptu air and faded coloration of Brooks’ muted washes counterpoint the grandiose resplendence of her veined metallic overlays appearing as sumptuous skeletons of what once was. The inability to adequately imagine the distant past as described in history books and museums is clearly a key inspiration for Brooks’ hazily painted portrayals of venerable settings. Blank paintings within paintings appear to have mysteriously vanished from ornate frames. Adorning faintly painted museum walls, gilt-framed indistinct sub-pictures sport nondescript subjects. Several compositions recalling Renaissance-style tapestries, including Los Angeles (2018), feature obfuscated figures and nebulous landscapes evoking blurry reveries of vague recollections. Memory of the Banquet (2013) is particularly memorable, almost surreal, with a table floating amid gray throngs superimposed upon barren wilderness. Brooks’ watercolors from the early 2000’s portray more intimate scenes of cocktail parties, parks and lived-in rooms; yet they, too, are suffused with a dreamy sense of wistful detachment.

 

Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery
Building 1B/1C
1100 N. Grand Ave.
Walnut, CA 91789
Show runs through Dec. 6
(Unusual hours and secluded location; see website for details)

Uneasy undercurrents seep from Jo Ann Callis‘ delusively simple images. Her versatile talent for finding eeriness in the everyday is amply demonstrated in “Now and Then” at ROSEGALLERY. This manifold selection of paintings, sculptures and photographs from the 1970’s to present is diverse yet insightfully arranged, educing correspondences among various bodies of work. In the main gallery, photographs of similar subjects are hung in suggestive pairs or trios hinting at ambiguous stories extending between their separate frames. For instance, Yellow Room (1977), a sallow rendition of a spartan chamber with unmade bed, is displayed next to Wet Jacket (1979, pictured above), depicting tub water sanguinely reddened from a sopping sweater. These two unsettling scenes together intimate the dreariness of austere lives such as in dormitories or halfway houses. Across the room, close-cropped views of tables and their awkwardly posed human inhabitants evoke moments where senses of normalcy fleetingly dissolve into impressions of total weirdness. Scatological insinuations are frequently embedded in Callis’ domestic settings and utilitarian household items: a soaking black towel, for instance, appears excremental. Drastically oversized and framed by drab curtains, a naturalistically painted baby portrait is imbued with inexplicable oddness. A set of diminutive new abstract sculptures occupies turntables near a sign encouraging visitors to touch them.   Nothing ever seems quite right in Callis’ work, a feeling that intensifies the longer you look or touch. Yet generally you are left at a loss for putting your finger on precisely what is wrong in her strange scenarios that, deceptively, appear so normal.

 

 

ROSEGALLERY
2525 Michigan Ave., D-4
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show runs through Nov. 24

A beautifully curated show unites abstractions by Andy Moses, Jen Stark and Kelsey Brookes at William Turner Gallery. Its title, “Elemental,” betokens the three painters’ employment of basic lines and simple shapes as fundamental building blocks for compositions alluding to forces of nature. Each artist adheres to an evocative formalism where sharply delineated configurations suggest biologic or geologic phenomena. Stratified bands of color define Moses’ compositions such as Geomorphology 1704 (2017), which engulfs your field of vision to place you in a glowing nocturnal lava field where indigo sky meets burnt orange magma rippling all the way to the horizon. This extraordinary work alone makes the show worth visiting, as does Brookes’ A Line Through the Rainbow (Yellow to Orange) (2017), a lurid hazy landscape formed of little more than repetitive squiggles. Stark’s and Brookes’ paintings both involve Op Art-esque conformations of concentric rings and segmented wavy ruffles. Stark’s optically mesmeric sunbursts such as Prisma Chrome (2017, pictured above) seem like close-up views or allotropic variations of Brookes’ minutely detailed orbicular crystalline forms. Evoking the sensation of gazing into an algae-lined tide pool, Stark’s round resplendent mirrored piece, Pink and Blue (2018), echoes the shape and sparkle of Moses’ “Geodesy” tondo series of panels glossed in swirls of shimmering paint resembling nacreous mineral marbling. Corresponding to these paintings’ circularity, pinwheels in Brookes’ nearby Batrachotoxin (2017) recall molecular geometry. These unexpected harmonies are just the sort one hopes to discover in a three-person exhibition.

 

William Turner Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave., Ste. E-1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show runs through Nov. 8
Artist talk on Nov. 8 at 7 pm, with reception at 6 pm

 

 

Painter Thomas Fougeirol doesn’t paint in the traditional sense of the word; rather, he encrusts canvases with sculptural superficies across which he sprays pigment and blasts debris. If these techniques sound terribly obtuse, their results are anything but. The French artist’s unorthodox manner of painting yields strikingly evocative pictures. “No Furniture, No Picture,” the title of Fougeirol’s current show at Praz-Delavallade, seems a wry allusion to the fact that his paintings often appear as furnishings such as window treatments. His artworks are taut with tension between flat pictorialism and sculptural three-dimensionality. Upon entering the gallery, you are confronted by a large canvas resting on the floor, cantilevered several feet away from the wall. From afar, it appears to be a piece of dirty concrete lifted from a sidewalk or parking lot. Viewed closer, it still looks like a grimy slab scattered with debris and glass shards; but peeking around its edge reveals its status as a painting. Other pictures, created with the same technique of using his studio vacuum cleaner to blow detritus onto freshly painted surfaces, evoke seashells and beach glass having just washed ashore on a stretch of gray sand. Enrobed with furrowed paint, a lineup of small canvases (example above) alternately suggests drapery, bunched fabric, and pahoehoe lava. A monochromatic series coated with grooved paint the texture and color of white chocolate evokes windows shrouded by disintegrating blinds. In celebrating painting’s evocative sculptural capabilities, Fougeirol pushes the medium’s boundaries while remaining squarely within them.

 

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Show runs through Nov. 3

 

 

Wanly illuminated in the sickeningly greenish aura of an outdoor motel lamp, a woman’s partially clothed body lies lifeless at the threshold of Room # 118. Inside, a reverse peeping Tom anxiously peers out the window, hunching before another woman’s body, his piercing leer cryptically directed away from both corpses. This isn’t a still from a Hitchcock movie; it’s one of many photographs in Melanie Pullen‘s “Unseen Stories” at Leica Gallery LA. True to the promise of the show’s title, each image is replete with ambiguous suggestions cuing the viewer to conjure potential narratives. Occupying the entire upstairs gallery and spilling over to ground floor, the exhibition features a selection of rarely shown images from Pullen’s diverse collections of fashion photography, including her “Voyeur,” “Molotov,” “Juliette,” and “High Fashion Crime Scenes” series, among many others. Besides murders, suicides and Molotov cocktails, there are glamorous witches, Russian roulette and costume parties turned violent inside bathrooms. The common denominator is an uneasy relationship between beauty and trauma. Throughout her work, Pullen investigates society’s glamorization of brutality and suffering. Her photos expose the fact that, too often in our society, violent acts are seen as secondary to how the victim and/or perpetrator looked. If you like Pullen’s photography, this show is not to be missed; if you’re unfamiliar with her work, it’s a great introduction. Viewer beware: just in time for Halloween, much of Pullen’s grisly imagery is as disturbing as any gory horror movie, searing your brain with mental pictures likely to induce nightmares long after you’ve departed her show.

 

Leica Gallery LA
8783 Beverly Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90048
Show runs through Oct. 31

Challenging traditional conceptions of photography, Klea McKenna creates embossed photograms based on haptic, rather than visual, impressions. In a darkroom, she generates each image by pressing light-sensitive paper against an object and thus capturing the item’s textural nuance, then exposing the hand-embossed paper to flashlight beams. Whereas her previous photograms recorded natural objects such as tree stumps and spiderwebs, McKenna’s new body of work focuses on fabrics. “Generation,” her show at Von Lintel, includes 12 photograms derived from vintage and antique handmade women’s textiles of different national origins. A sequined China Poblana from Mexico, a silk Indian dupatta and a Spanish shawl (pictured above) become mysterious portraits of the anonymous women who made and wore them. Shimmering with contrasty gradations, McKenna’s silver gelatin prints of floral embroidery, frayed weavings and dangling threads appear strikingly lyrical. Among her varied compositions, some photograms appear nearly nonobjective, while others are rendered in detail so rich and elaborate that gazing at them feels like peering through a microscope. In Von Lintel’s smaller gallery, Michael Waugh‘s show, “Trust in Me” encompasses five representational drawings composed of handwritten text. Manually copied from bureaucratic documents and treatises, the tiny scrawled words forming each of Waugh’s bucolic scenes are as strategically indecipherable as windy post-truth rhetoric.

 

Von Lintel Gallery
2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Shows run through Oct. 20

Two artists exploring aspects of their Islamic heritage and personal identities converge in a pair of enchanting shows at New Image Art Gallery. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, Brooklyn-based artist Hiba Schahbaz applies her rigorous undergraduate training in traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting to works of a much larger scale in her show, “The Garden.” Lovely yet subversive, her roughly life-size nude self-portraits satirically challenge mainstream mores here and in her motherland. In contrast to the standard “male gaze” with regard to depictions of nude women, Schahbaz’ dreamily introspective paintings portray her body as she styles it, a self-reflective “female gaze” of the artist commanding her own image and situation amid history. Painting with black tea and gouache in meditative washes on handmade paper, she fancifully posits herself, with tan skin and flowing raven hair, as a beautiful re-imagined protagonist (pictured above) of canonized European paintings such as Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. In contrast to Schahbaz’ deceptively straightforward self-presentation, ceramic artist Sharif Farrag reflects upon his daily life and personal history through his own idiosyncratic mythology of stories and characters no less intriguing for the fact that their individual significations are not easily unraveled. A native Californian raised in Reseda by his Egyptian father and Syrian mother, Farrag harmonizes his divergent origins by incorporating aesthetics of comics, skateboarding, graffiti and car culture with styles associated with Muslim cultures. His show, “Hart Street,” appears as a bizarre bazaar of ceramic sculptures occupying floor, pedestals, shelves and rugs. To examine the elaborate detail in Farrag’s whimsically creepy vessels and sculptures is to descend a rabbit hole of peculiarity.

 

 

New Image Art Gallery
7920 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90046
Shows run through Oct. 27