Category: Pick of the Week

“WISHFUL THINKIN’,” the title of Sarah Cromarty‘s show at Klowden Mann, indicates its tenor of hope against hope. Cromarty layers cardboard, digital prints, paint, glitter, rhinestones and sundry other materials to create 3D paintings affecting appearances of escapist kitsch in order to underscore the twin characteristics of adventure and futility inherent to fantasy. Through these works, Cromarty self-consciously elaborates her own imaginary world of lush green jungles and sparkles, positing painters as mythologizers and implicitly underscoring her own role as mastermind of intriguing yet impenetrable painted vignettes. Depicting a manicured hand holding brushes like magic wands before a rainforest glimmering with luminous orbs, The Painter (all works 2018) evokes the notion of an artist lost in a tropical paradise like Robinson Crusoe—perhaps a cardboard paradise of her own device. The closer you view such paintings the more blatantly their construction negates the affectation of tantalizing diversion they project across the room; the images quickly lose their illusion to seams and sidelong facets of layered cardboard evoking eroded quotidian tan cliffsides. The Magician, portraying a nude dancer, is a facade posteriorly adorned with glittery stickers and purple washes (pictured above), as though such embellishment would soften the letdown of the ligneous reverse. The Guide plays the most overt trick: this mystical verdant jungle-scape is angled suggestively away from the wall, seeming to promise an exhilaratingly arresting discovery beyond. What could the other side hold? Nothing so eye-popping as a flank of bare plywood.

Klowden Mann
6023 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
Show runs through Oct. 13

Channeling Death Valley into downtown LA, William Lamson has transformed Make Room into “Badwater,” an ecologically themed installation as poetically evocative as it is scientifically ingenious. Via an elaborate system of pumps, fans, hoses, timers and other contraptions, Lamson has converted the gallery into a microclimate mimicking evaporation cycles of Badwater Basin salt flats. Upon entering, you become cognizant of changed air tasting of humid salinity. Toward a far wall is a tiered structure, the exhibition’s centerpiece. Radiating irregularly from this structure, a brittle blanket of salt crystals encrusts the floor in oozy coruscant waves, crunching like a dry lakebed underfoot as you approach. Appearing as a comely but mad science experiment, the curiously arrayed shelf contains various combinations of metal pans, saline solutions, dried lemons, earth, resin and glass sculptures shaped as geological forms. Reactive processes involving sodium chloride and magnesium sulfate create an alluringly sparkly whitish crust growing all over, forming wiry mineral stalactites dangling precariously from shiny amorphous glass bubbles. Like organic matter, the salty crust constantly evolves throughout the show’s duration. Even visitors’ breath affects its growth. Are abiotic ecosystems really non-biological? Several foam sculptures mimic crystalline forms; it’s difficult to tell where minerals end and manmade begins. Adorning gallery walls are silver gelatin photograms (example above) created from the peculiar sculptures. Aligning with the weather theme, these painterly photograms evoke astrophysical events such as rain and movement of sun, moon and planets. Not so different from visiting the actual Death Valley site, Lamson’s “Badwater” is a mysterious experience liable to provoke rumination long after you’ve left.

Make Room
1035 N. Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through Oct. 29

Robert Yarber‘s spellbinding nocturnal realms feel at once familiar and otherworldly. Each of his paintings is far weirder than the sum of its parts, with generic characters and unplaceable urban locales coalescing into bizarre, morbid scenarios. Yarber’s mysterious nightscapes appear as though they could belong to any city, bringing to mind anthropologist Marc Augé’s conception of “non-places” —impersonal locations like motels and shopping malls—engulfing entire urban municipalities. In his paintings, embracing couples hover high above neoned cityscapes, clinging to each other in the thin night air, emblematizing a universal, desperate desire to overcome isolation in a supermodern world. Suspended midair, these ambiguous figures could be levitators, acrobats or suicides. From across the room to a few feet away, Yarber’s large-scale paintings appear as fantastic dreamlike visions, but the more you stare, the more his eerie febrile scenes seem like nightmares, with you, the voyeuristic viewer, plummeting into glowing streets alongside his protagonists. Disintegrating upon closer observation, his loose brushwork somehow still feels real. So intriguing and locally relevant is Yarber’s work that it seems a major oversight that he should only now be having his first solo show in L.A. since 1995—a long gap rendering “Return of the Repressed” at Nicodim Gallery all the more exciting. Evincing his progression, this show features examples from the 80’s and 90’s alongside paintings so new they haven’t quite dried. Inside the office are several that aren’t counted as part of the show, but are just as much must-sees. All manifest Yarber’s talent for suffusing fluorescent hues, stylized chiaroscuro and expressionistic brushstrokes with uncanny palpability.

Nicodim Gallery
571 S. Anderson St., ste. 2
Los Angeles, CA 90033
Show runs through Oct. 20

Prints and drawings by three generations of Inuit women offer a fascinating glimpse into remote Canadian Arctic life at the Armory Center for the Arts. “Akunnittinni,” the show’s Inuktitut title translated as “between us,” fittingly summarizes its convergence of a Baffin Island mother, daughter and granddaughter who directed art towards societal, familial and autobiographical documentation. Each espoused a unique personal voice. Stonecut prints by Pitseolak Ashoona (1904-1983) spotlight spirituality, animals and recollections of the traditional nomadic lifestyle of her childhood. With forms reduced to stylized, dreamlike essences, her centralized compositions incorporate small repeated motifs surrounded by ample expanses of bare white paper that evoke vast frozen landscapes dwarfing all life. Pitseolak’s wistful totemic scenes appear quaint compared with unsettling drawings by her daughter, Napachie Pootoogook (1938-2002), who highlighted social problems and harsh realities of subsistence. With wry humor and a sensitive eye for nuanced facial expression, several of Napachie’s drawings graphically portray violence and women’s oppression by male Inuit and non-Inuit. Embodying the most colorful palette and contemporary manner, Napachie’s daughter, Annie Pootoogook (1969-2016) delineated the modernization that had infiltrated their rural village of Kinngait. Clad in baseball caps and jeans, her protagonists are surrounded by tokens of modern urban society: shiny gadgets, blaring logos and prepackaged foods fill their humble homes. Works by this matrilineal trio together evince how much Inuit life had changed over the last century; but from Pitseolak’s Dream of Motherhood (1969) to Napachie’s Eating his Mother’s Remains (1999-2000) to Annie’s Family Sleeping in A Tent (2003-2004, pictured above), ancestry has remained their common denominator.

Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103
Show runs through Dec. 16

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) is popularly epitomized by her monumental masterwork The Rose (1958-66), whose counterpart, The Jewel (1959), is on permanent display at LACMA. It’s rather misleading, for her diverse oeuvre encompasses far more than just those heftily textured behemoths. Billy Al Bengston once declared, “Never just look at one of Jay’s paintings.” With over 20 paintings, “The Texture of Color” at Marc Selwyn Fine Art offers an inkling of DeFeo’s talent for crystallizing feeling and evoking spatiality via compendiously lyrical small-scale abstractions. These little paintings could be fancied as X-ray visions into facets of The Jewel or crevices of The Rose, as if the opaque, muted impastos of DeFeo’s more famous paintings harbored hidden realms of vibrant color. Though seemingly nonobjective, certain passages, such as a sky-like expanse in Homage to Thomas Albright No. 4 (1983), give the uncanny impression of receding deeply in space: an illusionistic effect heightened by contrast with impastoed strokes and bare paper highlighting the painting’s actual surface flatness. Viscous brushwork swirls and protrudes with meditative delicacy, evoking rocks, mountains and water. Alabama Hills No. 8: Arctic Sunset (1986) appears as the summit of a cinder cone. With murky shades of cobalt, an untitled painting from 1983 brings to mind a raft buffeted by crashing waves over the wreckage of a sinking boat. Several untitled pictures resembling corners in rooms (example above) recall Francis Bacon’s claustrophobic interiors. Each of DeFeo’s paintings presents a uniquely evocative existential vista to which photographic reproduction does little justice.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 S. Santa Monica Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
Show runs through Sep. 5

Aftermath of Puerto Rico flooding looms large in the backgrounds of Jonny Negron‘s psychically charged scenes. Indoors and outdoors, water is everywhere. Resembling graphic novel or zine illustrations, Negron’s eleven gouache-on-paper paintings in “A Small Map of Heaven” at Château Shatto depict stylistically corpulent Botero-esque figures inhabiting darkly allegorical mise-en-scènes of damaged tropical paradises. These scenarios are often as humorous as they are disturbing. A muscle-bound bodybuilder injects his left arm even as he resolutely continues his bicep curls in Injection Site (pictured above, all works 2018), a painting whose surface itself looks water-damaged. With its wearer nowhere to be seen, a ball gown—J-Lo’s Dress—mysteriously materializes as an apparition in the jungle. In Denissa, the Grim Reaper piquantly pats the generous rump of a twerking blond, perhaps Denissa Lopp, a well-known Puerto Rican dancer charged with prostitution. Negron’s amusing apocalyptic scenes recall Hieronymus Bosch but their subtext is the opposite of his doomsaying. The Puerto Rican artist taps the flood, a powerful cataclysmic symbol spanning religious myths to climate change warnings, to proffer a message of persistence apposite to his motherland’s current struggles. With clothes tattered and skin lacerated, his idiosyncratically painted characters endure. Awash in torrents of water and wreckage, some struggle to stay afloat. Others endeavor to regain normalcy on sodden land. Despite the deluge, life goes on.

Château Shatto
1206 Maple Ave. #1030
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show runs through Sep. 1

Watch out! Don’t tread on the dead rats; they’re part of the show. “Macrosolutions to Megaproblems” is a small but captivating assortment of quirky pieces by Sam Davis and Josh Mannis at M+B. At first, you might be so distracted by Mannis’ attention-grabbing paintings as not to notice Davis’ Good Rats (all works 2018), three tiny rodent sculptures unassumingly lying on the floor, their grossly elongated pink tails absurdly strung to the ceiling like jury-rigged electrical cables. The cordlike caudal appendages of Davis’ urethane rodents echo strings and cords in Mannis’ paintings, Love, Devotion, Surrender and The Key (pictured above). In The Key, three half-doctor, half-soldier hybrids bunglingly trip over one another while stitching together the torso of a weird, stringy-maned humanoid whose face is obscured by wavy-lined sky; one of the camouflage-clad physicians is apparently not finding whatever key he is after as he frantically searches the Internet. Equally improbable, Davis’ creepy Hell Class Mobile Cathedral is an unappetizingly green, plucked-turkey-like form on wheels, punctuated with unlikely little chambers appointed with dollhouse furniture. Where is this vehicle going? Perhaps nowhere. Mannis and Davis titled their show after an eponymous Voivod song whose pessimistic 1988 lyrics seem strikingly modern. Like the song, their whimsically grisly work is infused with sardonic hints of futility. Sometimes there is no solution but to laugh resistantly in the face of an absurd problem.

M+B
612 N. Almont Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Show runs through Aug. 25

Just as sordid episodes leak bit by bit from grand American narratives, a morbid sense of truculence stealthily emerges from Joshua Hagler‘s bright palette and superficially quaint old-time imagery. His show “The River Lethe” at the Brand Library encompasses two riveting installations and over 30 paintings inspired by his expeditions through former frontiers of Westward expansion. Hagler subverts the historic authoritativeness of Manifest Destiny paintings and Western film stills by presenting their scenarios as timeworn, chipping away. With syncopated imagery and corraded paint surfaces, his figures are so indefinite that it’s often impossible to tell what’s going on; but whatever is happening, it doesn’t appear auspicious. In Skin Shed Song (2017-2018, pictured above), a horseman, perhaps a Civil War soldier, seems to be blowing a bugle; but it isn’t quite the musical instrument it appears—its bell abruptly becomes the barrel of a rifle. Whether the horseman is attempting self-slaughter or trying to fend off an opponent’s bayonet is unclear; but either way, his mount seems unnaturally calm. Abstract landscapes montaged from multiple scenes, such as White Room Redroom (2018), and Lethe (Missouri 1565, 1811, 2016) (2016), recall weathery geography while also evoking multiple points in time and layers of paint peeling from weathered walls. Complementing Hagler’s evocations of sad, slightly intrusive sensations of exploring deserted sites, Elizabeth Dorbad‘s thought-provoking show, “Itinerant Architectures,” in the hallway galleries, encompasses sculptures, drawings and photographs documenting “architectural interventions” in which she symbolically transfigures abandoned trailers—aimless contemporary covered wagons marooned with meager resources and no land left to pioneer.

Brand Library Art Galleries
1601 West Mountain Street
Glendale, CA 91201
Shows run through Aug. 24

Contorting harlequins bow and sprawl over pastel chairs, rugs, walls and potted houseplants in Sara Berman‘s paintings. Are these mysteriously leotarded people lost in reverie, engaged in awkward stretching exercises, or merely lolling indolently? It’s impossible to determine. Berman’s collage-like spaces and their peekaboo occupants are imbued with beguilingly puzzling ambiguity. Vacillating protagonists blend into stylish settings like animals camouflaged in domestic jungles of wallpaper and upholstery. With distinguishing characteristics concealed in diamond or flower print bodysuits, the humanoid figures morph into patterned interior furnishings. Yet their corporeal integrality is compromised by the spliced cubistic compositions they inhabit—with milieus that don’t add up; neither do they. Are the harlequins bending over backwards to conform to disjunctive realities? Or do their surroundings reflect their visions? A former fashion designer, Berman seems well suited to posing such riddles through painting. “Double Entendre,” her show at Anat Ebgi’s AE2, also includes embroidered pictures, abstractions composed of dryer lint, and a harlequin floor rug that playfully posits gallery visitors as real-life versions of her characters. Ultimately, Berman’s paintings are most provocative for alluding to the ways in which people seek to fit in but fail to, or succeed so well at adjusting to pressing demands that they shed their own individualities. Bleak aftermath, her lint abstractions present grayish fuzzy residue as all that tangibly remains from a day in bright costume. To what extent are our furnishings extensions of our personalities, and to what extent are our personalities extensions of them?

AE2 (Anat Ebgi)
2860 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Aug. 11

Many conceptual artists employ sign painting techniques, but few execute such craftsmanship on their own. That’s partly what renders Norm Laich so intriguing. Overlapping shows at ICA LA and AWHRHWAR complement one another to provide insight into Laich’s work as artist, collaborator and sign painter extraordinaire. “This Brush For Hire: Norm Laich and Many Other Artists,” the title of ICA LA’s exhibition, aptly encapsulates co-curators John Baldessari and Meg Cranston’s perspective on Laich as designer and ghost for LA art stars. Just as film industry stuntmen avail their talents to more famous actors, Laich lends his creativity and skill to big-name artists requiring assistance in realizing their embryonic visions. Pauline Stella Sanchez’ insightful brief documentary illuminates Laich’s role in creating the displayed artworks. Featuring works by Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, Barbara Kruger, et al, the ICA show leaves out Laich’s own art, save one single painting, in favor of highlighting his collaborations, leaving visitors wondering about his work as an independent artist. Fortunately, AWHRHWAR’s diminutive retrospective, “Norm Laich: CONDEMNED,” offers a four-painting peek into his oeuvre as conceptual painter in his own right. Laich’s slick commercial manner of portraying disintegrating emblems harbors cynical built-in satire. The crumbling Parthenon appears beside the Windows logo in Microsoft/Acropolis (1992); while Condemned (2000, pictured above) incongruously advertises foreclosure. A piceous burst of calligraphic strokes evokes a dismal firework or a sooty palm tree in Black 5th (2002). These sharply limned paintings offer cutting commentary on corporative America.

ICA LA
1717 E. 7th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Sept. 2

AWHRHWAR
6074 York Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90042
Show runs through Jul. 28 with Thu. & Sat. hrs; through Aug. 11 by appt.

Just inside the house comprising the Women’s Center for Creative Work is a cozy den that, except for its moody lighting and nostalgic decor, seems to fit right into its residential setting. Though appearing to have long existed in its current furnished state, this room was a white-walled gallery before Yasmine Diaz transformed it into her poignant installation, “Exit Strategies,” recreating her teenage basement bedchamber. Attendants encourage you to make yourself at home, to spray perfume bottles, play tapes, and rummage through her drawers and binders. Yet the deceptively comfortable bicultural bedroom portends a bleak scenario. Though born in America, Diaz wasn’t afforded America’s basic rights. Her installation represents the chamber where she plotted her escape from a dire fate as her socially and religiously oppressive Yemeni Muslim parents sought to coerce her to marry against her will. Framed e-mail fragments bespeak Diaz’ desperate entreaties for help, divulging her precariousness under “threats of extreme violence if arranged marriage is refused.” Governmental assistance was not easily obtained: a chilling 2004 e-mail indicates that changing her identity in order to avoid being stalked or possibly murdered would be an arduous long shot “particularly given our country’s current severe case of xenophobia.” The suppressed story disclosed through Diaz’ intricate installation seems dramatic but reveals that forced marriage is a practice more common than one might think, oft ignored by discriminatory authorities. In her collages, face-ablated figures float amid fragmentary backgrounds of white paper and Islamic patterning, silently soliciting speculation: How many, like Diaz, shoulder pasts regretfully obliterated in order to exist freely? How many Americans suffer connubial immurement—or worse?

Women’s Center for Creative Work
2425 Glover Place
Los Angeles, CA 90031
Show runs through Aug. 3

However ordinary an entity may seem, Torbjørn Rødland will find a way to pose it, light it and accent it so as to produce, as if by alchemy, an uncanny photo that gradually unhinges you the more you gaze. See, for instance, Voodoo Shoe (2017, pictured above), which could initially be dismissed as a generic photo of a stiletto posed for a fashion ad. It’s not until you notice the leaden nails brutishly puncturing the pump’s lacy top, having chipped holes in its glittery sole, that you realize there is more afoot than couture in this unsettling tableau. Such images are rife with dissonant symbolism that cumulates as you study each picture in relation to the others. “Backlit Rainbow,” the title of the Norwegian photographer’s show at David Kordansky, alludes to lighting and color choices as well as a series of wistful, stiffly posed pictures recreating scenes from “Boys Love,” a homoerotic Japanese comic incongruously authored by women. Rødland’s inexplicable photos invite you to conjecture stories: Might the eerily grinning gent in Portrait with Yellow Tie (2016-2018) be the perpetrator of bloody brutality in No Climax (2007-2018)? Has the voodoo shoe anything to do with sickly feet on a nearby wall? Will Boone‘s image mélanges also suggest open-ended narratives within “Garage,” an installation appearing as though it could double as a secret society headquarters. Sculptures, miniature dioramas, and paintings conflate superheroes, rattlesnakes and monsters inside Boone’s intriguingly shivery carport clubhouse in which you may be relieved that you lack membership. Both artists squeeze elusive nuance from loaded emblems.

David Kordansky Gallery
5130 W. Edgewood Pl.
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Shows run through Jul. 7

Promise of the past rudely collides with dread of the future in Alexa Gilweit‘s nostalgic Americana scenes viewed through dystopic lenses. Satirically titled “Big Winners,” Gilweit’s show at AM Gallery consists of paintings inspired by mid-century ads depicting genteel folk frolicking in idyllic settings. With painterly verve, Gilweit cynically corrodes the idealism of pretty pictures found in vintage issues of Farm Journal and Better Homes and Gardens, eliciting from them latent clouds of trepidation. Evoking varying degrees of forebodingness, each sunny landscape or fine interior has a mystical or baleful twist that sharply contrasts with its old-time Fairfield-Porter-esque pastoral positivity. Explosive bursts of fluorescent paint mar the peacefulness of verdant meadows, while smeared faces appear ghastly, dehumanized. The bathing boys in Leap (2018) appear as though belonging in a Thomas Eakins painting—except that their countenances, inhumanly, have all but disappeared; and the sanguine body into which they jump looks more like a pool of blood than a pond. The bathers seem to be leaping towards a firework, chasing a sparkling elusive mirage never to be reached. Instead of roasting s’mores or hot dogs, the haloed family in The Boon (2017) prefers more wholesome fare: radioactively neon green goo. Nondescript Victorian-dressed telephone operators deftly manipulate disjunctively modern vibrant cords in Lines that Bind (2017, pictured above). Gilweit’s paintings urge us to look back to the past and remember: This is how we arrived at where we are now. Maybe the good old days weren’t so great after all. Or were they?

AM Gallery
2047 S. Santa Fe Ave.
(enter through 2049 and ask to see Alexa Gilweit’s show)
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Jul. 1

Mattea Perrotta abstracts figures and Jonathan Ryan abstracts architecture; their juxtaposition at The Landing educes the two painters’ similar manners of distilling contemplative moods from their divergent subjects. Ryan’s buildings frequently assume anthropomorphic details in windows and roofs that look ocular; conversely, Perrotta’s figurative forms appear furniture-like: the face in Comfortable Silence (2018), for instance, could double as a sofa. Like Jean Arp’s cutouts or Salvador Dali’s melting countenance in The Persistence of Memory (1931), Perrotta’s flattened figures appear reclining in some sort of dreamlike suspended animation. Her solitary female nudes are so simplified that their human identity is denoted primarily by way of basic curves and peach-toned skin. If one observes closely, further indications of humanity can be discovered in closed eyelids and scars hidden among her expanses of thickly painted flesh. By mixing sand into his paint, Ryan also harnesses textural subtleties to emotive effect, giving his paintings’ surfaces an earthen texture connoting desert soil or aged stone walls. Like Perrotta’s figures, his barren buildings appear totemic for their essentiality and loneness. Shading gives his paintings the trompe l’oeil illusion of projecting starkly from walls. Devoid of people, Ryan’s stepped pyramids and longsome staircases such as To Monte Alban (2017, pictured above) and Lavender Steps (2018) appear deserted like the futuristic structures in the 1960 movie The Time Machine. Each of these painters nostalgically ruminates on the past while evoking, as did H.G. Wells, a desolate future with cultures abandoned and people misused.

The Landing
5118 W. Jefferson Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90016
Show runs through June 30

There is irony in donning a mass-produced item that ostensibly projects one’s individuality via a saucy slogan coined by somebody else. Pippa Garner uses her art like a knife to cut straight to the revelatory heart of such prosaic absurdities. Under her satiric lens, commonplace cultural phenomena range from charmingly comical to deeply disturbing. Her current show, “Autonomy n’ Stuff (Garnerrhea),” is a grab bag of transactional curiosities beginning with a corridor of statement-emblazoned T-shirts tacked to walls as though Redling Fine Art were not a gallery but a tacky gift shop. Garner’s bespoke shirts bear sayings of a different sort than one would likely find at a mainstream retail establishment: “I Received a DEATH THREAT from my birthday party CLOWN;” “I was on LIFE SUPPORT but I got away!” So blatantly do her parodies broadcast the ridiculousness of “statement” T-shirts that they fall into a similar category of heavy-handedly ironic quotation, underscoring the fact that, like T-shirts, artworks serve as commodities while emblematizing components of culture. Even more engaging are Garner’s new sculptures emulating souped up gadgets, which cynically satirize the useless ingenuity of “as seen on TV” products. One is liable to snicker aloud at Super Shuffle (2018, detail above), a walker outfitted with everything a crankily mobile aged person could possibly want, including twin jars of Pepto-Bismol and Jack Daniels. Garner, who transitioned from Phil to Pippa after undergoing surgery in 1993, has concocted a singular brand of wackily cynical inventions for navigating modern life’s limitations on individual autonomy.

Redling Fine Art
6757 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through June 30

Alexandra Carter‘s current show, “All gods are hot,” is a maze of artworks so tightly packed that one can hardly turn around without colliding with translucent paintings adorning the walls and hanging from the ceiling at Radiant Space. Even so, cramped quarters seem airy for ambient light diffusing through drafting film surfaces painted with flowing imagery of chimerical humanoids in shape-shifting states of flux. Inspired by mythology, fairytales and female surrealists, Carter’s urbanely vagarious paintings address cross-cultural spiritual and existential paradoxes. Delicate detail, idealized beauty and soft translucence belie scenes of trauma, aberration and disgust. Bodily fluids burst from corporeal confines as bestial appendages mysteriously emerge from sphinxes and sirens in pieces such as Holy oil’s Thunder (2018) and Cabinet of the Solar Plexuses (2017). So graceful are Carter’s brushwork and stylization that even fleshly seepage assumes curious elegance. Carter’s pigment and imagery frequently allude to her Massachusetts cranberry farm upbringing. Vaccininum Macrocarpon (Cranberry Bosom-Room) (2017) depicts its titular fruits as pathologically multitudinous, balloonlike breasts. In a series of fanciful, washy drawings on linen napkins and handkerchiefs, rust-red cranberry juice takes on new life as blood or vomit; berry juice becomes goddesses’ ichor. Across cultures throughout history, gods and goddesses are often portrayed as embodying human characteristics, conveniently enabling the deification of people while symbolically reducing divinities to the stature of mere mortals that can’t even control their own corporeal secretions, much less halt the temporal degradation of their bodies. Fascination overwhelms repulsion as Carter beckons us to ponder the strangeness of being human.

Radiant Space
1444 N. Sierra Bonita Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Show runs through Jun. 23