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Category: Pick of the Week
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PICK OF THE WEEK: Isabel Nuño de Buen
Chris Sharp GalleryPersuaded by her alchemist rhapsody and teetery yet unshakeable assertion, Isabel Nuño de Buen’s exhibition, “Now and Away” at Chris Sharp Gallery instills in me a yearning for more. Her intricately crafted wall sculptures, characterized by their personable scale and meticulous intensity, consist of paper mache, wire, yarn, graphite, watercolor, muslin, hand dyed fabrics and more, forming a collection of tightly woven palimpsests. Indecipherable and yet complete, Nuño de Buen’s meandering formations display a determination and rigor in their material sensitivity, paralleled only by their intent to encode. Tasking observers to take turns and follow her path through an integration of components, Nuño de Buen presents multiple forms that carry varying social interests. At times, the conditions of her construction become a bindle or a fragment of a structure, while at other times, they accumulate into a gift, net or tapestry. The way she builds requires careful consideration of access, exchanges – circulatory, visual and energy – between layers. What and who is it for? What happens when it is received or given away? Must we carry it? Could it be that Isabel Nuño de Buen’s exhibition is a structure, a system, a figure, a DNA, a type, a body of distant planes suddenly collapsing into its own regime?
Chris Sharp Gallery
4650 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CAOn view through November 18, 2023
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PICK OF THE WEEK: Simphiwe Ndzube
BLUM“Have I ever felt strange suddenly being myself?” I thought after leaving Simphiwe Ndzube’s exhibition, “Chorus” at BLUM. If I integrate all the parts of myself into the world I believe in and want to see the most, maybe I too will find ordinary enchantment. Perhaps I will reach magic. Ndzube’s vibrant and vigorous figurative paintings and drawings of groups and of individuals represent a distinct maturation of his past works. Looking around the room, I find myself surrounded by his exuberant singers. The faces of his figures have a saccharine and matter-of-fact Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head construction while being placed in an indeterminate landscape without verifiable time. They conjure a world between worlds, seemingly salvaging personages from past subjects, stories, and history. With greater control, he continues to build a lexicon of mythologies arising from his respective experiences growing up in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing both absurdity and divinity, Ndzube’s mode of storytelling is delivered through Magic Realism. This is compelling not only as a narrative system familiarly catalyzed from postcolonial literature by destabilizing dominant forms of storytelling, but also as a device for highlighting a range of phenomena that can feel impossible to reconcile individually, let alone intertwined. Family, joy, love, pain, the individual, the community, unconscious desires, political and racialized atrocities, collective beliefs and more are submerged in Ndzube’s surfaces. Although it’s not a new way of illustrating stories, Simphiwe Ndzube’s world of devotion provides ground for traversing everyday moments of cosmic pleasure and affliction, which protect and suspend vital elements of life that require acceptance, not explanation.
Blum
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CAOn view through December 16, 2023
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PICK OF THE WEEK: Analia Saban
Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar GalleryThe theatricality and malaise of machines characterized by abundance, repetition, necessity, error and expansion, come into full play in Analia Saban’s latest body of work, “Synthetic Self,” which is simultaneously exhibited at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Saban offers a restless existence mediated by technology in this transdisciplinary exhibition. Her work, existing neither as entirely biotic nor purely mechanical, narrates an unceasing negotiation between “nature” as represented by earth-based mediums, forms of machinery and materials that signify technological advancement. At once sublime, efficient, and feverish, the experience of Saban’s work results in a low-level existential distress where functional objects and images emerge as sources of everyday desire. She brings attention to a dysphoria underlying the sense of compulsion, exalted alienation, overwhelming excess of energy in her frenetic details and highly controlled outcomes in her engineered forms. Saban’s work compels us to question our progress and the tedium of our needs. Are we winning? Have we won? In order to live with great satisfaction, must the matter of our lives be literally scattered by fans? If errors and instability are inherent to a machine’s compromised nature, do I have to inhabit a world filled with errors? Have I always, almost instinctively, understood what Saban is possibly suggesting: that it was a mistake to think I couldn’t live without machines when, for a long time, I wasn’t entirely certain that machines weren’t actually sharing life with me?
Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CATanya Bonakdar Gallery
1010 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CAOn view through October 28, 2023
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PICK OF THE WEEK: Jasper Marsalis
Kristina Kite Gallery“Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow,” Jasper Marsalis’ exhibition at Kristina Kite Gallery, directs me to hear its entirety with my body. The visitor is tasked with arriving and making contact with his process of transcoding a glitch-like quality of life with apparitional impact. Through the importance of having various forms, Marsalis mashes up sculptures, screens, paintings and more, offering a memoir matrix anchored in disappearance and emergence while delivering a sense of plurality and reckoning. It’s as if the installation itself is a fissure, a counter-monument and a web. He arranges compositions of dissonance into consonances that simultaneously suggest the possibility of the body—or his body—without fully representing it. Wood and stick forms are jammed into and protrude out of bowling balls. There is a large self-portrait, clothed ghosts backboned by tripods, a laptop with a circuit map, stacked and strapped speakers and paintings with a techno-focused color palette, all networked in a style that is not nostalgic but does suggest a personal account in transformation. Marsalis, a storyteller who mediates between many mediums, finds the conditions for showcasing something remnant and past while also reconstructing a world for memories to announce itself. Instead of pointing to how these memories may have been produced in the first place, the exhibition considers how to recast a shadow into a subject that is not diminished.
Kristina Kite Gallery
3400 W Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through November 4, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: “The Inexpressible is Contained”
Sea ViewWho has not asked oneself at some time or another: Should I disappear into the abyss or should I emerge and be seen? It’s a concern that is, at times, about recognizability and addressability, and if we are ready to situate our bodies which contain the raw materials of our psyche, in a mode that’s accessible and inseparable from others. Straddling between these choices, the shine and hum of the works featured at Sea View by Charlotte Edey (b. 1992, Manchester, UK) and Azadeh Elmizadeh (b. 1987, Tehran, IR) turn our attention to the mysteries of what is made visible, the value of hideaway places, and restoring states of disappearance as a play of inwardness and cosmic attendance. Materially, Elmizadeh offers delicately and ever-deepening layered paintings on the brink of becoming fog, regenerating relationships between form and color as fluid figures, while Edey creates possessed interiors by combining jacquard weaving and fine beading alongside firmly intimate paintings of incalculable daze. In their emergent states of plurality, both artists offer methods for understanding their respective dilemmas. Stirred by hydrofeminism and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Edey’s self-contained illuminating scenes press viewers to almost weep from its exquisite execution as it exits a world of rational thought and feeling, paths of necessary transformation. Elmizadeh’s inquiries are sprung by inspiration from allegorical Islamic manuscripts and illustrations, paintings that make aqueous forms of flora, fauna, and objects on an earth a source of diffused becoming.
Sea View
4166 Sea View Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
On view through October 21, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vivian Suter
Gaga & Reena Spaulings LAAt “Tintin Nina Disco,” Vivian Suter’s exhibition at Gaga & Reena Spaulings, I not only learned that changes were a part of her paintings, but that I should be ready to accommodate them. Walking through her show, I began to understand this was a peculiar trait to her work, that her installations often felt the need to prepare audiences that such a display needn’t be taken so seriously while simultaneously being a tour de force. Suter, an Argentinian-Swiss painter is known for letting the life of her untamed environment be an integral part of her paintings. Rain water, mold, animals, mud, forest leaves and other cherished debris of the life she has sought solace in for the last 30 years are part of the splendor of her work. The majority of Suter’s paintings are stacked from front to back, with a slight distance in between, resembling a tear-off calendar or a vertical version of a printmaker’s drying rack. Through her composites, which do not allow paintings to be viewed singularly, I found myself remembering things I had never directly experienced. The density of her installation isn’t a competition for attention; instead, it forms an inexplicable connection between disassembled and reassembled paintings, serving as avatars for the intimacies of her days in Guatemala. Indisputably refreshing—no prissiness, no specific restraint, no overthinking—Vivian Suter calls her paintings into constellations that record elements of the past and prolong the present in uneven qualities of time, bursts of color, and moments of scattered suspense.
Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA
6916 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through October 28, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Martine Syms
Sprüth MagersMartine Syms’ solo exhibition, “Loser Back Home,” is an epic, multidimensional collage of material and media. It’s a labyrinthine of various avatars and personal significations spanning video, photography, painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, forming a diaristic labyrinth of the artist’s identity, equally shaped and fractured by shifting perceptions and experiences. An all-consuming mass of content spans the entire second floor of the gallery—images and objects (created and found) are layered and spliced, magnified and distorted, pixilated and painted—forming a vortex of signs and signals that sucks you in just to spit you out, mimicking life’s endless loophole of self-construction and displacement. Syms presents identity as a constant construction site—a cruel and hilarious theater of sorts—a place of continual negotiation that inevitably leads inward (or “home,” as the title suggests), reminding us that being in a body is simultaneously securing and unsettling. Gleaned from personal archives and everyday encounters, Syms’ repetitive oversaturation of images and words becomes redundant to the point of obsoletion, relating to the ways in which we construct identity (especially since the advent of the internet and social media). Syms’ exhibition considers more nuanced and dimensional notions of displacement, as embodied and disembodied, as spacial and psychological. Aren’t we all strangers to ourselves every now and then?
Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
On view through August 26, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Silke Otto-Knapp
Regen ProjectsSilke Otto-Knapp’s paintings of cascading, roaming bodies feel as if they washed up on the shores of my mind like sedimentary particles— suspended and unsettled bits of matter that float and sink. Memories behave like mollusks, secreting trails of life, fading traces of the past. Clusters of silhouetted dancers appear to sprout from one another; their overlapping limbs form an intricate network tethered by some mysterious root.
Watercolor has figured into every aspect of the late artist’s practice and preparatory work. Repeatedly adding and removing paint on primed canvas, Otto-Knapp’s technical approach to painting might be described as a choreography of pigment, creating shadowy, cinereal worlds of grey. An installation of watercolor studies on paper are installed along a jagged horizon line that spans the length of the gallery wall, tacked loosely to the surface, causing them to flitter like leaves as I move across them, synchronously rippling like chimes as bodies move across the gallery.
Otto Knapp questions where the borders of life exist, imagining the strange and vast plains of life—abstract and figurative realms, psychological and physical. The silvery strangeness of Otto-Knapp’s greyscale worlds evokes the magical and longing feeling that sturs in me when I gaze upon the moon. Floating in the cosmos in one scene and swimming underwater in another, Otto-Knapp’s terrains are dark and light, thick and vaporous—figures move backward and forward, up and down, to the moon and back again. Her realms are vast, wide open plains where skies and horizons become fluid and unfixed.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blv
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through August 12, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Reggie Burrows Hodges
KARMAMemories appear shaky and cinderous, meteoric contusions of being and becoming, volcanic rumblings of the self, perpetually oozing and calcifying. Artist Reggie Burrows Hodges imagines psychic realms knotted and stretched by the spirals of space and time—warped and wobbly terrains of the mind, interior geologies made of craggy fissures and serrated shadows where perception and reality converge, perpetually entangled in reciprocal acts of transformation. Emerging in the layers of black paint that primes the surface of each canvas, figures appear as abstract dark luminescence, as traces of twilight emanating from fields of abounding depths, mysterious psychological realms of boundless complexity akin to something cosmic or oceanic. These dark pools do not register as hollow voids but tenebrous and vibrational currents—dynamic, intersecting layers of time and space where shadows dwell within shadows, bottomless dimensions endlessly scrambling and unscrambling.
To immerse oneself in memory requires ongoing construction and reconstruction, reckoning with fluctuating notions of self, fragmented histories, and present realities—attempting to make sense of the splintery intangible pieces of identity that may never be understood or feel whole. Hodges brings these tensions between the inner-psychic world and the outside world to the surface, dancing between figuration and abstraction to convey intimate scenes of self-reflection, sites where the psychic and spiritual are registered in lived realities and encountered in the familiar. Various reflective surfaces act as portals that seize upon moments of reflection and glimmers of self-awareness—portraits projected in a sleepy computer screen, in a compact mirror, illuminated in sliding glass doors, in the gentle lapping of water, rippling with fanciful visions of multiplicity, enticing one to dive in. Hodges depicts the experience of turning inward as a means to look also outward—a shift in perspective that illuminates the duality and friction between the interior, mental and emotional realms of existence and the exterior realities, an anxiousness rendered as a bubbling layer that pervaded Hodges work, swelling as our inner lives continue to rub up against the rigid outside forces of reality. This inside-out notion of the self and identity is inherently coded and elusive, pervading legibility as they are deeply situational, relational, and based on experience and worldview. The artist captures a spatial psyche that makes me want to tuck into myself—nestled in the innermost core of my being, where one is more sensitive and attuned to all that is not visible but profoundly felt, sensed and imagined.
Karma
7351 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046
On view through July 7, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Max Hooper Schneider
François GhebalyWhen I first met Max Hooper Schneider in 2015, he wore neon-colored costume jewlery up and down both of his ears. During that time, Max frequented Claire’s (the fast-fashion jewlery retailer) at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica where he was sure to get an infection, which he explained was half the fun. This sadistic anecdote sums up Max and his art practice—part punk, part science experiment where bodies are uncontained Petri dishes, porous assemblages of flesh and artifice, a leaky cesspool of bodies and materials that endlessly morph and mutate. A vital materialist, Hooper Schneider finds resurgent life amidst ruins where extremophiles crawl, festering in our terrestrial wasteland.
In a new body of work, broccoli and knobs of corn rot from the inside out, encased by copper, baroque shells that corrode as the fruits and vegetables decompose. The viewer’s perspective shifts between gargantuan and infinitesimal, between consumer and consumed. Diabolical and fantastic, Hooper Schneider imagines sublime, luminous landscapes where stories, dreams and myths of progress are traced in human wreckage. An underlying pathos and dark humor pervade Hooper Schneider’s infernal landscapes. In his feral theater, the presence of humankind is “invisible.” In other words, humans exist as no more than traces of discarded signs, occupying a dreg-like presence, fossilized delusions of our historic solipsism. At the base of the installation titled Falling Angel—made of aircraft wreckage, fluorescent light tubes, and Tesla coils—words scrawled in vintage neon lights read like glyphs embedded in a dirt crater formed by a monstrous foot, secreting remnants of human stories that sink into earth’s sludge forming a cesspit of dreams and desires.
Hooper Schneider often speaks of primordial ooze, which brings to mind one of my favorite short stories by Italo Calvino—a fantastic fictional tale about mitosis, meiosis and death. Calvino writes: “The risk we ran was living: living for ever. The threat of continuing weighed, from the very start, on anyone who has by chance begun. The crust that covers the Earth is liquid: one drop among the many thickens, grows, little by little absorbs the substances around it, it is a drop-island, gelatinous, that contracts and expands, that occupies more space at each pulsation. It’s a drop-continent that spreads its branches over the oceans, makes the poles coagulate, solidifies its mucus-green outlines on the equator, if it doesn’t stop in time it gobbles up the globe. The drop will live, only that drop, for ever….a mucilaginous sphere with the Earth as its kernel, a gruel that contains the matter for the lives of us all, because we are all arrested in this drop that will never let us be born or die, so life will belong to it and to nobody else.”
François Ghebaly
2245 E Washington Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through June 20, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vaginal Davis
Marc Selwyn Fine ArtA series of secreting, grotesquely glamorous portrait paintings rendered in gloopy lip gloss, lustrous nail polish, sparkly eye shadows, tints, and creams pay homage to queer-feminist heroes and the power of the performative body. Intimate in scale, Vaginal Davis’ paintings on found paper allude to the transformative body in their material and form—creams and oils typically used on flesh are applied with a fleeting dynamism that evokes a sense of movement in each mark. A witchy undertone is felt in their morphic makeup-ed surfaces, bubbling and melting with the shifting environment and passing of time. Excedrin migraine tablets and other pain pills are sprinkled throughout the work like fairy dust and adhered to the surfaces with super-hold hair spray.
The work’s honoring of lesser-known artists and creative figures serves as a reminder of Davis’s important role as an artist and collaborator whose experimental practice helped shape the avant-garde punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s and legacy of performance and body art—a history that is too often overlooked, misunderstood or gleaned over.
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 S Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90212
On view through May 27, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Keegan Monaghan
Parker GalleryKeegan Monaghan’s paintings feel like the moldy nooks and crannies of a house or a well-worn shoe, rendered in epic and compact proportions. Their compositions shiver with an eerie affection akin to the apparitional creaking of my old, poorly insulated apartment. The passing of time is traced in the calcified goop that lines the maze of termite cavities in my floorboards, the layers upon layers of paint coagulating beneath the brim of molding, welling up like petrified tears.
At first glance, Monaghan’s paintings present as pure abstractions, intriguing compositions of indeterminate color and form. To fully grasp the nuances and peculiarity of Monaghan’s prickly, overworked surfaces and grotesque application of paint, requires my slow and intimate attention. A kaleidoscope of color permeates the painting’s stuccoey surfaces; the vibrancy and variation in each brushstroke are almost indistinguishable from afar—like grains of sand. Familiar shapes and shadows emerge as vague, fragmented impressions—images of woodgrain, a table’s edge, the frayed fringe of a rug—windows, screens, and shadows of all kinds evoke a domestic, architectural geology of the mundane. Monaghan messes with proportion and scale to evoke a sort of vertigo; an uncanny feeling inherent in the psychologically charged spaces we inhabit, making paintings that are architecturally and mathematically off-kilter, like retrograde studies on Renaissance perspectivism. While the paintings appear devoid of any human figure, there is an eerie underlying presence in their absence.
Parker Gallery
2441 Glendower Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
On view through June 10, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Augustina Wang
Sow & TailorAugustina Wang’s fantastical world evokes a style of magical realism that is uniquely hers, embracing the immersive aspects of fantasy that function as a means of escapism, allowing more playful, nuanced, and expansive notions of identity to flourish. The femmes that populate Wang’s fantasyland include a cast of characters that present as alter egos, avatars, archetypes, proxies, fantasies, monsters, heroes, and anti-heroes—a visualization of the artist’s multitudes—the nuanced and numerous selves that cohabitate in one body. Beautifully rendered in oil and pastel, the protagonists that occupy Wang’s imaginative universe are full of dualities; they are emotive warriors—seductive and guarded, naked and sheathed, coy and commanding—wearing suits of armor adorned with hearts and sprigs of pink baby’s breath, delicate and muscular forces to be reckoned with.
While Wang’s fantasies and fictions operate, in part, as a form of escapism—seeking relief from the confines and pressures of the everyday—her work is also firmly planted in reality, providing a spectacular lens to communicate the elusive and abstract forces of power that loom large in the real world, helping us to untangle the power dynamics that animate and evade our daily lives and encounters, embedded in our identities, relationships, experiences, and traumas. To make sense of these gargantuan forces, the kind of imaginative thinking and playful expression of self that Wang presents feels so much more than just escapism; it feels crucial. Imaginative thinking engenders imaginative alternatives—alternatives that are critical to our mutual flourishing and evolution, both as individuals and as cohabitants on Earth.
Sow & Tailor
3027 S. Grand Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
On view through May 13, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Masaomi Yasunaga
NonakaHillVessels are shadowy shapeshifters—morphic geological bodies that contain ancient and imaginative geometries. A strange uncanniness is embedded in Masaomi Yasunaga’s ceramic vessels, evoking fossils and corporeal architecture. The sheen of some of their glazed surfaces juxtaposed against the jagged edges of the rocks feels supernatural and cosmic, appearing as though they are made of bits of stardust. I picture Yasunaga’s ceramic forms as chunks of earth that were once mysteriously sucked into a black hole, spaghettified, and spat back out. My eyes luxuriate in the glazes and the flecks of stone and mosaic tiles that glob onto the ceramic surfaces like taffy. Some stones and glazing evoke sea glass or a plastic bottle warped by the sun. As I squat down to comprehend the intricacies of their surfaces, I get lost in the details. My mind meanders into realms of geological fantasy, imagining what the fossilized garbage of the future might look like. I wonder what geological processes are in store for our plastic planet; how will nature swallow our monstrous mess? (I know, I know. How human of me to project such a fantasy!) The adjacent room feels like a geological time warp—the walls and ceiling are covered in a rich reddish-orange clay that feels hot and pulsing as though it were breathing. Vessels perch on the ground like a family of critters in their cave home, vessels resting inside larger vessels like nesting dolls, mimicking spirals of time. Yasunaga prompts us to think imaginatively about rocks and matter, broadening our perception so we may see the emergent energies embedded in seemingly silent entities, inviting us to make discoveries from picking up stones / 石拾いからの発見 (as the title of the exhibition suggests). Masaomi Yasunaga’s work evokes the mystery and magic of the universe.
NonakaHill
720 N Highland Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90038
On view through May 20, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Njideka Akunyili Crosby
The HuntingtonNjideka Akunyili Crosby’s portraits feel static on the walls of the Huntington Library. Thomas Gainsborough’s famous “Blue Boy” painting in the adjacent room suddenly feels stagnant and deflated. The Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist’s large-scale collages are autobiographical, incorporating personal and found imagery, and operate like mosaic maps, tracing kaleidoscopic constellations of memory and identity.
The exhibition is part of Hilton Als’ curated series organized in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, which includes a selection of works from Akunyili Crosby’s ongoing portrait series, The Beautyful Ones, depicting children in Nigeria. The series title references the 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah which examines the dynamics of life and self in postcolonial Ghana.
In an interview, Als once stated, “There is a science fiction element to Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s situations—of doom waiting to subsume the patterns of life as the people seem to grow out of the patterned wallpaper, the patterned clothes.” Akunyili Crosby’s painted collages of personal and found photographs activate the subjects of her portraits in a way that feels generative and vibrational—static rhythms that point to constant appropriation, movement, and emergence (particularly related to the formation of diasporic identity). These rhythms are not dissimilar to the emergent rhythms that exist in nature and the surrounding gardens. Octavia Butler surfaces in my mind as I think about Als’ reference to science fiction and the exhibition’s location in Pasadena (where Butler lived). Children are often the protagonists in Butler’s novels. Looking at one of Akunyili Crosby’s portraits of a young Nigerian girl, I see Lauren from Parable of The Sower, who considered God to be Change: “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” Like Lauren, Akunyili Crosby’s subjects are brave, complex, and perpetually changing.
Huntington Art Gallery
1151 Oxford Rd
San Marino, CA 91108
On view through June 12, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Bambou Gili
at Night GalleryTaking its name from The Chick’s 1999 song “Goodbye Earl,” Bambou Gili’s solo Night Gallery exhibition is a beautiful, yet ominous, exploration of the power and potential of womanhood and female friendship. The exhibition loosely follows the song—the story of Mary Anne and Wanda, high school best friends whose paths diverge following graduation, only to reunite to off Wanda’s abusive husband, the titular “Earl.”
While The Chick’s song is quick paced and upbeat, Gili’s visual interpretation is strikingly different. The show begins with a large, somber painting of two young women—Mary Anne and Wanda—dressed in pastel blue and pink dresses, holding one another beneath a banner that reads “Class of 1999.” The muted colors and hauntingly blank stares of the women are discomforting, making the painting eerily reminiscent of the aged, yellow snapshots found tucked in drawers at antique stores.
Bambou Gili, Earl’s Descent, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. This painting is the only one in the exhibition that casts Mary Anne and Wanda in this innocent, nearly pitiful light. In other paintings, such as Goodfellas (2022), Gili’s protagonists are expressive and active, their faces radiating power and revenge rather than passivity. At times, the figures appearing entirely different from preceding paintings, making Mary Anne and Wanda placeholders for any woman. The scenes vary from direct references to the song to moments that capture the various obstacles women face today.
The show appears to reach a crescendo with Earl’s Descent (2022), a large painting that shows a body falling to the bottom of a richly blue lake. But it’s the smaller-scaled painting, Jam Stand (2023), that marks the climactic end to Gili’s exhibition. Gili paints the women in a soft, warm light that mirrors the serene landscape they’re cast in. Though the women appear relaxed, there’s a look in their faces that make clear they’re not going back to the innocence captured as they stood beneath that “Class of 1999” banner. Gili’s work transforms Mary Anne and Wanda into more than simply characters from a ’90s ballad, she makes them an example of women do what they need to survive: As the song goes: They sell Tennessee ham and strawberry jam / And they don’t lose any sleep at night / ‘Cause Earl had to die.
