Your cart is currently empty!
Category: Pick of the Week
-
PICK OF THE WEEK: Prunella Clough
Château ShattoPrunella Clough’s paintings glitch, sneeze, and itch in states of spaghettification. Observational renderings culled from the everyday–seemingly subtle yet tidal and awkwardly beautiful–Clough discombobulates the gravitational fields that tether shapes and colors to reality. Clough’s work taps into what the painter Amy Sillman calls “the mysterious black hole located at the center of the artist’s thinking.” Made in the final chapters of the artist’s life, this small and thoughtful selection of work makes a strong case for abstract painting–it is not dead! (nor a zombie)
I was first introduced to Prunella Clough’s work by way of Amy Sillman’s writing, in which she refers to the artist as her “favorite shape-y English painter.” I learned that Clough lived a somewhat secluded life by the seaside. While she received success during her lifetime, she remains largely underappreciated and unknown, especially outside Great Britain. As an artist who operated in the margins (in some ways), it seems perfectly fitting that Clough should have an exhibition in Los Angeles just as the art world flocks to London for the Frieze art fair. If you find yourself on the outside of this herd and in Los Angeles, do not miss the opportunity to experience Clough’s strange paintings.
Château Shatto
1206 Maple Ave # 1030
Los Angeles, CA 90015
On view through November 19, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Sharon Ellis
Kohn GalleryThere is something sugary about Sharon Ellis’ new psychedelic paintings that are reminiscent of my favorite childhood board game, Candy Land, nostalgic of gingerbread plum trees, the peppermint stick forest, Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. Ellis’ paintings also remind me of the last time I took mushrooms and indulged in looking up at the glittering night sky. It’s hard to say if these sugarcoated landscapes are enchanted or haunted. Biomorphic forms vibrate and surge with electricity that evokes a magical sense of wonder with a sinister undercurrent, situating them within the sublime. Ellis attempts to imagine what we cannot imagine, see what cannot be seen. She imagines a nature that is emotive and interconnected. Geologically ambiguous and seemingly devoid of human life, Ellis’ landscapes are represented in a style akin to scientific thermal images, prompting us to question the unseen source(s) of emissions that cause the environment to glow. While concepts of the sublime have been endlessly discussed and debated, there is still value in Ellis’ attempt to question and push against the limits of human perception. In defense of artistic representations of the sublime, Eva Horn asserts: “What is needed are bodies of evidence for a transformation that is both so massive and so tiny, that is happening so fast and so slowly that no image or narrative can ever grasp its breadth. How can we start to sense what we only know abstractly? Producing such bodies of evidence seems like an impossibility–and at the same time, more necessary than ever.”
Kohn Gallery
1227 North Highland Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through October 29, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Anina Major
Shoshana Wayne GalleryVessels are containers–spaces for bodies of volume to dwell, to fill up–shaped by what they have held and what they long to hold. In Anina Major’s solo exhibition “Inheritance” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, fragmented baskets molded from clay operate as metaphorical vessels for strength, legacy and identity. Major’s forms resemble the oleaginous scales of a snake, latticed cages, husks and shells. They appear in various states of creation and deformation–some are partially woven, some are punctured or smashed in, and some are seemingly disintegrating or in a state of oxidization–creating a kind of lyrical tension and balance. These vessels contain a private sense of spirituality and phenomenology; their uncanny forms are simultaneously anthropomorphic and organic while also referencing a specific place and heritage. Inspired by the familiar straw markets from her hometown of Nassau, Major references the woven goods created by her family and consumed by tourists. By alluding to traditional and familial basket weaving techniques (plaiting)–largely marginalized as “craft” and labeled “women’s work”–the artist reclaims cultural heritage and legacy by imagining her own migrational and artistic identity.
Anina Major has created her own sculptural language that is poetic, phenomenological and formally complex. Her hybrid forms ask us to consider the migratory and changing realities of materials and cultural traditions.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery
5247 W. Adams Blvd
Los Angeles, 90016
On view through October 22, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Shana Hoehn
Make Room Los AngelesAn ouroboros of hair and vomit surges through an arched body; vulvic lilypads share a tender moment of caress; aluminum breasts perched above erect flower stocks posture as suits of armor, guardians, gargoyles; a tantalizing cocoon drips from above; a nest of braids, ribbons, and bows snarl and embrace; hair coiled around a pit lures and echoes with longing; an arched spine resembling a monstrous mollusk rests vulnerably on the ground.
Equal parts tender and terrifying, Shana Hoehn’s solo exhibition, “A Tangle of Limbs and Long Hair,” feeds my grotesque-romantic fetishes and sensibilities. Hoehn’s emphasis on materiality is a tether that unites the exhibition through her use of organic and non-organic materials and a range of processes and techniques such as woodworking, 3D printing, etching and hand drawing. The show is informed by the artist’s experience growing up in the American South, living on terrain defined by its resurgent swamplands and dynamic ecosystem that manages to survive in spite of the insurmountable pain and trauma that lurks in the water and soil.
Hoehn presents notions of beginnings and endings–cycles of life and death–that are cohabitational, complex, tangled and fragmented. While the strange poetics of the show might resemble familiar fairytales and fantasies, Hoehn also presents alternative ways of thinking about life and death that more accurately reflect our shared reality rather than relying on the stale, unimaginative scripts we have inherited. In Hoehn’s tangle of limbs and hair, living beings exist in constant states of deformation and re-creation–ceaselessly tethering, entangling and unwinding. While this dualism is inherently brutal, even cruel, “learning to live and die well together” (as Donna Haraway puts it) might allow for better conditions of care and possibilities for transformation.
Make Room Los Angeles
5119 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through October 15, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Vielmetter Los AngelesJust as Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) troubled differentiations between life and painting, Paul Mpagi Sepuya confuses the boundaries that separate life and photography, questioning what is intended to be seen and concealed.
In his recent exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, “Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio,” Sepuya presents two series of photographs that oscillate in scale, light, and technique. The Daylight Studio series depicts the mechanics of the artist’s studio, presenting the studio space as a kind of stage where images are constructed. Historically, the photographer’s “stage” has been a platform of control designed to objectify and dominate marginalized subjects. Alternatively, Sepuya’s studio is a space for play, pleasure, and empowerment where subjects have agency over their bodies and interactions. Sepuya exposes the scaffolding that divides the artist and the subject and conceals the dynamic spaces and relations that animate the studio.
Groups of petite dye-sublimation prints on aluminum depicting the Dark Room Studio are interspersed throughout the gallery. Smaller in scale, their luminous and distorted surfaces require your intimate attention. Entangled figures and streaks of movement are illuminated by red safety lights and captured over a long exposure period. Looking at these images in close proximity, I become self-aware of my own gaze as I peer into seemingly private spaces. Are they dancing? Fucking? Stretching? Maybe it is not for me to know.
Vielmetter Los Angeles
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through October 22, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: A Minor Constellation
Chris SharpI’ve always enjoyed the playful and uninhibited spirit of summer group shows, unbridled by the circuits and agendas of the art market. Chirs Sharp’s exhibition, “A Minor Constellation”, perfectly exemplifies this kind of delightful candidness. The show features a survey of small-scale paintings installed in a neat line that trails around the gallery like ants marching in search of something sweet. As the exhibition title suggests, the cosmic expanse of this “minor constellation” of paintings glimmers and shines, as each work gently leads the viewer into their own private world. Both the processional installation and the scale of the work requires one’s intimate attention. Though minor in scale, the surface of each work is monumental, pulling one in with individual gravitational pulls. Upon closer inspection, each work seems to reveal an element of surprise – enchanted by the rough texture of Jennifer Lee’s pointillist painting of a roller coaster, the mysterious dimensionality of Fergus Feehily’s painting on cardboard, the pillowy gesture in Sophie Barber’s ode to Niki de Saint Phalle, the deliciously pulposus quality of Paulo Monteiro’s surface. Like a galaxy, each detail is revelatory in the act of intimate observation. This is one constellation in a whole universe that reveals itself if we allow ourselves to give in and delight in the intimate allure.
Artists: Tom Allen, Sophie Barber, Michael Berryhill, Dike Blair, Varda Caivano, Luz Carabaño, Lois Dodd, Fergus Feehily, Anna Glantz, Federico Herrero, Ulala Imai, Lauren Spencer King, Jennifer J. Lee, Daniel Graham Loxton, Paulo Monteiro, Alexandra Noel, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Paul P., Santiago de Paoli, Dana Powell, Kristopher Raos, Eleanor Ray, Louise Sartor, Anna Schachinger, Shana Sharp, Hiroshi Sugito, Sean Sullivan, Altoon Sultan, Hayley Tompkins, Tinus Vermeersch, Tyler Vlahovich, Owen Westberg, Yui Yaegeshi, Zhiliang Zhao.
Chris Sharp
4650 W Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
On view through September 3, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Casey Kauffmann & John de Leon Martin
Human Resources LAArtists Casey Kauffmann and John de Leon Martin have created a super-collage at Human Resources, Los Angeles. A messy collision of screens, drawings and passionfruit vines engulf the gallery space with the intention to bamboozle. The duet’s maximalist installation conjoins Kauffmann and Martin’s longstanding interest in the construction, circulation and consumption of images as a means of forming identity. A sinister humor pulses through the exhibition, as each artist presents cultural ephemera from the internet and popular culture–from Super Mario to the real housewives– intentionally introducing familiar tropes only to subvert them. This destabilization makes room for discussion of queer and feminine desire, pain and possibility.
In artist Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen, she writes that poor images are “the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images…they spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification.” Kauffmann and Martin blur the lines between fantasy and reality, mining landscapes of reproduction and fragmented imagination, presenting limitless possibilities out of cultural detritus. As Kauffmann, Martin and Steyrel suggest, the “poor image” contains a reality that is both prescribed and constructed.
Human Resources LA
410 Cottage Home St
LA CA 90012
On view through August 20, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Sam Anderson
Tanya LeightonHaving gone through a recent breakup, the theme of Sam Anderson’s show, “Lunch Hour,” felt all too familiar as the artist examines cyclical narratives of desire and disappointment. At first glance, the show at Tanya Leighton gallery feels like a departure for those who know Anderson’s work. But upon closer inspection, the sculpture’s strange, eerie, and DIY qualities are undeniably Anderson. This new body of work marks Anderson’s first presentation of 3D printed sculpture (which, of course, she taught herself). These creepy hybrid 3D printed assemblages represent archetypal lovers in culture, such as the cat from “Pepé Le Pew” and the Big O from Shel Silverstein’s book “The Missing Piece,” which are embedded in our psyche whether or not we consciously subscribe to them. A clunky square pedestal sits in the middle of the gallery upon which a haunt of faceless men synchronistically lurk toward us like zombies. These ghostly figures represent the ambiguously bodied men of the artist’s past. I can’t help but project my own collection of ex-lovers onto Anderson’s faceless bodies, the memories of whom are blurred but ever-present. The gallery director encouraged me to watch the 1960’s British film Lunch Hour, from which the show takes its title. The film is about the beginning of a workplace affair between a young woman and her older male supervisor—and is, unfortunately, another familiar narrative that personally haunts me. Applying a Marxist-Feminist framework to the film reveals tensions between desire and fantasy both informed by power relations and engendered by the conditions of capitalism. It feels serendipitous that I should recently decide to re-read Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism, in which she writes, “the subordinated sensorium of the worker, whose acts of rage and ruthlessness are mixed up with forms of care, is an effect of the relation between capitalism’s refusal for futurity in an overwhelmingly productive present and the normative promise of intimacy, which enables us to imagine that having a friend, or making a date, or looking longingly at someone who might, after all, show compassion for our struggles, is really where living takes place.”
Like Berlant, Anderson’s work leads me to question the narratives of desire that pull me along my journey for human connection and examine the cruel optimism embedded in my pleasure quest. I wonder what drives me to still feel excited by the prospect of new love in the wake of so much suffering, haunted by the trauma of failed relationships and sexual violence. Yet, as Anderson asserts, we persist, trapped in our prisons of pleasure and pain.
Tanya Leighton
4654 W Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
On view through August 13, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: The Tale Their Terror Tells
Lyles & KingThe enchanting lure of a hole, the tender scuttle of a bug, the mysterious vibrations of the forest, the pungent bloom of a corpse flower, the mutability of our fleshy bodies in decay—these are things that have fascinated and bonded my years of friendship with Geena Brown. Our co-curated exhibition “The Tale Their Terror Tells” at Lyles & King in New York began as a conversation between friends with a mutual passion for all things dark and grotesque. At the beginning of the pandemic, Geena and I found comfort and joy in watching the horror films that captivated us from adolescence to adulthood (taking inventory in the form of a rather obsessive google spreadsheet that continues to grow). While many of our friends and family found our embrace of horror in a time of peril to be masochistic, we found it generative, playful, and cathartic. The intersection of horror and ecology would become an important source for us to think imaginatively about our survival despite feelings of overwhelming doom and terror. Using the concept “eco-horror,” (as it is applied in film, literature, and visual art) allows us to articulate the collective anxieties of our time and reckon with the daunting uncertainty of our world in crisis. The 23 artists included in the exhibition are guided by the strange, pushing the boundaries of reality and questioning what it means to be human. This kind of curiosity is similar to a child’s sensitivity to the mystifying and unexplainable dimensions of the world. This group of artists reveals a world of haunted topographies crawling with ghosts that whisper tales of desire and fear, casting shadows that trace the violent cost of modern “progress.” These artists practice a kind of radical imagining that calls attention to the vibrant interconnections embedded in everyday life that carry possibilities of resurgence and consider our individual and collective responsibilities. The deep friendship and mutual admiration that nurtured this exhibition speak to the ecofeminist values that frame our curatorial practices and ideas. “The Tale Their Terror Tells” is just one iteration of an ongoing inquiry into eco-horror that will continue to evolve as we leap towards the perils and possibilities of our future.
Artists included in the exhibition:
Angel Lartigue, Astrid Terrazas, Chris Dorland, Chris Hood, Dan Herschlein, Danny Moynihan, Erin Jane Nelson, Farley Aguilar, Felipe Baeza, Hings Lim, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Josh Kline, Karl Haendel, Kathy Ruttenberg, Kiyan Williams, Lila de Magalhaes, Marlene McCarty, Max Hooper Schneider, Miljohn Ruperto, Mira Schor, Sarah Jérôme, Xie Lei and Zoe Leonard.Lyles & King
21 Catherine St & 19 Henry St
New York, NY 10038
On view through August 22, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: The Condition of Being Addressable
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesAt the ICA Los Angeles, curators Marcelle Joseph and Legacy Russell have assembled 25 artists whose practices engage with the construction of identity and the self as subject –or, as Judith Butler puts it, The Condition of Being Addressable. This international and intergenerational group of artists present overlapping and diverging approaches to subjectivity and self-imaging that considers the relationship between the body and language and complicates the distinctions between signifier and signified. Language takes many shapes throughout the show–projected in song, layered over images, uploaded onto screens, or in the case of Mary Kelly, embedded in lint.
Approaching the entrance to the exhibition, I quickly notice the number of installations involving sound. Overlapping voices leak through the walls of the gallery, pushing and pulling for my attention as if competing to be addressed. In the distance, I hear E. Jane’s version of the No Doubt song “Just A Girl” which quickly infiltrates my millennial neuro pathways. I hum along. Oh, I’m just a girl, living in captivity. Your rule of thumb makes me worrisome. The show is not installed in chronological order which allows for surprising and exciting moments of dialogue between artists. A work from Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series is situated next to a photograph by Tiona Nekkia McClodden, who creates their own silhouette as it relates to Black embodiment. In another installation, Lynn Hershman Leeson prompts the viewer to take on the role of voyeur, while in the next room, Aria Dean places the viewer under a “dummy surveillance camera.” In her book Self/Image, Amelia Jones notes the importance of retaining a kind of tension between the subjective and objective, which allows for “images of the body that are immersive rather than safely contained, bounded, and thus potentially trapped by an external gaze.” Placing these artists in dialogue emphasizes this tension and addresses shifting modes of communication and representation. Feminist and Queer theories and histories intermingle in new and immersive ways, creating opportunities for reflection and dialogue.
Artists included in the exhibition: Hannah Black, Judy Chicago, Aria Dean, Anaïs Duplan, Caspar Heinemann, Lubaina Himid CBE, E. Jane, Clotilde Jiménez, Miatta Kawinzi, Mary Kelly, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Ana Mendieta, Ad Minoliti, Troy Montes Michie, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Athena Papadopoulos, Imran Perretta, Sondra Perry, Tschabalala Self, Lorna Simpson, Sin Wai Kin, Diamond Stingily, Jessica Vaughn, and Zadie Xa.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
1717 E 7th St
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through September 2, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Mika Rottenberg
Hauser & WirthA grotesque feeling of excitement and misery shivers through me whenever I encounter Mika Rottenberg’s work. Her stories of monstrous mechanisms of hypercapitalism are infused with a queasy comedy that reminds me of Julia Kristeva’s “laughter of the apocalypse” engendered by terrified feelings of abjection and fascination that border on cruel.
It’s hard to believe this is Mika Rottenberg’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles. It feels as though she could have easily dreamt up this apocalyptic Tinsel Town, with its sprawling excess and dualistic myths of sunshine and noir. The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth will include several of Rottenberg’s most outstanding films from the last ten years and a new series of kinetic sculptures featuring silky ponytails that spring from mysterious holes, whipping about in mechanical motions. Some sculptures require the viewer to activate the work by pedaling or cranking knobs that generate nonsensical movement. Elongated fingers with curling nails attached to industrial material twirl slowly in a manner I can only describe as witchy. Mechanical gears, fleshy body parts, and sprouting house plants mingle with artificial materials of human detritus. A sculpture of a potato partly submerged in a cup of water is over-sprouting in every direction. When I saw this grotesque hairy potato rotating in place, I immediately thought about how Earth is over-sprouting thanks to toxic human actions and destructive systems. This metaphor reminds me that our Earth-potato will be viable only by removing these poisonous sprouts (systems).
Bodies that bulge, excrete, and shriek in ridiculous states of excess call attention to the shifting conditions of capitalist exploitation and how capital relates to particular bodies and identities, oscillating between states of agency and control. Rottenberg reminds us that mechanisms of power transcend borders and bodies, making Capitalism a fundamentally eerie concept. While Capitalism operates in abstract ways, Rottenberg also reminds us of its omnipresence in our daily lives and materials. In the film “NoNoseKnows” (2015), women work themselves to exhaustion in what appears to be a Chinese pearl factory-sweatshop, an example of Capitalism’s vampiric 24/7 work clock that discounts what it means to be human. This particular film strikes a personal nerve in my allergy, eczema-ridden body that is overly sensitive and constantly reacting to the ”invisible” world on macro (climate pollution) and micro (pollen) levels. In Rottenberg’s film, a woman sits at a desk surrounded by flowers that cause her to ceaselessly sneeze plates of spaghetti that she subsequently sets aside for sale. The character in this film resembles a stereotype of a “sad old secretary” whose laboring body is stuck in an assembly line of sneezy purgatory–or a fever dream caught between David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (full of sad “helpless” women) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. I believe our world is as strange and precarious as Rottenberg imagines, but it’s up to us to pay attention to the strangeness and take notice of our daily actions, choices, and consumption that cross borders and bodies.
Hauser & Wirth
901 E 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
On view through October 2, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: American Artist
REDCATOctavia E. Butler’s speculative fictional imagining of Los Angeles seems to inch closer and closer to nonfiction as our apocalyptic reality grows louder and hotter by the day. At REDCAT, the exhibition of new work by American Artist shows how Butler’s words are so much more than mere warning signs–they are stories that imagine alternative futures shaped by collaboration and community.
The exhibition “Shaper of God” traces the real and imaginary story of Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, set in an increasingly familiar dystopic Los Angeles. Like Butler, American Artist also grew up in the Pasadena area. An installation of free-standing walls reference the “fortified city” depicted in Butler’s novel. They also function as partitions that divide the gallery space. These artificial walls point to the artist and Butler’s awareness of the ways in which systems of power are embedded in the geography and urban fabric of Los Angeles. A retro bus sign and bench seem to sprout from the ground, floating eerily in the gallery space like a mirage. It’s known that Butler didn’t drive in LA, and her writing was in many ways informed by the way in which she moved about the city–usually by bus where she would write on scraps of paper. Her movement and daily encounters informed her thinking about community and the diasporic movements that shape Los Angeles. A seemingly fictional documentary film that almost feels like a parody plays in front of a public bench. The film depicts old footage of the Arroyo Seco landscape in which Pasadena is situated, outlining the overlapping histories, communities, and movements that continue to activate and haunt the landscape. Butler’s acute attention to the topography of Los Angeles and the dynamic geopolitical history of Pasadena presents a kind of ecology of the city that exposes colliding and conflicting stories of desire, power, and community. American Artist’s exhibition emphasizes Octavia Butler’s notion of change as a force that exists in our dynamic and interconnected present. Imagining alternative futures is a project that is never done and always changing. As Butler famously reminds us, “All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change. Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.”
REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through October 2, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Jeffrey Meris
Matthew BrownCold sheets of perforated metal gnaw quietly at severed plaster limbs inside Matthew Brown’s La Brea gallery. Despite the unsettling horrors this description might conjure, Jeffrey Meris’ exhibition, “be ever wonderful,” is deceptively healing and hopeful.
A series of mechanized assemblage sculptures titled “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” depict pieces of the artist’s body cast in plaster that rest atop galvanized steel surfaces that feel sterile, almost surgical. Severed, brittle, and pale, the artist’s limbs are slowly shaved down into piles of dust, accumulating on the ground and surface of the sculptures over the course of the exhibition. Victorian tea cups and antique light fixtures appear as parts or gears of the apparatus. While these “human mills” are violent and visceral, if there is an overarching theme in Meris’ exhibition, it is one of care and healing. In a series aptly titled “Care Paintings,” the artist stitches together t-shirts used to care for and maintain the kinetic sculptures. Mounted on scraps of black roofing material, traces of plaster from casts of the artist’s body form cloudy cosmic constellations (a subtle nod to David Hammons’ body prints). Born in Haiti, Meris’ use of reclaimed materials are particular to the terrain of the Caribbean—this thin roofing material is often found strewn across town after a storm—connecting the work to the artist’s personal and embodied experience.
Live orchids cascade out of showering constellations of metal and electrical wiring. Meris thinks of these installations as fireworks—significations of rebirth and freedom—and lively assemblages that require care. Of course, Orchids are also tethered to the brutal legacy of colonialism. Interested in the ecological implications of Meris’ work, I’m reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s words on orchids in A Thousand Plateaus: “the orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by carrying its pollen. … a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other.”
Matthew Brown
712 N La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through June 30, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Kiyan Williams
Hammer MuseumAs my feet touch the terrain of compact, glittering soil that covers the floor of the Hammer Projects space, it feels as if I’m stepping into another realm, another planet even. Kiyan Williams’ solo exhibition, “Between Starshine and Clay,” curated by Erin Christovale, presents a new kind of land art–a sort of archeology of ruins. The artist began collecting earth from ancestral sites in an effort to piece together their own familial heritage. Williams understands soil as vibrant organic material that harbors collective meaning related to Black American histories and identity. Attuned to the spiritual and metamorphic qualities of land and soil, Williams’ practice is echoed in Katherine McKittrick’s claim that “black matters are spatial matters.” In mapping a kind of Black geography that considers diasporic histories and subjects often regarded as “ungeographic”, McKittrick emphasizes the “spatial practices Black women employ across and beyond domination and the ways in which geography, although seemingly static, is an alterable terrain.”
Under the dome of the gallery, a constellation of geological debris and cosmic matter is suspended in a moment of transformation, levitating in a state of simultaneous expansion and explosion; bits of sandstone from the facade of the U.S. Capital constructed by slave labor float alongside pieces of ancestral earth creating a sedimental vortex of Black life. Fragments of the artist’s face and hands are imprinted in the soil as if to suggest their own transformation embedded in the material traces of the “ruined” body. A human figure emerges from the dirt as if springing from the roots of the constellation. An audio recording of Lucille Clifton’s 1993 poem “won’t you celebrate with me” reverberates throughout the gallery, energizing the surrounding materials and bodies. Like Clifton, Williams honors past and present networks of kinship that live in the soil and the stars.
Considering the ways in which humans and nature intersect, Williams presents a new kind of land art grounded in Queer-Black ecofeminism, and land monuments that are not emblems of totality and domination but rather totems of transformation and regeneration.
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024
On view through August 28, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Fawn Rogers
Wilding Cran GalleryFawn Rogers’ exhibition “Your Perfect Plastic Heart” at Wilding Cran Gallery presents a series of paintings depicting oysters and their gooey erotic membranes. At first glance, these works struck me as a cross between Marylin Minter and Chloe Wise–glittery hyperrealist paintings of gastronome with a hint of kitsch. Rogers takes the oyster as her subject to frame the story of our precarious reality as we navigate living and dying in the age of the Anthropocene (a term Rogers uses that I tend to shy away from).
As Rogers points out, oysters have been historically commodified as culinary delicacies–served with lemon and mignonette–and their pearls as a luxury material that signifies wealth and taste. Human fingers creep out of the oyster’s shells, tracing their slimy edges and protruding pearls, eroticizing and likening their forms to female anatomy. The oysters are decontextualized from their natural habitats and painted against nondescript color field backgrounds. As if to evoke an eco-Yves Klein fantasy, the painting titled Epoquetude is foregrounded by a vibrant cobalt blue, further stressing their condition as rarified commodities. I’m left wondering, how does Rogers’ sexualization of nature contribute to the ecofeminist conversation?
While the pearl industry certainly speaks to the story of human exceptionalism and exploitation of nature, another related, resurgent, and collaborative story lies beneath Rogers’ opalescent surfaces. Oyster farming is surprisingly sustainable; not only that, it significantly benefits the ecosystem as oysters are natural filtration systems that promote biodiversity. What is not sustainable is farming and shipping oysters from Maine to Los Angeles. Rogers claims that “the pearl’s inception hinges on corruption, manipulation, and desecration.” While this is true, oysters also contain histories of indigenous harvesting practices. Rogers’ paintings present pearls and mollusks from the vantage point of capitalist consumption to tell an aestheticized story of the Anthropocene. It’s hard to deny the alluring quality of Rogers’ paintings, but they seem to miss vital connections to a more resurgent ecofeminist story, lost in the painting’s erotic surfaces.
While I’m aligned with Rogers’ ecofeminist agenda, I do wonder if her painted critters tell the story of environmental urgency and disaster she aims to inform. Or are oysters just enticing to paint and sexy to look at? Ecofeminism’s strength and potential lie in its commitment to cultivating tentacular thinking, resurgent strategies, and multispecies kinship. As Donna Haraway likes to say, “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.” Rogers’ oyster story is one among many other related (hi)stories of conquest, resistance, and resurgence.
Wilding Cran Gallery
1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, unit 460
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through June 25, 2022 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Kevin Beasley
Regen ProjectsVibrant matter dances and pulsates in vortical pools and currents. Artist Kevin Beasley petrifies matter in states of motion, submerging and emerging materials form dynamic topographies that embody personal and collective histories and significations. I remember my first humble encounter with Beasley’s work as an intern at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York and have been haunted by his ghostly forms and uncanny sense of materiality ever since.
“On Site” is Beasley’s first solo exhibition with Regen Projects in Los Angeles, presenting work from his ongoing “Slab” series as well as a new body of wall-based sculpture that furthers his consideration for the vitality of materials that embody notions of Black experience in the American South and evoke conditions of being and possibility–composed of hand-dyed cotton and items of found clothing such as socks, T-shirts, house dresses, and loose shoelaces cast in swirling pools of candy-colored resin. Spontaneous and fragmented sounds permeate and reverberate throughout the space, flooding all corners of the gallery (including the rooftop) with audio recordings taken by the artist in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. This vibrational environment creates the sensation of being underwater or in a pressurized space. New variations of Beasley’s “Slab” series act as counter-sculptures to traditional European art historical relief sculpture commonly inscribed with narratives of dominance to advance white-male-human notions of “progress.” Alternatively, Beasley’s sculptural reliefs, or slabs, are abstract and open rather than closed and fixed. His energetic (almost spiritual) approach to materiality questions the limits of knowledge and constitutes a kind of radical imagining.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through June 25, 2022
