Category: Pick of the Week

The title of Farley Aguilar’s exhibition “Phantom Limb” refers to the corporeal sensation of a limb that has been severed from the body–memories scratch and ache, haunted by the historical traumas of slavery that manifest in transgenerational pain and psychic dismemberment. Aguilar’s practice is concerned with the construction of American identity and the fragmented historical narratives that work to uphold structural and institutional racism. Presenting counter-narratives that acknowledge underrepresented historical perspectives, Aguilar exposes the racist underpinnings of the “American dream” and the contradictions (slavery and liberty) embedded in American democracy. 

Aguilar’s dynamic paintings–made with oil stick, graphite, and oil paint–reference historical photographs that capture moments and events in American history of underrepresented perspectives and subjects. The painting titled The Mourners depicts a crowd standing alongside a funeral procession for the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that took place in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Faces of pain and loss are animated by Aguilar’s emotive use of color and gesture. On the opposite wall, The Ribbon Cutting shows the mayor of New York and the president of General Motors (Alfred P. Sloan) with a group of white male executives standing outside the entrance of the Astor Hotel’s Grand Ballroom posing for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the General Motors Exhibition in 1932–an era associated with American progressivism and Industrialization. This painting feels tighter, more calculated. Sloan’s piercing red eyes gaze out at the faces of the oppressed (The Mourners), confronting the viewer as if to suggest our complicity. The tension between the two paintings evokes an American dream riddled with anxiety and trauma. 

Systemic oppression is sustained, in part, by the passive acceptance of institutional racism and the erasure of non-White historical perspectives from the American narrative. As Isabel Wilkerson points out, “Americans are loath to talk about enslavement in part because it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened democracy, a beacon of democracy for the world…It is as if the greater we distance ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces.” The disavowal of systemic racism in the U.S. is alarmingly evident as conservative Republicans oppose the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), passing legislation banning CRT from school curriculums across the country. Aguilar’s paintings challenge the ahistorical one-dimensional vision of American society that continues to control and deprive the oppressed of agency over past narratives and possible futures.

Night Gallery
2050 Imperial Street
Los Angeles CA 90021
On view through May 7, 2022

Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Billie Holiday’s iconic song “Strange Fruit” serves as a haunting metaphor for racial violence, evoking the historical and ongoing pain of Black Americans. The song was originally written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 in the form of an anti-lynching protest poem. “Strange Fruit” is also the title of Genevieve Gaignard’s current solo exhibition at Vielmetter gallery. Presenting a series of installation, assemblage, and photographic works, Gaignard addresses constructs of identity that intersect race, gender, and class. By looking to the past, Gaignard interrogates hierarchical systems of representation and implicit biases embedded in American culture that continue to enable the subjugation of Black identities. 

A palette of crates labeled “strange fruit” containing bright red pomegranates welcomes viewers into the gallery. Pomegranates are often depicted in art history as a symbol of fertility, and in Greek mythology, they are known as “the fruit of death,” having grown out of the blood of Adonis. The fruit’s double meaning–death and life–sets the tone of the exhibition. Notions of Black and white femininity are represented in everyday found objects often sourced from Gaignard’s familial and childhood archives. The daughter of interracial parents, Gaignard examines her own intersectional identity in a series of photographs titled “Off With Their Heads.” Dressed as one of the Southern Gothic Royal Doulton figurines included in the surrounding installation (in the form of severed heads delicately resting on pedestals), Gaignard performs white historical concepts of beauty that appear kitschy and absurd. An installation of tightly staggered mirrors on vintage wallpaper titled Do You Only Want to See What You Believe? brings to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness in their fragmented reflections. The mirrors summon Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, which tells the story of a Black girl who spends long hours looking in the mirror. Clouded by racist ideals, the girl struggles to recognize her own Black beauty. The mirrors also prompt the viewer to look at themselves—to turn inwards and ask, Do you only want to see what you believe? Viewers are encouraged to examine their own identities, values, and potential complicity. By turning to the past, Gaignard reminds us that America is still sick—with blood on the leaves and blood at the root. 

Vielmetter Los Angeles
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through May 7, 2022

A series of curious doors assembled in neat parallel lines resemble haunted monuments or an uncanny labyrinth of portals to seemingly familiar spaces. Fiona Connor’s solo exhibition, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs” is an ongoing series that documents the doors of clubs, businesses and community spaces that have closed in Los Angeles—a continuation of the artist’s inquiry into the social and psychic processes that shape our built environments. Employing several production methods, Connor maps the fragments of a world profoundly altered by the COVID 19 pandemic and its impact on the survival and adaptability of community spaces in Los Angeles, amplified by the city’s deep-rooted issues relating to development and gentrification. The careful labor involved in Connor’s sculptural reproductions evokes the unending process of deconstruction and reconstruction—labor that honors the particular identities and collaborative energies that once activated these civic spaces. By meticulously replicating the frayed details and human remnants of each facade—capturing ephemera such as posters, stickers, flyers and eviction notices—Connor emphasizes space that is situational, relational and socially constructed. Connor’s rearticulated doors are multidirectional, multivalent, nonlinear portals that embody the memories of social histories. Hovering on the tenth floor of the historic Bendix building, the installation is framed by large industrial windows overlooking South Los Angeles—a vista of unending portals permeate the urban landscape.

Connor’s material documentation of overlapping temporalities, blurring the past, present and future is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities). Calvino writes, “the city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the street, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” Connor navigates the boundaries of our built environments, asking us to notice the intimacies of the everyday and the infinite plurality of hidden worlds that surround us.

Château Shatto
1206 Maple Avenue Suite 1030
Los Angeles, CA 90015
On view through April 30, 2022

Nancy Youdelman’s Button Dress from 1972 hangs in the window of a nondescript gallery on Fountain Avenue. The garment represents early feminist strategies that confronted and subverted domestic roles and “feminine” mediums traditionally prescribed to women and labeled folk or kitsch. The exhibition “Womanhouse 1972/2022,” curated by Stefano Di Paola, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the legendary “Womanhouse” exhibition, organized in 1972 by 25 CalArts students enrolled in Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program. The 1972 exhibition was experimental, collaborative, immersive and situational (installed in a vacant mansion in Hollywood). As a student of art history, I often imagine what it felt like to be in Los Angeles during this time and to experience “Womanhouse”—wishing to be a fly on Robin Weltch’s Pepto-Bismol pink walls. Upon entering Anat Ebgi’s pop-up gallery, after encountering Youdelman’s dress and work by Mira Schor, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Wilding, I feel a tinge of disappointment when I notice Sandra Orgel’s mannequin linen closet reproduced in print on the central wall of the gallery. I did not imagine this iconic feminist work neatly installed on white walls, but in an immersive alternative space. The feminist practices that emerged in the 1970s were nurtured and catalyzed by site-specific alternative spaces like “Womanhouse” and the subsequent Woman’s Building. As I made my way through the show, I realized my mind was stuck in a Womanhouse fantasy. This feminist project did not begin and end in that mansion in Hollywood. It is impossible to articulate the impact “Womanhouse” had on the generations of feminist artists that followed. Di Paola’s curatorial approach is brave and impactful. By bringing together a selection of work made before, during and after the 1972 exhibition—including work by some of the core CalArts students as well as their collaborators—Di Paola engages and connects early feminist practices and strategies more broadly, emphasizing the collaborative and profound legacy of “Womanhouse” and the Feminist Art Program. 

To conclude the exhibition’s performance program—organized in collaboration with Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND)—artists Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz will reimagine Sandra Ogel and Christine Rush’s 1972 performance series, “Maintenance.” The program will take place on Saturday, March 19th, 2022, with performances starting at 4 pm.

Anat Ebgi
4859 Fountain Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90029
On view through April 16, 2022

Survival is dependent on adaptability. But at what point will humans be willing (or forced) to become adaptable? Josh Kline’s 16mm short film, Adaptation (2019–22), presents a future shaped by human destruction. New York City has become submerged by seawater due to the catastrophic effects of climate change. Essential workers are seen traversing canals of cloudy flesh-tone water by boat, meandering between Manhattan’s skyscrapers—once symbolic pillars of modern “progress” are transformed into sublime capitalist ruins. Every inch of the gallery floor is covered with a dark tarp that ripples like water across the room. Visitors are invited to rest on plastic storage bins and prompted to imagine their inevitable apocalypse: Will we survive? Will we adapt? For many, the apocalypse has already arrived by way of colonization. Refugees continue to die every day in search of sustainability.

The style of the film is uncanny yet nostalgic—a kind of dystopian daydream. There is an air of stillness and acceptance; does this kind of aestheticization of disaster provoke action or acceptance? What would Kline’s film be like if it were set in Los Angeles? Yet again, this city is not short of apocalyptic imagery—real and imagined. As workers gaze out toward the murky horizon, searching for hope, I recall my own experience pausing to watch the undeniable beauty of an LA sunset during fire season. 

The exhibition also includes an installation of sculptural work related to the film in the upstairs gallery.

LAXART
7000 Santa Monica Blv
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through April 9, 2022