Like unruly creatures, Dona Nelson‘s double-sided paintings defy convention; they stand free, hang from ceilings and incorporate quotidian materials in bizarre ways. Titled “Painting the Magic Mountain” in wry reference to Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, this show contains 18 new specimens. These canvases’ unique formats evoke billboards, windows, stelae, game pieces, tile floors, embroidered textiles, and human figures; yet their exuberant abstract imagery resists being pinned down. The checklist designates Nelson’s media as “on canvas,” but it might as well say “on and in canvas,” for her acrylic stains bleed through unprimed cotton, and her painted strings not only sit atop the canvas, they trespass its weave in stitches and protrude on the opposite side in defiance of painting’s usual two-dimensionality. Each painting is not only a double image, it is also a sculpture that must be circumambulated; even nails and stretcher bars become aesthetic details. Viewing thus takes on a motional, exploratory quality akin to the painting process. Nelson arrives at each work by enacting a series of arbitrary procedures with paint and cheesecloth until she sees an image emerge “like a character in a play,” she says. “Once I see the character of the painting, I get excited, and then what I have to do to finish the painting becomes clear to me. I follow the painting until its character completely emerges from the shadows.” Once developed, her characters embody curious lives of their own. In one room, you find yourself encircled at close quarters by several freestanding paintings, as though you, not they, were under examination.

Michael Benevento
3712 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Show runs through Nov. 2