ALI LIEBEGOTT
ROOMS AND OTHER FEELINGS
OCTOBER 29 – DECEMBER 17, 2022
OCHI is pleased to present Rooms and Other Feelings, an exhibition of new work by artist Ali Liebegott. This is the Artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Rooms and Other Feelings will be on view at OCHI Aux, located at 3305 W Washington Blvd in Los Angeles, California from October 29 through December 17, 2022. An Artist’s Reception will be held on Saturday, October 29th from 5:00 to 8:00 PST.
For more than 20 years, Ali Liebegott has been a visual storyteller, using watercolor, ink, and oil to make paintings and drawings that feature sharp observations full of well-seasoned characters, familiar places, and quotidian wit. Chronicling the goings-on of the everyday, Liebegott welcomes the viewer into her community and immediate surroundings as seen through the lens of her own queer consciousness. Each brightly colored self-portrait, landscape, and interior scene depicts personal experience with nuance and complexity and draws on the elusive nature of memory and feelings. Subtle and voyeuristic, the paintings focus on ambiguous moments of existence. Like distant memories, space is flattened, distorted, and morphed as Liebegott lingers on a moment, unafraid to consider the absurdity or the tenderness of the present.
Moving beyond visual representation, Liebegott’s compositions emphasize the feeling of looking, staring, gazing, and interacting. Imagining an observer always slightly out of the frame, the objects in each painting radiate a heightened awareness of isolation, exposure, and attention. In Shrimp Cocktail (2021) perspective is oriented down onto a plate of shrimp arranged on a bed of ice, accompanied by lackluster garnishes and a sliver of stemware. Stiffly composed in a portrait orientation, the meal appears unremarkable yet has been rendered with detail and care, as if the protagonist just out of frame was listening to other peoples’ conversations while dining alone in a restaurant. Entenmann’s Factory Outlet (2022) depicts empty coffee carts tucked into the back corner of a grocery store alongside assorted desserts, day-old and discounted. Illuminating the commonplace can reveal the drab. Exploring the vulnerability of being noticed, Liebegott paints vignettes of the unseen details of life—poetic, temporal, and endearing.
Ali Liebegott (b. 1971, Newbury Park, CA) is a painter and a writer primarily interested in inclusion and representation for queer communities. Liebegott’s work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in St. Louis, MO; Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA; Invisible-Exports in New York, NY; and OCHI and Junior High Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Liebegott has read, performed, and exhibited her writing throughout the United States and Canada and is the author of four books: The Beautifully Worthless (2006), The IHOP Papers (2007), Cha-Ching! (2013), and The Summer of Dead Birds (2019). Liebegott received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-founded the non-profit RADAR LAB, a free annual retreat for queer writers. She is the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards (2006, 2008), a Ferro-Grumley Award (2008), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1999), and a Peabody Award (2015) for her work on the television series Transparent. Liebegott lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
