Exhibition Descriptions:
Xingzi Gu’s figures are waiting: adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, two people unsure whether tenderness is approaching or passing, solitary figures sitting in unknown feelings. They seem content to yearn. For Gu, waiting is its own answer; it hardly matters whether Godot ever comes.
Across their series of works, Gu’s figures remain similarly unresolved: their bodies mix with the background, the two influencing, absorbing, and producing each other. The ambiguity does not make the figures passive to their surroundings. Instead, it allows the body to grow its own space without defined outlines. Gu’s figures do not simply wait in time and space; in waiting, they reshape the world they inhabit.
–
In her debut solo exhibition at Make Room Gallery, Where Willows Rise, Katya Labowe-Stoll imagines a chimerical post-deluge world shaped by natural tension, resilience, and shifting hierarchies. Across seven paintings set within the same fantastical mountain range at different times of day, primordial human-fish figures inhabit surreal landscapes of flourishing willows, reflective waters, phosphorescent flora, and palpable heat. Drawing inspiration from Frederic Church, George Burr, Käthe Kollwitz, and the diverse plant life surrounding her Mt. Washington studio, Labowe-Stoll uses dramatic shifts in light, color, and atmosphere to create an oneiric environment where her figures explore the land through touch while remaining psychologically detached from one another. Their interactions with plants, animals, and each other move between curiosity, intimacy, consumption, and control, reflecting humanity’s complicated relationship with the natural world. Ultimately, Where Willows Rise asks what responsibility we bear toward the environments we inhabit and consume—and what consequences follow when nature’s limits are ignored.
–
Make Room presents Tête-bêche, an exhibition of painting, sculpture, and furniture by seven artists and designers who live in Los Angeles and grew up elsewhere: Aleza Zheng, Daniel Wang, Tianlian Liu, Xiangxi Zhang, John Wu, and Studio Paul Chan with Jeremy Kim. The work shares no subject. What it shares is a body of pictures each of these artists took in early, Hong Kong cinema and Japanese film and animation for the most part. Depending on the artist, that was the world outside the door or something that came at a distance, on a screen and in translation. And each arrived carrying a different set. Those pictures surface here as a way of handling a room, a table, a low light, a figure that has just stepped out of frame, in work that is otherwise about other things.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/q4qd6abgt33s7ytnez4bi/AEyHshu2Hft-3zGDPRhFZYQ?rlkey=7i6aqtyyb8b4ayhjojcudcu34&st=cqv2v5b4&dl=0
