“The work of art created as a labor of love may sound cynical, yet it is made in good faith and contains a deep utopian wish for social change, no matter how naive and nostalgic that dream is.” ~ Miyoshi Barosh
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce MIYOSHI BAROSH: LOVE, to be presented from January 11 through February 15, 2020. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 11th, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This exhibition marks the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. Concurrent exhibitions honoring the life and work of the late Los Angeles artist, who died in 2019, will be held at Night Gallery in downtown LA and The Pit in Glendale.
Over the last fifteen years, Miyoshi Barosh made her work with humor and dystopian irony in a style she called “Conceptual Pop.” With an emphasis on cultural blindness toward death, decay, and the disintegration of both utopian social constructs, and ultimately the individual body itself, Barosh saw her work as “a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity politics through a handmade carnivalesque, mischievous confrontation.” Given her untimely death, her message is made even more poignant, if not tragic, because she lived it.
Introducing “Delirium,” her first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2008, Miyoshi Barosh declared: “My work collides the domestic world of craft with the muscular images of Pop in signs: maps, banners, billboards, and roadside attractions. Like figures of Paul Bunyan, concrete dinosaurs, giant donuts and circus billboards, I want the work to share that sense of crazed exuberance, a bid for attention that contains a simple expectation of attracting attention. There’s a pre-technological innocence to those somewhat crudely constructed signs that is honest because the gag is so obvious that you’re in on it.”
Barosh’s use of vernacular craft processes and folk traditions in combination with digital technologies was made with both comic irony and heartfelt sincerity. On exhibit at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles will be her seminal tapestry LOVE, 2007; I Keep Going On, 2008; Arcadia (happiness plays on shuffle 24/7), 2013; I ♥ Kitties, 2014; and several paintings from the Portraits for the Home series, 2011, as well as studies on paper. Ideas about love, which in one form or another are emblematic of this conceit, is the conceptual thread that runs through all of the works in this exhibition.
LOVE was the first large-scale work that Barosh created using repurposed afghans — those lonely and discarded, hand-made blankets which “in itchy, acrylic coziness embody feelings of dependency, obligation, and guilt.” Together with I Keep Going On, these collaged and crocheted pieces play on the notion of a “labor of love.” Making afghans is traditionally a women’s craft that, according to the artist, refers to both the “ideal of self-less love and to the idea
of unconditional love, that is expected of, but not a reality of, family.” These pieces are “deliberately imperfect, damaged, and irregular like the human condition, pulled by conflicting desires for independence and dependency, freedom and obligation.”
Arcadia (happiness plays on shuffle 24/7) is an assemblage of accumulation, consumption, and destruction — a folksy-crude parody inspired by computer gaming, Spotify, and home videos of cats from YouTube. In this mediated experience of nature, reduced to floral-patterned fabrics and digitized kittens, animals are consumed as constructs of cuteness, an addictive escape to an interiorized “happy place.” The images of the kittens reflect a culturally induced need for self-medication. An extension of the ideas elaborated in Arcadia, I ♥ Kitties are layered, screened, Instagram-perfected reproductions of captured kitty heads, the new celebrity icons of the digital age, at once eye candy and hypnotic drug.
In speaking about her work, Barosh said, “Questions of value including perceived aesthetic value, are part of the narrative. Ideas about originality and authenticity are mocked while pointing to larger cultural failures that have to do with consumption and ecological disaster. I talk about materialism, accepted notions of value, and resulting anxieties through my work — subjects that are relevant to everyone. While socio-economic questions are raised around ideas about women’s labor and value in the use of craftwork, ‘value’ also becomes a projection of ourselves onto things like cute animals on the Internet, mythic American landscapes, and the built environment.”
Miyoshi Barosh (1959-2019) made work in a wide range of materials and techniques that humorously expose the socio-political underpinnings of American culture. Her work has been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and The Pit in Glendale. Recent exhibitions include Thread, Long Beach Museum of Art (2019) and Material as Metaphor at the former Craft & Folk Art Museum, now Craft Contemporary (2017). Notable exhibitions include the 2015 C.O.L.A. Exhibition, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles; Body Conscious: Southern California Fiber at the Craft in America Center, Los Angeles; Women, War, and Industry at the San Diego Museum of Art, and The Small Loop Show at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Barosh was a 2015 recipient of both a Guggenheim Artist Fellowship and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (C.O.L.A) and an Artist-in-Residence at the Pilchuck Glass School. After receiving a BFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design, she moved to New York, where she became the first Managing Editor of BOMB magazine. Upon receiving an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Barosh became involved with A.R.T. Press, publishing and editing her own arts journal, Now Time, as well as becoming involved in the artist collaborative, Project X. She died in Long Beach last February and a memorial in her honor was held at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles in July 2019.
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“I feel an affinity to Michael Heizer’s use of drawing when he carved circles in the desert with his motorcycle. I, too, am claiming land as artist’s materials, but I’m using the ground to inscribe the surface of the paint.” ~ Margie Livingston
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce MARGIE LIVINGSTON: The Earth is a Brush, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, to be presented from January 11 through February 15, 2020. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 11th, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
For the past four years, Margie Livingston has been dismantling the line between painting and performance. In a hybrid form of Action Painting, performance, and Land Art, she drags constructed paintings across terrain, inscribing the canvases with the ground to what she calls Extreme Landscape Painting or “non-painting painting.” Inherent in this process is the use of chance procedures and the knowledge that the ideas change and evolve as she gets into the work.
Using her body as an instrument pits her natural introversion against a desire to perform; the absurdity of dragging a painting in public triggers shame. Shame envisions judgment from others, presumes an audience, and complicates the relationships between performer, witness, and participant. As works of art, the performance artifacts evoke Color Field and Action Painting but, having been dragged in the street, also speak to darker forces in our culture.
The grouping titled Dragging Self Doubt resulted from an experimental, interactive performance that Livingston produced reflecting on chance, creative destruction, and collective release at the Seattle Art Museum’s annual Party in the Park. Guests were invited to write something they’d like to let go of onto a painting. Dragging the painting around the park offered an opportunity for catharsis as the face of the earth and the weight of gravity colluded to erode away the words. “Because doubt is always lurking around my studio,” says Livingston, “waiting to ambush me if I get too cocky, I immediately connected with the painting on which someone had written self-doubt.”
Margie Livingston received her MFA in painting from the University of Washington and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2001, a period she spent living and working in Berlin. Other awards include a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the 2010 Neddy Fellowship from the Benkhe Foundation and the 2010 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust (funded by the Chihuly Foundation), a 2008 Artist-in-Residence at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, and the 2006 Betty Bowen Memorial Award. She has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, and Amerika Haus-Berlin, among others. Margie Livingston’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Eugenio Lopez Collection, Joel and Zoe Dictrow Collection, New York, and numerous other private and public collections.
