The meeting of Covey Gong and Monique Mouton at Bel Ami is like watching the contact of two elements transforming one another. While their respective works are satisfying on their own, together, Mouton’s mixed media on paper and Gong’s tactful sculptures, spotlights a transitional and unsettled nature that resignifies the experience of fully emerging without committing to a definition. In Gong’s work, a sculpture such as TRD-RDDL01-HP (2024), with its delicate stainless-steel assembly and sequenced acrylic rods, oscillates between feeling talismanic like an I Ching hexagram and embodying the function of an architectural maquette. In Mouton’s Zones (2024), an asymmetrical floating paper touched by horizontal gray brushstrokes and a subdued fluorescent lemon wash, counters what I expect—yet is seemingly right. Their separate and complimentary tenderness towards materials and the construction of each work is technical without requiring a complete sense of fixity.  While one could say these works are ephemeral or understated, that suggests a softness and short-lived quality that doesn’t capture the fortitude in their fragility nor their finely tuned approach. Propelling together with a sharp clarity, “a vista,” is steady and penetrating. 

Bel Ami
709 N. Hill St. Suite #105
Los Angeles, CA
On view through October 12, 2024