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Tag: abstract art
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Pick of the Week: Psychosomatic
Various Small FiresWhile painting may, in most cases, operate within the mind alone, sculpture is intrinsically connected to the body. Sculpture itself has a certain corporeality. The works aren’t abstracted onto a wall, but rather exist in the world among us. We are forced to reckon with their existence because we have to adjust ourselves around sculptures. To take them in, we have to navigate around them, walking around, over, under, or through them. The physical nature of sculpture and its broad array of functions is on display at Various Small Fires’ new group show, “Psychosomatic.”
Many of the works have an overt connection to the body, like Isabel Yellin’s Gut Feeling (2021) or Nevine Mahmoud’s Untitled (2021). Mahmoud’s work in particular is striking for its erotic posturing of a marble female nude, drawing on imagery found throughout Mahmoud’s other works. But most interestingly is the rough, unfinished edges of the otherwise smooth and polished form; they provide a tactile sense of craftsmanship, giving evidence of the ever-working hands of the artist molding the work. This craftsmanship is seen again in the workman’s table upon which the statue rests, a coarse pedestal for a classical medium.
Still other works deal with the connection between body, mind, and art in a more tacit fashion. Amelia Lockwood’s excelsis (2021), a ceramic work, is a colorful altar, inviting visitors to approach and participate in its ritual nature. The work possesses a certain auspiciousness, with its visual similarities to a menorah and highly decorative patterns. It sits powerfully in the space and demands attention. Lockwood’s work relates that religion, similarly to art, can act as a bridge between mind and body.
Finally, we come to the works of Kristen Morgin – some of the last seen in the show. Morgin, unlike Mahmoud or Lockwood, draws firmly from contemporary culture. Her clay recreations of children’s books and old DVDs, like the items from Claes Oldenburg’s store, invite you to take the sensations of viewing art out of the gallery. What would happen – to our minds, our bodies, or even our souls – if we were to look at a real used copy of Mr. and Mrs. Smith with the same awe?
Various Small Fires
812 North Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90038
Thru July 16th, 2021 -
Reconnoiter: Kimberly Brooks
Interview with the artistThe acorn never falls too far. At age 12, an enterprising artist stood in front of White on White, the Kazimir Malevich painting at MoMA NY. She tugged on her father’s sleeve and asked the surgeon, “What does it mean?” His answer inspired Kimberly Shlain Brooks toward a career in the arts. Her question sent Leonard Shlain on a decade-long inquiry which produced the 1991 bestseller, Art & Physics. Shlain dedicated his studies to the art of science; his daughter focused on the science of art. Her new illustrated book, which reveals safe practices for oil painters, may revolutionize the popularity of the once-hazardous medium.
ARTILLERY: You are a busy practicing and exhibiting artist. How long have you been painting and where has that taken you?
KIMBERLY BROOKS: I started painting when I was in college, spending the first five years painting the figure. I have moved through so many phases since then, from portraiture to landscape. As I enter my 30th year with the medium, I am flirting with abstraction. I have an exhibition this summer at Zevitas Marcus in Culver City.
Beyond the title of your new book, The New Oil Painting: Your Essential Guide to Materials and Safe Practices, what can we learn?
I think oil painting is one of the most misunderstood of all the art materials, the diva of all mediums. Most people think they need solvents. This, among other reasons, causes many artists to opt for acrylics. I longed for a little black book on oil painting, a basic understanding that had everything I needed to know, about the materials, as I use them. I conferred with scientists, conservators and historians. I wanted to make it easily accessible, so I illustrated it with drawings, and thanks to Chronicle Books I have color photography as well.
What prompted your research? How far did you investigate?
I used to have a studio in Venice. One hot day, when I had been painting with all the smelly stuff, I suddenly had trouble breathing. It really freaked me out. I knew I had done some kind of damage, but I didn’t know how long it had been brewing. I then spent the next year trying every other media on earth to see what would satisfy me. Nothing measured up to oil painting.
How far did I investigate? Exhaustively. I ultimately learned that you really don’t need all those fancy, toxic things. An experienced oil painter may balk. Hopefully that person will get the book and discover how beautiful and simple oil painting can really be if it’s used the way science, not history, recommends.
Photo by Stebs Schinerrer Acrylic or oil? Your thesis challenges the choice most artists have made. Thoughts?
Definitely oil. I think acrylic can be fine for very geometric work but I don’t like the way it dries so flat and fast. For me, it is not as sensual.
All of your many projects are redefining the term “synergy.” What is First Person Artist?
First Person Artist is an interview platform where I talk with notable artists and we answer questions from the audience. During the pandemic, I started hosting “Fireside Chats” and “Vampire Cocktail Hours,” where we gather to look at art online. If any readers are interested in attending the next event, they can sign up at Firstpersonartist.com.
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Pick of the Week: Taewon Heo
LibertineThe silencing of protest is the hallmark of authoritarian governments. While often this silencing can be very bloody, the most effective form of violence is legislative. The fight for democracy in Hong Kong – and the accompanying crackdown – is a prime example of how State power is wielded more forcefully through legislation than law enforcement. China’s addition of the National Security Law to Hong Kong Basic Law, the de facto constitution of the quasi-independent area, is attempting to squash the will of the people in Hong Kong. The real effects of this law are still being felt, and are explored in Libertine’s new exhibition from photographer Taewon Heo, “Kill the Secret Cops.”
Taewon Heo’s photography does not explore the protest itself so much as the obliteration of protest. His photos are of Hong Kong protest signs, often graffiti, that have been painted over and obscured. The obfuscation is obvious – there seems to be little mind paid to being secretive about eliminating the subversive messages, and for good reason: the destruction of democracy doesn’t need to be subtle when it is legal.
The National Security Law, basically, allows Chinese police to arrest and extradite individuals in Hong Kong that they view as treasonous against the central government in Beijing. This law is intentionally broad. Pro-democracy political advocates and politicians have been arrested and disappeared into the Mainland; protestors and activists are being sentenced to years in prison; and, with the recent dissolution of Apple Daily, free press has all but been extinguished. The emptiness of Taewon Heo’s scenes emphasizes these broad eliminations of human rights. Humanity itself is nonexistent in the images, though their remains can be found under a thin layer of paint.
At the protest on July 1st 2020, police arrested protestors for holding flags, signs, or even phone stickers that displayed pro-democracy messages. Taewon Heo’s photographs of political violence illustrate the destruction of those messages, and how their absence can be powerful. Though the words have been destroyed, the message is clear: Hong Kong will be free. The protest never stopped, and democracy lives.
Liberate Hong Kong, The Revolution of Our Times
光復香港，時代革命
Libertine
6817 Melrose Ave, LA, CA, 90038
Thru July 9th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Lawrence Calver
Simchowitz GalleryLawrence Calver’s first US show at Simchowitz Gallery, “On the Off Chance,” is one of the most fascinating studies in material of any show in Los Angeles that I’ve had the chance to review. Calver is not a traditional fine artist; his background is in creative direction for fashion shows. Here in “On the Off Chance,” he relies on this training and eschews traditional mediums, creating strong, symbolic canvases out of stitched fabrics, often times found fabrics.
The canvases that Calver assembles are rooted in a color-field, Soviet aesthetic. There are strong, bold lines and geometric patterns to the fabrics. Many of the works are landscapes with pared down houses, while others illustrate roughly human figures. They tap into a rustic urbanity, creating within them a conflict between the old (traditional fabrics and dyes) and the new (abstracted forms with an emphasis on color and texture.)
But the true magic of the show, as I suggested before, is the subtleties in which Calver works. We’ll start with the figures themselves. The blocky representations of people in Calver’s works have a common element: pointed hats. While a pointed hat is a symbol used by any number of cultures and peoples, the sourcing of Calver’s materials in India points to the reference being to the Tibetan monk’s pandita hat. This certainly enforces the idol-like nature of the figures and their blank, serene depiction.
And Calver’s sourcing of materials is evident without even reading an excerpt about the show; within the works themselves, Calver maintains the original logo of the fabric companies that he’s sourced the materials. Printed in English, these logos cite manufacturers like Kohinoor Rubia and Bhoja Ram Mukand Lal. The use of fabrics made in India by a British artist echoes the long, colonialist connection between these two nations, a connection reinforced by the inclusion of patches of vintage Western fabrics.
Through his inventive use of fabrics, Lawrence Calver questions our pattern of consumption which has its roots inextricably tied to our colonialist history, and demonstrates what an artist can accomplish with material alone.
Simchowitz Gallery
8255 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90048
Thru June 26th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Guy Yanai
Praz-DelavalladeGuy Yanai is irreplaceable. Not simply his vibrant, structured style (though that too is unique,) each of Yanai’s paintings carries an air of individuality and transience. Seeing them for the first time is a new wave crashing on the shore of your subconscious, dousing you before receding again. At his new show at Praz-Delavallade, “The Caboose,” Yanai showcases a collection of works combining his distinctive palette of colors with dreamy, narrative scenes that inspire a deep wistfulness.
But this wistfulness isn’t grounded. Despite the strong, decisive brushstrokes, Yanai paints scenes that he hasn’t experienced, and are mostly drawn from photographs or films. Claire and her boyfriend (2021) or Pauline Reading (2021), for example, do not depict exact memories but rather ideas of memories – pleasurable moments that, in their non-existence, are as real as our memories. The pictorially flat and colorful scenes, be they a couple embracing, a figure reading alone, or a simple house-plant, are singular and unique from anything you might find in a nostalgic moment.
I’m beginning to think that nostalgia is a curse. The desire for a happiness never to return can blind you to the happiness which might exist right in front of you. And yet this desire is addictive; like any good curse, it draws you in before binding you in a wicked web. Nostalgia promises an ideal yet provides only an imitation – and a fleeting one at that.
To this effect, Yanai references the essayist Roland Barthes, quoting him thusly:
“This is to say the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. … Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”
While Barthes is talking about a streetcar, the sentiment also applies to the work of Guy Yanai. Each painting, while existing in concert with each other, are still independent and unique. They bring with them their own kind of joy, longing and profound. But unlike nostalgia, that accursed and remote bliss, the paintings of Guy Yanai are not perpetually out of your reach; they will summon the same vanished pleasure each and every time.
Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048
Thru June 26th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Arnold Kemp
JOANArt is a reflection of the artist. The culmination of personal experiences, years of study, and distinct perspectives that comprise their life emerge in their works. But none of us are infinitely unique – which is good, for if we were, we’d have no way to relate to one another. In this way, art too must be a reflection of the viewer. The issue is muddied further by greater questions of who is the artist and who is the viewer, both easier asked than answered. These matters of authorship, language, memory, and perspective are masterfully explored in Arnold Kemp’s show “False Hydras,” on view at JOAN until June 19th.
“False Hydras” is obviously composed of sculptures, photographs, and other works by Arnold Kemp the artist and educator, but it features many different Arnold Kemps. Even the title is a reference to a “Dungeons & Dragons” monster created and posted about online by a different Arnold Kemp. Within the game, the memories of any person the monster consumes are wiped from the minds of those who knew them – a fitting beast for a show which deals so heavily in Kemp the artist’s own life.
Another Arnold Kemp referenced in the show is the artist’s grandfather, a tailor from the Bahamas. The work Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), is comprised of a limestone sculpture made by Kemp in 1984, draped with shorts created by his grandfather. In one of the nooks of the sculpture, there is a cellphone from a performance piece done by Kemp and his father in 2003 about communication between father and son. This work is a culmination of generational artistic efforts, a bridge between Arnold Kemp the tailor and Arnold Kemp the artist.
The most prominent work in the show is Mr. Kemp: Yellowing, Drying, Scorching (2020). A black leather chair is stacked with forty copies of Eat of Me: I am the Savior, a book from 1972 by Black nationalist author, Arnold Kemp. There is a transposition of identity, a conflation of artist and author.
Finally, lying on the floor, there is a single piece of paper which punches straight through the show. Upon the page is written three lines: “I Would Survive; I Could Survive; I Should Survive.” These declarations are affirmations of self, of personal identity untethered to the other; they avow that, even in a world of false hydras, you will always remember yourself.
JOAN
1206 Maple Avenue, Suite 715, Los Angeles, CA 90015
Thru June 19th, 2021 -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Emil Alzamora
Lowell Ryan ProjectsEmil Alzamora’s “Waymaker” is like journeying through a series of time warps. Cement, steel and wood figures loom in various states of decay like Greco-Roman relics in a museum. Yet a modern sensibility invites the sculptures into a surrealist dream conjuring a restrained body, mangled by metal. His sculptural figures are caught in a violent tempest of industrial materials that weave in and out of linear time.
Emil Alzamora, Wormhole at Cladh Hallan, 2021 Wormhole at Cladh Hallan (2021) gives us a clue as to how Alzamora considers the body’s narrative history. Cladh Hallan is reportedly the only place in Great Britain where prehistoric mummies have been excavated. By alluding to a wormhole, Alzamora plays with the limits of time. He casts a dramatic resurrection by reconstructing forms out of rubble. His inventions are kin to Mesopotamian lamassu, a divine hybrid of human and animal. In Alzamora’s case, he unites the materials most commonly used in construction to introduce the human/industrial hybrid. He leans into the construction process through additive and subtractive techniques to highlight the procedure of the build.
Emil Alzamora, Hone Redux, 2018 Surrealist psyche unshackled, Alzamora’s sculptures stand among the fluid and powerfully charged sculptures of Umberto Boccioni. In fact, his provocative and alluring forms far outweigh any conceptual fodder. A practicing sculptor since the late ‘90s, Alzamora is a master craftsman when it comes to design. From the aquiline arms of the figure in Star Suit (2018), to the pocketed seams along Hone Redux’s (2018) ribs, Alzamora captures the ambition and drama of Henry Moore’s work while maintaining sensitivity to subtle expression. The arched back and exaggerated neck of Waymaker (2021) imitates Persipine’s deserpate clamor for freedom in the Baroque marble sculpture The Rape of Proserpina. Likewise, Hone Redux bears striking resemblance to the ancient Crouching Aphrodite and Crouching Venus sculptures. No doubt Alzamora was stuck with inspiration from the ancient world and his industrial time warps tunnel us into a futuristic dystopia studded with impeccable design.
Emil Alzamora “Waymaker”
May 8 – June 19, 2021
All photographs courtesy of the artist and Lowell Ryan Projects.
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Pick of the Week: Federico Solmi
Luis De Jesus Los AngelesLos Angeles is coming back to life. That’s a sentiment that somehow simultaneously feels cliché and unexpected all at once. But just look around: concerts are being promoted, theaters are rescheduling shows, and bar hoppers are, once again, singing far too loud at far too late on my street. The party is just beginning, and the perfect celebration of this return to normalcy is Federico Solmi’s new show, “The Bacchanalian Ones,” on view at Luis De Jesus’ new Arts District location.
Bacchanalia, the Roman era parties to honor Bacchus, the god of wine and festivities, and are associated with a commiserate level of drunkenness. In Solmi’s show, the artist incorporates his background on illustration and animation with a renewed emphasis on painted works to illustrate some of Western history’s controversial heroes.
The majority of the works on view are LCD screens displaying animated videos of immense celebrations, set into sumptuous and ornate painted frames which carry on the themes of the scenes. In attendance at these celebrations are familiar faces, albeit twisted to possess terrifying, toothy grins and wide, unblinking eyes. The main work, entitled The Bathhouse (2020), has five screens depicting Julius Caesar, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus among others partaking in the festival. In other works, such as The Golden Gift (2020) or The Indulgent Fathers (2020), we see these same characters partying through historical moments, such as Columbus’ crusade landing or the crossing of the Delaware.
Solmi reimagines these figures as devilishly smiling partiers, who are unconcerned with the people – particularly Native victims of colonialist action – who are trampled over by their revelry. The show, through all its varied mediums, points a finger towards the rampant deification of these historical figures despite the atrocities and pain they perpetuated and profited from.
In our return to normalcy, it’s important to continue the interrogation of the history we’ve been given which has started anew in this past year. We will return to the parties, the galas, the concerts, and the shows – but will we work to create a better status quo? Will we have the strength to tear down the monuments to misguided men, and to look at the world through fresh eyes? This is yet to be seen, but it’s through the work of Solmi’s Bacchanalia that we can begin the task of dissecting the complexities of our Western “heroes.”
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
1110 S. Mateo St., Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru June 19th, 2021 -
Remarks on Color: Marooned Maroon
June’s HueMaroon is unmoored, untethered, unhinged and completely undone by the weight of isolation, marooned as she is on an unnamed island somewhere in the South Pacific. Alone, she communes with phantoms that include the likes of Oscar Wilde, Salome, Kierkegaard and of course the ever-elusive, but charming Amelia Earhart, with whom she eats Dungeness crabs every other Sunday by the seaside. Amelia, having gone missing for 84 years and some change on the same unknown island, has some experience with the “Castaway Syndrome,” and has proven to be a terrific friend and ally, often sharing her coconuts.
Yet, despite this hospitality, Maroon is strangely inconsolable, forever looking for other like-minded colors like Sangria, Burnt Sienna and Chili Pepper Red with whom she might share her sadness. It isn’t so much the loneliness that confounds her, but the lack of representation as the island is small and largely dominated by various shades of green and blue. And let’s not forget the ubiquitous sun, nearly unforgiving in its radiance. So much yellow can drive a girl mad! Maroon searches the island for some sign of herself, some likeness beneath the rocks, a brief swell of red algae or florideae in the tides, but every time she is disappointed.
Maroon longs for the city with its flashing neon lights and the smell of burning rubber. She misses the nightclubs with exotic names like The Red Iguana, Hot Coals and The Fiery Furnace—and finally devises a way to get back there. After all, Maroon could only stay marooned for so long, having finally decided to build her own boat to sail back to civilization and the wonders of the modern world. It’s a small and agile craft made from the wood of the Black Cherry tree and the flowering Dogwood, both of which, when saturated with water, turn red.
Egon Schiele, Lovers, 1916 
Rory Devine, Untitled (audience diverse), 2013 
Sayre Gomez, Untitled Painting 1, 2010 
Chelsea Culprit, Harpie Hunting Forbideen Fruit, 2021
Jesse Mockrin, Blank and Pitiless, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Roland Reiss
Diane Rosenstein GalleryIf the uncanny valley had an interior decorator, their name would be Roland Reiss. The recently departed artist has a new exhibition at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery, featuring not only a host of recent works but also Reiss’ ground-breaking installation, The Castle of Perseverance. Through his moralistic and post-modern approach in depicting modern life, Reiss not only blurs the division between reality and unreality, but reminds us the importance of truth in the face of falsehood.
I’ve just recently commented on this divide between the real and unreal in a review of Richard Nielsen’s show “Past Imperfect,” but unlike Nielsen, Reiss extends the argument even further. Beyond illustrating the divide as a reflection of our current moment, Reiss physicalizes the division and invites you to immerse yourself in it.
The Castle of Perseverance (1978) is a particle board recreation of a 1970s living room, right down to the curved bar, copious ash trays and cigarettes, and vintage tv stand. The more time you spend in Reiss’ castle, the more you are drawn into its world, and the less you question real vs. fake.
In time, the question becomes who are the people who occupy this space, and what are their stories? Why are there loose pills, and loose firearms? Who needs this many keys (I counted at least ten!) The narrative which is simultaneously hidden and yet made so evident is the heart of Reiss’ works, in which falsehoods become so realistic that it is impossible to separate them from reality itself.
This effort is enforced with his work in miniature and diorama, of which many of his series are on display from throughout his career. An original diorama from the 1980s, Adult Fairy Tale: Language and Myth (1983), shows a well-dressed man and woman arguing in a traditional office space, while a third woman looks on, disapprovingly. It’s unclear whether this third woman will act as arbiter or merely observer. This vignette brings the themes of the Castle of Perseverance to life, underscoring important lessons about the necessity of objective truth and the danger of being caught up in a glass enclosure – or a particle-board world.
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
831 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90038
Thru May 28th, 2021 -
OUTSIDE LA: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte, Rome
Group Exhibition “lo dico lo – I say I”The capacious white central gallery is filled with a medley of artworks that at first glance seem to have no apparent connection. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and ceramics are distributed evenly on the walls and floor. Eventually it becomes clear all of these works are made by women and that is when the exhibition title ‘Io Dico Io / I Say I” comes into focus. This celebratory exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Rome has delved into its collection in order to bring to the fore women artists. Each speaks with their own voice with their own poetics, thus the heterogeneity of works on display falls into place.
Installation view, Io dico Io – I say I, Galleria Nazionale. Carla Accardi, better known for abstract painting, has a work, “Origine” (1976-2007), where she uses sicofoil, a commercial plastic, which she first incorporated in her practice during the 1960s as the framing device for a number of small photographs of women in her family. This intimate mash up of formal moves she deploys in her paintings combined with personal images epitomizes the approach of many of the artists on view. It is at the antipodes of the heroic muscular male-dominated art modes most often represented in modern Italian art history.
Monica Bonvicini, Fleurs du Mal (pink), 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano © Monica Bonvicini and VG Bild-Kunst. Monica Bonvicini’s 2019 sculpture “Fleurs du Mal (pink)” displays pink hand-blown glass objects hanging from hooks on a steel structure reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (1914). Congruent with an earlier version of this sculpture where transparent hand-blown penises are draped over the hooks, the artist humorously takes an icon of a decidedly phallocentric art practice to task.
As the viewer makes their way through the extensive exhibit, enjoying each on their own terms even as they may discover the resonances that are established by proximity, one eventually winds their way upstairs where they encounter the extensive archive of Carla Lonzi. The activist critic was the first to organize and sort art made by women from the specifically personal point of view and in terms of self-portraiture that effectively point to how historical gender occlusions can in fact be addressed. Curators Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini, with poise and adroitness, bring deserved attention to these women artists that are finally being recognized as part of the historical canons.
curated by Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
March 1, 2021 – June 6, 2021
All photos by Alessandro Garofalo.
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Pick of the Week: Richard Nielsen
Track16The line between the real and unreal is a thin one. Just beyond the horizon, and beyond the corner of our eye, exists only the expanse of our imagination – what you might call magic. And it’s in this liminal space between magic and matter, fact and fiction, that you find “Past Imperfect,” a new exhibition of paintings by Richard Nielsen at Track16.
Nielsen’s works, many of them portraits of masked people or surreal landscapes, tap into the unease of our contemporary moment. I can say with absolute certainty that if you polled people in at the start of the millennium how they thought the country would look in twenty years, no one would have even been close. The images and news stories of today would have been impossible to imagine for many Americans. And by juxtaposing paintings of cryptid monsters and psychedelia with paintings of masked faces and hospice rooms, Nielsen draws out that subtle divide.
One of the most striking paintings that lies completely in this divide is one of a zookeeper, dressed in a loose fitting panda costume, swaddling a cub. The caretaker stands on a flat green background adorned with prints of deciduous leaves, hand-feeding and looking down at the small cub like a doting mother. It’s surreal and bizarre, but it’s based in reality – zookeepers actually dress like that to handle a new cub, so as to acclimate it to other pandas.
But Nielsen does not just deal with the bizarre reality of our present, but ties it also to our tumultuous past. In the painting Antifa Denmark 1945, Danish Freedom Fighters, Great Uncle (2020), we find five well-dressed men, standing in a variegated cobblestone street – members of the Danish resistance, as the title suggests. Nielsen connects this earlier form of anti-fascism – that is, freedom fighters working against Nazi Germany – with the more modern catch-all movement titled Antifa, which has become a bogeyman for ultra-conservative nationalists. In doing so, Nielsen contextualizes the modern Anti-Fascist movement with grass-root anti-fascism throughout history, letting the past meet the present to make sense of our reality.
Track16
1206 Maple Ave., #1005, LA, CA, 90015
Thru May 29th, 2021 -
Remarks on Color: Parakeet Green
May’s HueMostly you hear him coming long before the bright and flowing flourish which is his body floats across the speedway. Being that he is a dandy from Kensington, he much prefers the moniker Budgie, to the more pedestrian Keet. An avid smoker of Players and Dunhill’s, Parakeet Green would never be seen puffing menthols or rolled tobacco, at least not in public.
There has been some debate as to the “provenance” of his color, some suggesting a more pearlescent green suffused with what could only be described as lemon zest, while others have identified a downy tangerine streak lurking just under the surface. Parakeet Green deigns to position himself on either side of the debate, preferring instead to remain discreetly and luminously fluid, a verifiable mélange of bursting color, proffering something for everyone who turns to gaze upon this Avian Extraordinaire.
Parakeet Green can often be found posing for photos with ardent admirers in and around St. James’s Park with its view of Buckingham Palace, alongside all manner of other feathered detractors including the hideous and ubiquitous pigeon with its ever-bobbing disco-ball head, the dunnock, a common accentor of low flying means and unremarkable breeding, and the fierce little coal tit, circling the highlands in masked abandon in response to the calls of the tawny owl.
Parakeet Green is secretly searching for a counterpart in high society, a budgerigar of impeccable breeding, mischievous and ever loquacious, a BIRD among birds, a partner in crime, a downy compatriot with whom to pass the time, and what a time it will be! Soaring over the headlands, wing to wing, to finally eschew the mandatory “tea sessions,” the endless chatter of gossip and mean-spirited gibes, countless visits to the Queen, sitting on her shoulder and forever trying hard not to poop!
Vincent Van Gogh, Tree Roots, 1889 
Elaine de Kooning, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1963 
Henri Matisse, The Green Line, 1905 
Helen Frankenthaler, Leprechaun, 1991 
Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (the one who eats), 1928 
Emily Carr, Western Forest, 1931 -
OUTSIDE LA: Rachel Rossin
Magenta Plains, New YorkWhile the intersection of art and technology may be new for some, artist Rachel Rossin has been a pioneer in the field for nearly her whole life, having taught herself programming at a young age. Her practice includes painting, sculpture and digital art, as well as hybrid combines that incorporate elements of different disciplines. In her latest exhibition, “Boohoo Stamina” at New York’s Magenta Plains, Rossin presents a new body of gestural paintings that explore loss and methods of self-repair.
Pushing the boundaries of traditional and digital art, these recent works seamlessly weave together elements of both the physical and virtual worlds. A clear marrying of the two; some of her paintings include embedded holograms. One such combine, Boo-hoo (brain) (2020), features a close-up of a pink face with bright blue tears pouring out of the eyes. Above the eyes is a hologram of a brain that rotates continuously. While the inclination might be to search for a projector or hidden screen, the holograms are installed in the works themselves.
Rachel Rossin,
“Boo-hoo (brain),” 2020The figure in Boo-hoo (brain) is one of many avatars from the digital realm depicted in both the painted and holographic elements. The pink figure is joined by others from Rossin’s digital library, including cats and harpies, perhaps avatars of the artist herself. The allusion to sadness in both the tears and the title of Boo-hoo (brain) set the tone for the exhibition.
Addressing the theme of self-repair, Rossin explores the tools we use to heal in both the physical and virtual worlds with images of crutches, braces and the staff of Hermes or Caduceus. In Tall Cat on Mend (2021), the artist has painted a cat that appears to be propped up on crutches. The cat, another avatar or a nod to the proliferation of internet cats, is ethereal with its soft, washy colors. Avatars are useful tools to act as proxies for our physical selves, an idea the artist has investigated previously in her practice. Related to the concept of a sentinel species, like the canary in the coal mine sent to detect danger, avatars and our internet-selves are vehicles through which we grow, heal and even test out different identities.
Rachel Rossin, Set Elements for a Tome To Me and Tall Cat on Mend (installation view), 2021 Next to the cat is another feline figure in Set Elements for a Tome To Me (2021). Whereas the tall cat’s crutches were painted, Rossin has attached an aluminum brace to the surface of this second painting, introducing another tool to patch the figure together. Slightly robotic, the brace hints at VR equipment and prosthetics, again marrying digital and physical methods of repair.
While the works themselves blur the boundaries of digital and physical, the exhibition as a whole takes this even further. From the flickering images and whirling hum of the holograms to the blue light in the den-like bottom floor of the gallery, there is no beginning or end to Rossin’s physical and digital worlds. Instead, she weaves the two together to the point where their defining characteristics no longer exist and the viewer finds themselves surrounded by avatars in a glowing, buzzing, hybrid space.
Rachel Rossin: “Boohoo Stamina”
Magenta Plains
New York, NY
Runs thru May 22
