Artillery Magazine

Tag: Art

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Lev Rukhin East 26 Projects

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Lev Rukhin
    East 26 Projects

    Russian exile Lev Rukhin creates grand works of realism tinged with just enough peculiarity to suggest doubt. They are dreamlike—much of the imagery is suspended in a nimbus—and implies both memory and trickery. This device is quite intentional; the exhibition is titled Dreamscapes. 

    Pressed together in scores of photographic tiles, these large-scale images are a peripatetic narrative echoing both his contemporary travels and his fragmented memories, of things firmly recollected and those hazily recalled. In Hero’s Journey, 72” x 96” (all works 2020), sits a Pittsburgh factory devoid of workers, a skeletal remnant of the former smoke belching Eastern powerhouse so fearsome that it had been referred to as “Hell with the lid taken off.” In the triptych, Homage to David Hockney, 72” x 144”, Rukhin’s silhouette can be seen illuminating a tall spiny yucca as waning sunlight rims the horizon. The artist is visible in many of the works as if assuming the role of tour guide and eager to reveal the singular beauty of the unvarnished.  His comparable yet much smaller Dunes places a similarly solitary tree in a much emptier landscape, isolated with an expectant or communicating human figure; the towering Brooklyn Chimney, 48” x 48”, becomes an obelisk worthy of homage as it watches over the sprawling boroughs. 

    Lev Rukhin, HERO’S JOURNEY, 2020. Laminated archival dye-sublimation photographs, layered, cropped into circles, hand-mounted onto aluminum honeycomb substrate.

    The gallery’s darkened rough-hewn floor lends a melancholy and contemplative aura to the works that are already doleful. Masonic Lodge, one of the smallest works in the exhibition, is a genuine haunter, suggestive not only of ghosts but advantages pressed, opportunities denied, and stratagems contrived. For an artist expelled from a homeland where subterfuge was a national obsession the ghosts of the past and the apprehension of the future are fraternal twins. Umbrella Man—part of his Los Angeles series of diverse figures—walks swiftly by in his shimmering suit, a wary eye ever cast behind him, his wide umbrella disguising his shadow.

    Lev Rukhin: Dreamscapes

    East 26 Projects

    June 11-August 7

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Robert G. Achtel Marshall Gallery

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Robert G. Achtel
    Marshall Gallery

    The City of Namara is a fictitious place created by Robert G. Achtel. In the photographs that define this curious and digitally fabricated location, Achtel presents Namara as a place devoid of people and filled with modernist architecture. Each building is shot straight-on and fills the frame. These evocative and precisely positioned structures are created by digitally compositing thousands of photographs of buildings, signage and the landscape, as well as fragments of sky and road that Achtel captured during visits to Nevada, Florida and California. Because they are digital composites, however seamless they might be, the works call into question the notion of photographic veracity. While Achtel begins with “real” physical forms, he changes the colors, proportions and relationships between the elements by using software, such as Photoshop, to create a heightened sense of place.

    The Gateway (all works 2020) depicts the facade of a liquor store called Liquor Swamp. The scripted letters of the word liquor— white lines surrounded by black— are installed above diamond-shaped plaques with the letters S-W-A-M-P on a striated dark green facade of a midcentury modern building that has a Jetsons essence. Bisecting the building is a tall light pole supporting a sign that states, “No Parking: Drive Thru Only.” However, there is no visible drive-thru. Stone walls depicted in shadow make up the lower portion and are positioned on either side of the glass entrance. The building is set in a vast empty landscape with a few palm trees blowing in an invisible breeze. Telephone wires and the top of light fixtures provide a resting place for groups of birds that may or may not have been in the “original” photographs.

    Robert G. Achtel, Jealousy, LightJet chromogenic print, 2020

    In Jealousy, Achtel presents a stark white facade with nine tall recessed spaces, each casting slightly different sized shadows consistent with their positions in relation to the sun. The black block letters across the facade of the building announce “The Modern Gentleman” while in the window below, there appears a neon sign stating “Nudes 24/7.” As in The Gateway, the setting is devoid of life (except for occasional birds) and the landscape is a barren strip of road in a desert climate. To the left and just behind the central structure is a tall skyscraper jutting into the sky like a minimalist sculpture.  To the right is another Jetsons styled modernist building with spiky yellow supports. At one time, this might have been a carwash or body shop, but in Achtel’s image the sign now reads “B-O-Y.”

    Though each building is unique, Achtel’s process becomes a bit formulaic. In most photographs he sets the main structure against a distant landscape with palm trees and birds, as well as other modernist buildings placed at the edges of the image to emphasize a vanishing perspective. The buildings in Achtel’s city have specific functions — be it to entertain or heal— and Achtel reinforces this through the narrative implied by reading across the different fragments of signage. The facade of The Fix is a geometric design featuring bright green and blue interlocking diamond shapes. The patterned facade has nothing to do with the building’s function— it is a “drug” store called “World of Drugs” that advertises it as “Doc’s Choice.” Achtel includes a windowless building in the mid-ground called “Relapse” creating an ironic contrast. Relapse, replace, revive are all words easily associated with Achtel’s project. Many of the buildings photographed were once dilapidated, abandoned structures from bygone eras that Achtel has resurrected by compositing and then transforming myriad details from the originals.

    Robert G. Achtel, The Fix, LightJet chromogenic print, 2020

    What is most striking about Achtel’s images is the Bechers-like straight-on presentation of these fabricated facades. Though different, they exist in the same space, set back from the white or yellow striped road surrounded by blue sky. Achtel purposely creates over-determined spaces that are reminders of both past and present. The images allude to a dystopia. Is this dream city heaven or hell? The facades in The City of Namara with their modern enhancements are drawn from the landscape discussed in Learning from Las Vegas and reference 1950s architecture found in both Las Vegas and Miami. Achtel imbues his city with texts that speak to loss, love and dependence, while simultaneously celebrating the visual power of “Modernist” architecture.

    Robert G. Achtel

    The City of Namara

    Marshall Gallery

    July 9 – August 20, 2022

  • Beeple and Madonna: Material Girl in a Meta World The Digital

    Beeple and Madonna: Material Girl in a Meta World
    The Digital

    When we think about groundbreakers or early adopters, we think of the first, the biggest, the people that jump up and exemplify a movement. Some will stand the test of time, others will bring shock value in being the protagonists. Whether it be Bowie, Hendrix, Basquiat, Warhol—the list of these trailblazers is long. But wherein lies the common thread? Talent and timing inherently play a role but, I might scream—FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD. 

    For those of us who exist only in the tangible art world—the human that made us stand the hell up and pay attention to NFTs was the unassuming Beeple. Combine this subversive digital artist with the historical boundary-pushing Madonna, Queen of Pop. We may be left with a collection of NFTs that have the potential to be some of the most controversial feathers in either of their caps.

    For this three-part collaborative NFT video series titled “Mother of Creation,” Madonna uses her classic recipe of sexually explicit imagery combined with controversial content—only at an older age with some digital manipulation. This time the “Material Girl” jumps into the Immaterial World of meta space, fully exposing her digital self. This is no unassuming wardrobe malfunction—rather the full monty in meta. Madonna’s three avatars that make up the “Mother of Creation” series are created by manipulating a 3D body scan of her in all her sexagenarian glory. This technology can now recreate hyper detail within the context of meta space, with the closeups leaving nothing to the imagination.

    Mother of Nature, 2022; stills from NFT video artwork; courtesy of the artists.

    Each of Madonna’s avatars vary slightly, but the traumatic birthing message remains clear. In the first, “Mother of Nature,” a giant tree takes root and grows and blooms out of a closeup 3D model of her “vagina,” slowly panning away to show the avatar lying in a sterile white room being overseen by a creepy robotic arm. In “Mother of Evolution,” a more plastique/Barbie doll version of Madonna lies on the hood of a truck—straight out of Mad Max. As the post-apocalyptic scene rages in the background, monarch butterflies flutter out of her crotch. 

    In the final and darkest of the three videos, a silver-haired avatar—one which best represents the aging pop star’s most current state—has a multitude of blood-soaked robotic centipedes crawling from the exposed area between her legs. This last chapter of the NFT trilogy may very well be the most accurate foreshadowing of the dark AI future awaiting us.

    With all the proceeds from the NFTs series going to benefit charity—this is not a money-making endeavor for either Madonna or Beeple but seems to be a great way to show the world what a 60-something digitally enhanced vagina looks like. And all for a good cause.

  • Remarks on Color: Hallelujah Hot Pink! June's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Hallelujah Hot Pink!
    June’s Hue

    Hallelujah! The queen of everything has finally arrived! Never before has the church social been abuzz with so much excitement and activity, and this year Hallelujah Hot Pink is in charge of the punch bowl, which she repeatedly spiked with Cristalino Tequila when no one was looking. Ever the class clown, she can often be seen standing on her head while simultaneously strumming an electric guitar and singing the song “Sink the Pink” by AC/DC in the middle of a parking lot at two in the morning. Needless to say, no one was there to witness the event.

    H.H. Pink is proud of her legacy – the color of ballet slippers and tutus, raspberry sorbet, bubblegum and cotton candy, beet hummus, chard, lip gloss, tourmaline, flamingos, jellyfish and sphynx cats. Hallelujah Hot Pink was the color of Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Jackie Kennedy’s infamous two-piece suit that fateful day in 1963.

    Some naysayers have claimed that Hallelujah Hot Pink isn’t really a color at all, but she’s been around for hundreds of years and even the great poet Homer described her charms in the Odyssey when he depicted a new day beginning as, “the child or morning, rosy-fingered dawn then appears.” A derivation of the color cinabrese, a mixture of the red earth pigment called sinopia and a white pigment called Bianco San Genovese, Hallelujah Hot Pink is truly a dedicated follower of fashion, championed by the great Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France in 1756. It is said she was buried in her most luxurious pink gown.

    History has always favored her charms and nature shows her off to great effect from the cherry blossoms in Sendai, Japan to the gemstone Rhodochrosite, the national symbol of Argentina. Hallelujah Hot Pink may not have the red-hot sex appeal of crimson red, nor the innocence of virgin white, but put these two together and prepare to take on the world!

     

     

  • Letters in Exile, No. 6 By Maria Agureeva

    Letters in Exile, No. 6
    By Maria Agureeva

    Since March I have edited Letters in Exile with Maria Agureeva. Artillery generously offered Maria and other artists who had fled Ukraine and Russia an important platform from which to express their feelings, voice their grief and protest, and to share stories of courage and compassion.

    There are two books I have recalled while editing. In one, by the diplomat and historian George Kennan, he expressed in the 1960s that the two most important issues to be solved in our life time are climate degradation and nuclear proliferation. As we see in Russia and Ukraine, they are inextricably linked with the ongoing state sponsored violence. The other book, The March of Folly by historian Barbara Tuchman, looks at the avoidable but mindless paths to war, ecological catastrophe, and destruction of civilizations, even though the people of those time knew better. It seems to me there is a dominant strain of reactionary violence in collective human behavior that is deeply disturbing.

    The words of the Buddhist activist Thich Nhat Hahn helps show me a sane way forward; “To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration and fear that will be passed on for generations to come. We know very well that airplanes, guns and bombs cannot remove wrong perceptions. Only loving speech and compassionate listening can help people correct wrong perceptions. The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.”  —Clayton Campbell, Editor

     

    Maria Agureeva

    I want to end Letters in Exile for now with the release of a sixth installment, #NoWar. To all of you who have followed my blog, from my heart I wish to thank you very much; to the long list of everyone who took part in previous blogs, helped my family leave Russia, and especially to the artists who have spoken their truth through Letters in Exile. Because of this unexpected and incredible support, I will be back in Los Angeles soon, and will resume my life there. There were moments I didn’t think this would happen, and now I look forward to how my practice will unfold, informed by my experiences.

    I spoke with Digital Art Month’s curator Jess Conatser to highlight artists creating AR and video artwork that inspires peace and stands for #NOWAR in Ukraine. The festival is organized and curated by Elena Zavelev, Andrea Steuer of CADAF & Jess Conatser of Studio As We Are.

    For AR please use your phone to access them.

     

    Hermine Bourdin

     

    Dance For Peace (Augmented Reality- open on your phone to interact)

    https://www.instagram.com/ar/314068410688765/

    Dance for peace is the performance of the French dancer Eugenie Drion re-transcribed on one of my sculptures using MOCAP.

     

    Yamid Botina

     

    Invisible, Video, 1:01 minutes

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg70rHEVYo4

    Botina’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine, based on the things that cannot be destroyed.

     

    Maria Agureeva

     

    The First Universe, Video, 45 seconds, Sound Art Dario Duarte Nunez.

    https://www.instagram.com/tv/Cda7_ERAViH/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

    How quickly we forgot about Love. How often we perceive the heart as only an organ, as a motor that carries through the body, along with blood, gunpowder of war, fear, hatred, confusion and other toxins.

    But our hearts are so much more. It is an object that exists simultaneously in billions of universes, where Love resides— the very first of them.

     

    Clayton Campbell

     

    Ghost Ships (photographic print, 2022, 66” x 88”), March 2022

    These days a density of fractured images have arrived in my disturbed sleep.

    Despairing of the inevitability of Men; their fogs of war, addictive cravings for spilling blood, sexual subjugation, unscripted power stripped of knowledge, wisdom, and compassion,

    We travel onward through the dark night of the soul in our Ghost Ships.

     

    Jullian Young

     

    Caged in Red (Augmented Reality- open on your phone to interact)

    https://www.instagram.com/ar/5230824633642795/

    This artwork places you inside a crumbling red cage surrounded by bluebirds whose yellowish tint is only cast in light

     

     

    Kushtrim Juniku

     

    No War (Augmented Reality- open on your phone to interact)

    https://www.instagram.com/ar/511333743820354/

    NO WAR is an AR effect that inspires to speak up against the war in Ukraine .

     

    Zoran Poposki

     

    Peace Piece, 2022, animated video generated by AI in collaboration with artist and director Polyptech. 4K video, sound, 1:00 minute

     

    https://vimeo.com/697821931/cbc89c0045

    “Peace Piece” is a short animated video generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in collaboration with award-winning contemporary artist and director Polyptech.

    The visuals are a series of AI-generated artworks created by Polyptech through text-to-image synthesis utilizing a neural network. The neural network has been trained by Polyptech through thousands of iterations to generate visuals based on a string of keywords associated with peace, such as pacifism, no war, harmony, demilitarization, empathy, love, human rights, social justice, sisterhood, humanity, love, etc.

    The lyrics in the video represent an AI-generated poem co-written with Polyptech, based on Emily Dickinson’s reflection upon peace and belonging, “I many times thought Peace had come”. The AI uses a generative text model developed by Open AI, leveraging machine learning and deep learning to achieve the generation of natural language.

    The music in the film is a generative sound piece created by an AI music algorithm.

    Editor’s Note: If you would like to donate to Ukrainian relief efforts, you may make a direct contribution to the Global Giving Ukrainian Relief Fund at this link. Or please donate to a charity of your choice that will assist the people of Ukraine.

    https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ukraine-crisis-relief-fund/

     

     

  • FORT WORTH, TEXAS: Hector A. Ramirez SENSE AND NONSENSE

    FORT WORTH, TEXAS: Hector A. Ramirez
    SENSE AND NONSENSE

    I was thoroughly bewildered when I first saw Hector A. Ramirez’ work as a member of his MFA committee at Texas Christian University in 2017. He handed me Carpet Shoes, a worn pair of men’s brown leather shoes with rectangles of yellowish carpet glued to their soles such that their footprints would be made by the carpet’s fibers. This simple juxtaposition of two familiar objects creates an irreconcilable absurdity.

    Art-historically, the distinction between Dada and surrealist assemblage is illuminating; Duchamp’s bicycle wheel attached to the seat of a wooden stool resists narrative closure and remains absurd while Man Ray’s Cadeau (1921), with large tacks attached to the pressing surface of an iron, evokes an image of clothing torn by the iron’s thorny sole. As in Bicycle Wheel (1913), the juxtaposition of everyday materials is also seen in Italian Arte Povera, which Ramirez acknowledges as an important influence. Giovanni Anselmo’s 1968 Untitled (Sculpture that Eats Itself), for example, consists of a rectangular pillar of polished granite wrapped with a copper wire that binds a leaf of fresh green lettuce to one side of the pillar.

    Carpet Shoes straddles the borderline between sense and nonsense; one imagines the shoes’ wearer abjectly polishing a hardwood floor as he traverses it. Yet Ramirez’ own inspiration for the work was a documentary report on identically outfitted shoes handcrafted by migrants and drug traffickers to conceal their footprints from the authorities while crossing the desert. None of these explanations, however, fully account for the comic absurdity of Carpet Shoes on a pedestal in an art gallery.

    Like Carpet Shoes, Ramirez’ found-object sculptures incorporate minimally altered and shrewdly juxtaposed objects from our everyday world, which are in conjunction conceptually and socially meaningful. Ramirez’ works recall Duchamp’s defense of the readymade urinal Fountain (1917) by “R. Mutt,” who “created a new thought for that object.”

    Toma Agua, Ve a la Misa (Drink Water, Go to Mass), 2020; vinyl tile, cast concrete, glass mirror, 3 x 2 x 3 feet.

    Focused on Mexican-American culture, Ramirez’ work is often drawn from memories of his childhood and family life in El Paso, Texas. A cast concrete Madonna and niche—designed to decorate his neighbors’ gardens—sit atop a base covered with printed vinyl tiles, common in middle and working-class homes. With her robe painted an appropriate blue by Ramirez, the Madonna faces the interior of her unpainted niche in which a rearview mirror is mounted at her head height. Titled with an aphorism of his mother’s, Toma Agua, Ve a la Misa (“Drink Water, Go to Mass”), the altar-like configuration is undone by the blasphemous suggestion of the Virgin’s vanity. The rearview mirror also evokes the car culture enjoyed by Latino youths.

    A large floor-bound assemblage with sound, Ramirez’ Playing the Smiths Out of It (2020) includes an oversized homemade speaker cabinet, destined for the trunk of a car where it would emit the booming music favored by young men. The upright cabinet, however, is wrapped with thick sheets of mattress foam tied with wire. The configuration is reminiscent of nothing so much as Anselmo’s Untitled (Sculpture that Eats Itself), with the foam rubber replacing the lettuce leaf. The Smiths’ music, which is overwhelmingly popular with young Latinos, appears to be suppressed by the sound-muffling mattress foam. Ironically, their music is amplified by a small stereo component placed a few feet away on the floor.

    Dócil, 2019, Construction materials 31 x 30 x 36 inches.

    Dócil (2019) includes only two major readymade elements. Ramirez painted the sides of a small plastic doghouse a bright yellow and the roof a purplish blue, intending to recall the saturated hues often seen on the exteriors of Mexican-American homes. Inside the doghouse is a small toy dog, manufactured as a soothing “therapy dog” for elderly and Alzheimer’s patients. The fur-covered mechanized dog makes subtle movements and sounds. Upon bending down to view the work on the floor, the viewer’s presumption of a static assemblage—a dog in a doghouse—is shattered by the haunting, nearly imperceptible movements of the toy dog.

    Ramirez painted the interior walls of the doghouse with a generic domestic hue mixed with texture additives familiar to any home- or apartment-renter (from sandy walls to popcorn ceilings). Because Ramirez’ father is a professional house painter, he has long been familiar with texture paint additives and in 2018 began to explore the critical possibilities of the material’s cultural implications. Adding various textures to beige and off-white paint, Ramirez sprayed large, neatly taped-off rectangles directly on gallery walls, at once recalling the high modernism of Robert Ryman’s white monochromes, the political implications of Diego Rivera’s proletarian murals, and the non-aesthetic production of hired house painters. His recent paintings on canvas are sprayed with textured layers of blues, pinks and yellows derived from snapshots of El Paso sunsets. They range from purplish gray to sienna monochromes. On close inspection, the various sprayed colors are visible on the sides of the small nodules projecting from the impasto surface.

    Blue Waltz [video still], 2018; 2:07 minutes.

    In addition to sculptures and tableaux, Ramirez produces low-tech videos. In Blue Waltz (2018), the intertwined, blue-jean clad lower legs and cowboy boots of two male dancers engage in the graceful steps and twirls of a country-music waltz. Although the dancers’ uniforms stereotype them as straight southwestern men, their physical intimacy exposes the macho superficialities of American and Mexican-American fashion and proposes another kind of cultural fraternity.

    Ramirez’ work hones in on the subject of identity coursing through contemporary art since the 1990s. Like most identity art, his work is narrative and illustrative, based on personal and cultural memories. It is not however autobiographical, transcending the particular through its mundane humor and the tactile, anti-illusionistic presence of plastic, concrete and foam rubber. The real components of every assemblage speak the language of the industrialized world, from a culturally informed point of view.

  • COMICS Where the Wild Beasts Are

    COMICS
    Where the Wild Beasts Are

  • Remarks on Color: Ukrainian Blue and Gold May's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Ukrainian Blue and Gold
    May’s Hue

    Collectively, we are so much more than colors. We are the beating, impregnable heart of our country – now brought to our knees in the fetid air, on the bloodied streets, yet if you look up, we are the cerulean sky and the golden amulet of the sun.

    Now we flee in dirty blue shirts, yet one day, the tattered yellow flags that hang in blown out windows will be gathered together, resewn into a greater awareness as all that ends must eventually bear out a fresh beginning.

    Like death, this smoke is temporary, and as it clears, our truest nature is revealed by the burgeoning light of the sun, a sudden and endless shock of blue that extends the entire length of the world. Look up! We are roiling there in the heavens, breaking out from behind the shadowed skies of Kharkiv, the burned-out shells of buildings still smoldering in the ugly gray morning. We will come back to ourselves, reanimated on the stale and sickening air.

    Blue and gold shine our mantle of resistance, and as the sun breaks over the blackened fields, we once again take our place. No one man owns the sky as with each new combustion, the purloined buildings and the rising swathes of poisonous smoke, Blue and Gold reconnoiter again, to bring forth the future, rising yet again from the past.

     

  • PICK OF THE WEEK: Sophia Stevenson Roski School of Art and Design

    PICK OF THE WEEK: Sophia Stevenson
    Roski School of Art and Design

    Love lingers in memories of past embraces, in y(our) shared moments of agony and affection. The pains of past love form bruises–tender and swollen kinks that excite and sting. 

    Sophia Stevenson’s MFA thesis exhibition is personal, as is our relationship (she is a close friend and fellow graduate student at USC Roski). Guided by a queer feminist framework, Stevenson considers stories of longing and desire told through queer literature and lesbian pulp fiction as they relate to her own queer yearning and ongoing process of self-discovery. She examines how these stories disrupt politics of pleasure, power, and gender and how they forge connections with communities of queer kinship and healing. Acknowledging her tumultuous experience growing up queer in the conservative American South, Stevenson examines intimate periods of loss, illness, and self-preservation. Moments of strength and precarity push and pull in acts of radical vulnerability as she traverses the remnants of past relationships. In the film ​​Sweetbitter the artist gags, spits, and chokes as she devours mounds of salt, repeating the action of gaining and losing control, and feeling attraction and repulsion. These power dynamics and dualistic instincts can be traced throughout her performance and material practice. A wall of velvet lilac curtains guides you to a pillar of salt with a single-channel video projected onto the glistening surface depicting the artist running ahead and abruptly stopping to gaze back. Stevenson’s interest in salt is a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s iconic lesbian novel, The Price of Salt from 1952. Shot at the Bonneville Salt Flats in northwestern Utah, the artist projects her hopes and desires for radical queer futures onto the salt-encrusted horizon. 

    Stevenson presents notions of desire that are vast and fleeting. Flirting with the edges of queer horizons, she imagines radical queer futures, a perpetual sunrise where sexuality and love know no limits or borders. Looking back as a way to look forward, Stevenson whispers tender stories for queer ears. 

    Roski Mateo Gallery
    1262 Palmetto Street
    Los Angeles, CA 90013
    On view through April 30, 2022

  • Letters in Exile, No. 5 By Maria Agureeva

    Letters in Exile, No. 5
    By Maria Agureeva

    Artists are experiencing a sense of gratitude for the unexpected support and basic kindness shown to them. In the midst of exile and displacement, often the best of humanity reasserts itself.

    As Maria says in her fifth blog, “So many of my friends and colleagues who were also forced to leave Russian and Ukraine tell incredible stories. I asked some artists to share their stories.”

    Two persons, Maxim Zmeyev, a photojournalist; and a young musician, Yaroslav Dimov, share their stories. —Clayton Campbell

     

    April 20, 2022

     

    Recently I was at a reception at the Czech embassy and for almost 1.5 hours the discussion was only about the war. Secular meetings become like “war councils.” People raised issues that are now worrying everyone: how such an event is possible in the 21st century, how to help Ukraine, or will there be a nuclear incident as the war expands? However, several speakers said that now it is an important task to support the artists, journalists or dissident musicians who do not support the existing regime in Russia.

    Before I fled Moscow, I was isolated, alone. I feel such incredible support now! I have never received so much help from friends and strangers from other countries. I had believed that people’s humanity in the Metaverse era was in short supply. Yet now a hundred thousand acts of unselfish generosity have awakened people into a spirit of gratitude. Everyone helps each other, and I have been deeply touched.

    When the war began, friends stepped up, finding a residence for me and my daughter in Berlin. An American foundation unhesitatingly gave me a grant that has allowed us to survive. And miracles continue to happen in my life. This gives me hope not to give up and continue to engage in art, to which I have dedicated my entire conscious life.

     

    Action in front of the Russian Embassy in Vilnius against the violence of Ukrainian women by Russian soldiers. Photo: Edvard Blaževič / LRT

     

    So many of my friends and colleagues who were also forced to leave Russia and Ukraine relate incredible stories. I asked some artists to share their stories:

    “My name is Maxim Zmeyev, I am 35 years old and a contemporary artist and photojournalist. I was a photographer for Reuters, as well as a freelance photographer for the AFP and independent media in Russia. Russian troops attacked Ukraine on February 24 on the orders of Russian President Putin. Russia’s aggression continues to this day. As I write this letter the Russian military continues to destroy Ukrainian cities and kill Ukrainians. This is a fact and from March 4, 2022 the Russian Federation could see up to 15 years in prison for disseminating or discussing this fact. On March 5, I flew to Istanbul where I am now. I’m looking for an opportunity to move to Europe or America and am in contact with Journalists Without Borders—who are trying to help me. I hope I will have the opportunity to live on. I have a friend who is a French journalist, Anne. She is helping me a lot right now and gives me hope. It’s very important to feel that if you’re from Russia, it doesn’t mean that the whole world hates you. For people like me who are against the war, it gives hope that peace can come.”

     

    Max Zmeyev, Red Mirror (project in progress), 2022
    Photo collages from “Red Mirror” series consists of photos taken in the video game which takes place in Russian/Soviet reality. These games were made by developers from countries that were part of the USSR and/or Soviet Empire. These collages also contain elements of documentary archive photos of the USSR.

     

    “My name is Yaroslav Dimov, I am 18 years old, from Kiev. All my life I have tried to give people positive emotions through music. In October 2021, my friends and I created a group and we intensively gave concerts in popular venues in the capital, where many came to hear our work. Our goal was for people to learn to listen to each other. On the third day of the war, I miraculously managed to leave my home and get rid of the hellish sounds that Russian rockets made, I just wanted to live. The road to Europe was for me a leap into the unknown and a step towards a new life. In Berlin, My family and I were treated with understanding, care and support. Kind people helped us with a place to stay and every day they offer their help; it’s cool that they consider us their friends. Our neighbors provided a few musical instruments and space to practice my music. Here I met musicians from Ukraine and we managed to participate in several charity concerts in support of our country. We believe that goodwill overcome evil and music will help this.”

    It seems to me that against the backdrop of this ongoing madness, we should unite and help each other—the only way to endure. The whole world now feels vulnerable and only unity can help to survive. Our strength is in unity and the ability to hear each other.

    As I prepare to leave Berlin at the end of the month, nothing is certain. The war could ripple through more countries, creating widespread financial ruin and devastation. Or, it might stop, and the world will blossom with the spring.

     

    Yaroslav Dimov, personal archive, Kyiv, 2021

     

    To be continued…

    —Maria Agureeva

     

     

    Editor’s Note: If you would like to donate to Ukrainian relief efforts, you may make a direct contribution to the Global Giving Ukrainian Relief Fund at this link. Or please donate to a charity of your choice that will assist the people of Ukraine.

    https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ukraine-crisis-relief-fund/

     

     

  • Letters in Exile, No. 4 By Maria Agureeva

    Letters in Exile, No. 4
    By Maria Agureeva

    As Maria was working on Blog 4, I happened upon an article about photographer Edward Burtynksy, who is of Ukrainian descent and still has family there. He was scheduled to photograph in Ukraine this year for other reasons than the war. His work has been postponed. He said of what is happening in Ukraine and Russia, and that Maria’s blog speaks directly to, “Unbelievable, the amount of hate and trauma that’s being inflicted. [Putin]’s destroying the future of a whole generation of Russians and traumatizing the whole country of Ukraine. It’ll take generations to heal.”

    Artists respond to war situations in various ways, as anyone would be. When undergoing stress and trauma caused by dislocation, loss of statehood, livelihood, physical harm and perhaps death, people are changed physically and emotionally. Overtime, personality and values are taken over by trauma responses, making living life so difficult because all trust is gone. What is happening in Ukraine and Russia is a cautionary tale for free-minded people, seeing how easy it has been for personal freedoms to be taken away by an autocratic, conservative government. Maria suggests that artists can, in spite of everything that may happen to them, find the way back again to a full embrace of life. —Clayton Campbell

     

    Lviv, Ukraine–March 26, 2022: Concert near Lviv National Opera. Photo: Ruslan-Lytvyn

     

    April 15, 2022

    The mission was impossible.

    Since the ’90s, when the first contemporary galleries appeared in Russia, art began to actively develop and be included in the international context. After 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, everything changed. Perhaps we created our own bubble of illusions, inflated more and more as Russian artists found success. What we thought we were building, a free-minded cultural community, did not transfer to the vast majority of Russians. They had no interest in our values and creative pursuits.

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, restrictive regulations on artmaking were canceled and for the next 20 years artists could fight for the freedom of their art without fear of punishment from the state. Integration into the global cultural space supported this illusion: that Russian art could be free. This is the era I grew up in as an artist. But another fate was prepared for us.

    There was some change in those two decades. The influence of contemporary art helped to penetrate a historically unfree land. Surveys from 2021 show that at least 30% of the Russian population put freedom as their first priority and do not support repressive actions by state authorities. Yet this minority has been silenced as artists are now squeezed out of their country.

    This liberal change of sensibility, especially in younger generations, threatened the government. Over the past five years censorship in Russia has returned. High-profile artists have been publicly punished. Kirill Serebrennikov, born in Ukraine, is one of the most prominent theater directors in Russia. He spoke out against the Russian annexing of Crimea. As a result, his apartment was raided shortly after. He was sentenced in June 2020 to a three-year suspended prison sentence and was also issued a fine over trumped-up charges of embezzlement. A Moscow court canceled the suspended sentence after questioning the filmmaker twice last month. The director left Russia two weeks ago and is residing in Germany.

     

    Still from the film Leto, Director Kirill Serebrennikov
    Still from the film Petrov’s Flu, Director Kirill Serebrennikov

     

    In another example of public shaming, feminist artist and LGBTQ+ activist Yulia Tsvetkova is on trial in Russia, facing charges of disseminating pornography based on her artwork featuring the naked female body. She was arrested in November 2019 and was forced to pay two fines under Russia’s notorious “gay propaganda” law. She remained under house arrest until March 16, facing up to six years in prison if found guilty of illegally producing and distributing pornographic materials on the internet. The current case has terrible implications for the future of women’s rights in Russia, as it marks the first time an activist has faced criminal charges to produce feminist art.

     

    Yulia Tsvetkova and her viral body-positive drawings A Woman is Not a Doll. Photo: Anna Khodyreva
    Yulia Tsvetkova, Untitled, 2018. Text in red- “You don’t owe anyone anything” Around her are comments like “smile, lose weight, family, etc.”
    Yulia Tsvetkova, “My body is not pornography!” reads the protestors placard. “Is this an Article 242?” wonders the policeman. Article 242 of Russia’s Criminal Code criminalizes the creation and exchange of pornographic materials. Image ©: Yulia Tsvetkova

     

    Authority of most kinds has never trusted art. Art makes it possible to think critically. People who contest various forms of power and control are uncomfortable to the status quo. We are viewed by Authority as uncontrollable. Like a mindless machine the State can only suppress, alienate or kill us.

    In the supposed socialism of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev (former Russian president) recently stated that Russian culture will not close itself off from the world, but will focus on “adequately minded people”, those who share and support their position. This is about staying in power

    Four years ago, when I left for Los Angeles, I was able to feel the whole abyss that still separates the contemporary art of Russia and other free countries. It has become, I fear, an unbridgeable chasm.

     

    Many young people were among those out demonstrating in Russian cities. Here, a young woman in St. Petersburg is detained by officers. (Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky/The Associated Press)

     

    The liberal change of sensibility in the last 20 years, especially in younger generations, threatens the government. I can definitely say that the generation of my daughter, who is now 16 years old, is completely different. They have a sense of empathy, lack of fear, and think freely. More than 400 teenagers were detained in Moscow in February and March at anti-war rallies. As a result, on February 24, 19 protocols were drawn up to punish a perceived failure by parents to fulfill their obligations to raise minors, due to the participation of children in rallies. They include fines and possible deprivation of parental rights in case of repeated detention.

     

    Russian President Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev attend a meeting with members of the government in Moscow, Russia January 15, 2020. Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo. They warned the United States on Wednesday that the world could spiral towards a nuclear dystopia if Washington pressed on with what the Kremlin casts as a long-term plot to destroy Russia.

     

    It is beginning to seem that the war will continue for a long time; the wreckage of Ukrainian museums and concert halls will smoke in ruins for more years; the Russian cultural spaces supporting truly free art will return not soon. Russian President Putin recently spoke live on Russian TV and voiced a phrase popular in his circles: “The war between Russia and the United States will continue until the last Ukrainian.”

     

    It’s hard for me to imagine now how artists will come out of this meat grinder. It may only be possible to truly talk about this only after the end of the shooting. What Ukrainian and Russian artists are now experiencing will sooner or later be embodied in their work. This will be a whole stage in the global cultural agenda. And it shouldn’t be lost, blurry. This should be accepted, comprehended as part of a new culture, even more free!

     

    It seems to me that most artists I am meeting and hearing from have quickly developed a different attitude to their work. I am rethinking my past work and the topics covered. There is a greater sense of responsibility. The topics of ecology, gender issues, our future, have not lost their relevance, but now my focus has shifted, everything becoming much sharper and more subtle.

    I invite other artists to share with me what they are experiencing today and I will publish it on my blog.

    —Maria Agureeva

     

     

    Editor’s Note: If you would like to donate to Ukrainian relief efforts, you may make a direct contribution to the Global Giving Ukrainian Relief Fund at this link. Or please donate to a charity of your choice that will assist the people of Ukraine.

    https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ukraine-crisis-relief-fund/

     

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Barbara Kruger Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Barbara Kruger
    Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    Me You

    “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” is a classic Barbara Kruger experience. The exhibition serves as an introduction to those who may be unfamiliar with her work, yet also engages with seasoned viewers by re-presenting older works in grand, high tech and spectacular ways. Kruger is a master appropriationist who cleverly re-contextualizes her imagery, often enlarging the original photographs to monumental scale, or configuring them into dynamic videos. She is also an astute observer and cultural critic who uses her art to challenge, provoke, inspire and educate.

    Installation photograph, Barbara Kruger: Thinking of . I Mean . I Mean You., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 20, 2022–July 17, 2022, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

     

    A good place to start however, is not at LACMA but across the street at Sprüth Magers gallery. Here, a selection of Kruger’s original paste-ups—small scale, pre-digital collages— are on view. In these pieces from the mid-1980s, Kruger juxtaposes appropriated black-and-white photographs of statues, animal jaws and body parts with declarative statements, including the iconic Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981) and Untitled (Business as usual) (1987). It is wonderful to see the original mock-ups for these early pieces, then walk across the street and see them again in large-scale, digital works and room-sized immersive installations. When walking across the street viewers are drawn to billboard-sized works plastered on LACMA’s construction fence. These new pieces serve as a dramtatic introduction to the exhibition.

    Barbara Kruger, Artist rendering of Untitled (That’s the way we do it) (2011) at the Art Institute of Chicago, photo courtesy of the artist and the Art Institute of Chicago

     

    Though the exhibition spans four decades of Krugers work, “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.”  is not a chronological survey. The exhibition begins in a room that reimagines Kruger’s 1987 photograph, Untitled (I Shop therefore I am). In the original work, a red card with bold white words rests in the center of a black-and-white hand proclaiming, I Shop therefore I am. In this iteration, the hand holds montages of photographs by others that Kruger found copying her signature style. Kruger embraces these imitations and integrates them into her work, rather than dismissing them. Installed on one of the walls in this room is a large video display with texts that riff on the original, changing the wording to read variously I shop therefore I Hoard, I sext therefore I am, I need therefore I shop, etc. The image is separated into puzzle pieces that cohere and then break apart as the video cycles through the different variations.

    Barbara Kruger, “Untitled (Truth),” 2013, digital print on vinyl, 70 ¼ × 115 in. (178.6 × 292.1 cm), Margaret and Daniel S. Loeb, New York, digital image courtesy of the artist

    As viewers traverse through the exhibition, they happen upon single channel videos, digital prints on vinyl, as well as room-sized, site specific installations where text, image and video projections fill the walls and floor. While the design and tenor of Kruger’s works has remained consistent throughout her career, the presentation has evolved, partly due to changes in technology which Kruger has embraced and used to her advantage. In Untitled (Forever) (2017) and Untitled (Floor) (1991/2020), digital prints on vinyl span the gallery walls and floors. It is necessary to step on and over the words and move through the space in order to read the entire text. Untitled (Forever) states: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face.” Often Kruger’s texts are about the physical body, its relationship to theory and current events. Watching Kruger analyze an Artforum article in the video Untitled (Artforum) (2016/2020), by circling and then commenting on words like ‘post-identity’, ‘post-race’, ‘post-gender’ and ‘post-human’ concretizes the depth of her thinking.

    Barbara Kruger, Still from the video Untitled (No Comment), 2020, three-channel video installation; color, sound; 9 min., 25 sec., courtesy of Sprüth Magers, and David Zwirner, New York, digital image courtesy of the artist

     

    While Kruger’s works are graphically bold and eye-catching, they are always about more than what can be seen on the surface. She looks hard at war, oppression, racism, feminism, social and cultural injustices, often presenting contradictory statements and allowing them to clash. In her work, Kruger wants to get at the truth, whatever that may be at any give moment. She immerses her audiences in a bombardment of images and texts, asking them to sift through the many layers to find a personal takeaway.

     

     

    Barbara Kruger

    Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.

    Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    March 20 – July 17, 2020

  • Remarks on Color: Raven’s Tail Black April's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Raven’s Tail Black
    April’s Hue

    As famous architect Mies van der Rohe once said, “God is in the details!” So, when Raven’s Tail Black overheard a conversation between two unassuming strangers, describing her alternately as “Coal Black,” “Carbon Black,” “Midnight Black,” and by far the most offensive, “Inky,” she felt the need to set the record straight.

    She began to ponder the veracity involved in identifying anything. Can anyone really ever accurately describe another creature? Can the unknowable ever truly be known, and perhaps more importantly, can one moniker precisely convey the vicissitudes of existence? The answer, at least in her mind, is a resounding NO! A name is sacred and not to be taken lightly. “Coal Black” is by its very description muddy, dusty and all together suffocating, just as “Midnight Black” is loose lipped, prurient and not to be trusted, as nothing good happens in the dead of night! With “Carbon Black,” one might assume she is derived solely from the atmosphere, and therefore rather boring as who wants to spend the evening discussing sediment striations at the center of the earth!

    Raven’s Tail Black is a proud member of the avian classes and by far the smartest, noblest, and cleverest of colors. Regularly seen cracking walnuts in the center of the road, waiting for cars to drive over them, Raven’s Tail Black is incredibly resourceful, witty, and generally self-reliant unlike the duplicitous “Inky Black,” whose liquid exploits are well documented.

    Perhaps most importantly, Raven’s Tail takes great pride in the perfect, unrivaled shine of her shoes, two points of luminosity like beacons of light on a cold blustery day in December. Lost souls have more than once found their way home by such compelling sleekness. So, the next time the color black occurs to you, remember the great William Shakespeare was wrong when he pondered “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The rose is proud of her sweetness just as the raven is, sporting an incomparable shroud of Black!

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Roberts Projects Group Show "Wish You Were Here II"

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Roberts Projects
    Group Show “Wish You Were Here II”

    Now that we are finally emerging from the stronghold of isolation in the wake of COVID-19, the familiar phrase “wish you were here,” takes on new meaning. In Roberts Projects second visual iteration of this phrase, the nine artists in this exhibition reassert the notion of community and home, familiarity and friendship, kinship and new beginnings. Where the first show highlighted the sadness inherent in isolation, this new group of works celebrates our newfound human connections. Daniel Crews-Chubb continues his explorations into human intimacy in his vibrant series of couples and Alexandre Diop’s Autoportrait Ligamentaire, a mixed-media work on burlap is an intensely realized exploration into the notion of “self.” Wangari Mathenge’s It is What It Is, also a portrait, is unflinching in its loveliness just as Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s Jokey and Nana, is a luminous and colorful portrait of good friends and familiars. Beyte Saar’s Eye of the Beholder, represents the act of being seen and recognized by a ubiquitous and all- knowing God. Brenna Youngblood’s Wish You Were Here, captures the moment between being one thing and another as a folding chair appears half open, suggesting that we are constantly in a state of transformation. Ardeshir Tabrizi’s Horsemen, is a surrealistic take on being accountable as the entire image emerges from several vertical sluices of color, and Taylor White’s I am the Pilot, is a humorous look at car culture. Finally Evan Nesbit’s large free hanging painted panels are fun and enigmatic, and certainly offer a fitting welcome to newly minted gallery goers. This dynamite show ends this weekend.

     

    Wish You Were Here II

    Roberts Project

    March 19 – April 16, 2022

  • Letters in Exile, No. 3 By Maria Agureeva

    Letters in Exile, No. 3
    By Maria Agureeva

    In her third blog, Maria considers the testimony of four artists from Ukraine and Russia. Each speaks powerfully about how the war is impacting them. We like to say artists speak truth to power. Courageous artists do this, yet often with severe consequences. Some of them are highlighted in the blog. Maria speaks to the trauma of war, exile and disruption, how it creates memories that may never be dispelled. Like an earthquake, it is visceral and ripples through the body, reemerging with each new tremor. Like so many artists, historically and in the present, she questions the relevance of her practice in the face of the violent end of meaning, rationality, and order. —Clayton Campbell

     

    April 6, 2022

     

    Six weeks since the start of the war. I wonder about artists; has their purpose been crushed by millstones of war and politics? Is their work made irrelevant by the war? We all have to reconsider what we are doing going forward. For the exiled artists I meet in Berlin and communicate with in Ukraine and Russia, their new reality is an existential shock. In Ukraine, abundant with talented creative people, artists are forced to wear body armor and defend their country on an equal footing with the military. Russia has so many brilliant artists who made important contributions to world culture. Now artists are forced to be outcasts from their country if they do not support the regime.

     

    Alexey Karpenko, pianist from Lviv, Ukraine

    With the beginning of the war, I brought a piano to the Lviv railway station to play for people, namely refugees. They need support more than anyone, because they abandoned their homes to save their lives. Music has always been an antidepressant, soothing and inspiring. I play every day for the people, for which I received a lot of gratitude from the refugees. At the beginning, I could not imagine that it would reach a planetary scale. The video in which I play during the sirens was seen by the daughter of the famous composer Hans Zimmer; she showed it to her father. On the same evening, he personally recorded a video in support of me and showed it in front of 15,000 people at a concert in London. In this way, I can help my country to declare the information about Ukraine in order to enlist the support of people from many countries.

    Alexey Karpenko. The pianist plays under the air raid sirens at Lviv Railway Station. John Stanmeyer (National geographic). Music Hans Zimmer “Time”. 20th March

     

     

    Yevgenia Isaeva, artist from Saint Peterburg.

    After her anti-war performance in St. Petersburg’s center, Yevgenia, Isaeva was arrested and fined for vandalism and held for eight days. My heart is bleeding. I feel that it’s helpless to appeal to reason. That is why I’m appealing to your hearts. Women, children and elderly people are dying in Ukraine everyday. From bombings, hunger, the impossibility of getting out of the rubble and obtaining medicine. Their graves, topped with self-made crosses, turn black in the yards and playgrounds. Thousands of injured and mutilated people, millions of broken lives. If you can find any justification for this, your heart is blind. Find the strength in yourself for mercy and compassion, do not support bloodshed!”

     

    Yevgenia Isaeva. performance My heart is bleeding. 27th March. 2022. Saint Petersburg.
    Photography composite from EuroNews, BBC News.

     

     

    Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, artist from Moscow (now lives in NY)

    As a queer artist, I am against Putin’s regime and against his war in Ukraine. I’m speaking out in support of the Ukrainian people—and the LGBTQ community around the world. The war in Ukraine is a crime. I cannot remain silent, and it is my responsibility to speak out against it. To be a queer artist in Russia is already a political statement. Queer art in Russia is illegal. My exhibitions have been censored. The media has routinely cut pieces mentioning queer topics. The government’s “gay propaganda” law carries a prison term of five years. And now, the new “fake news” law carries up to 15 years in prison. I am now in New York now, and I cannot go back to Russia.

     

    Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, Image from the video- A Snake and a Bat are Girlfriends of the Octopus, 2019-21

     

    https://vimeo.com/502223682

     

    Nikita Shokhov, artist From Moscow (now lives in USA)

    The massacre that Russian Federation forced in Ukraine is a tragedy of European society. RF discredited itself in the international arena, it is dragging Russian creative future into the swamp. The war shall be stopped right now to save the invaluable lives of the Ukrainian people, their happiness, and freedom. This is a historical mistake of the RF. The longer this war progresses, the harder the future will be for Russians and our culture. I insist on helping Russian dissidents, artists, activists, scientists, cultural entrepreneurs who are contributing to the liberation of Russia from this murderous political machine.

     

    Dragzina– video, Presented at Spring/Break Art Show Los Angeles 2022, theme “HEARSAY:HERESY”

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey_iUkRg60A&t=134s

     

    If this horror ever ends, I feel artists will no longer be the same. Will we be needed at all in that future, another world? Will we be able to return to our old practices, ideas, interests? How will they be transformed by a world on fire? Will our art be wanted, will it matter, showing the permanent traces of wounds on our bodies and psyches?

    —Maria Agureeva

     

     

    Editor’s Note: If you would like to donate to Ukrainian relief efforts, you may make a direct contribution to the Global Giving Ukrainian Relief Fund at this link. Or please donate to a charity of your choice that will assist the people of Ukraine.

    https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ukraine-crisis-relief-fund/

     

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Abraham Cruzvillegas Regen Projects, Los Angeles

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Abraham Cruzvillegas
    Regen Projects, Los Angeles

    Consider the rhythm of poetry, the speaking voice and the eye moving across the page, the mathematics of strict iambic and hendecasyllabic verse pressed into the service of unruly love and nature. The pace and structure of power of three is eternal, the optical advance and retreat of colors in complement and conflict keeps the eye in motion, and the organic beat of handmade drums moves the mind and the feet. The physical rhythm of the body engaged in labor, sweeping a mop across a gallery floor, wielding a mop as paintbrush to lay down wide, wavering routes of pure color — at some point, it will become necessary to confront the movement of capital and its role in the production of objects and the guiding of interests as ideas progress art history. All of this and more converges in Abraham Cruzvillegas’ remarkably forthright and elusive Tres Sonetos (Three Sonnets).

    Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tres Sonetos Opening Performance (video still) at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Saturday, March 5, 2022. Video courtesy of Regen Projects.

    The exhibition was inaugurated with a performance by the artist involving painted shell-and-antler drums, their beats punctuated by poetry read from atop each of the three wooden stage sculptures, and finally the pounding of the antlers into the wall, from which the drums now hang. Those drums, the three fanciful wooden set-pieces, a series of three photographs of the artist in face paint and a trio of large-scale paintings are all connected by a specific, refined but eccentric palette of pink, green, yellow, gray, and blue. The sculptures and the paintings were executed on site at the gallery, and the paintings especially are assertive, almost boastful, in their display of the labors that generated them. In their appearance and the energy of their linear armatures they evoke Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings and in particular the line paintings he notoriously signed on the diagonal. Cruzvillegas shares this puckish taste for obscuring intentions and thwarting preciousness, undermining the logic of capital by forcing viewers and collectors into making choices about which way is up, puncturing the passive haze of consumption without responsibility.

    Abraham Cruzvillegas, Camécuaro γ, 2022, Silkscreen on cotton handkerchief, Handkerchief dimensions:
    18 x 18 inches. Image courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.

    The way Lewitt’s larger wall drawings were intended to be executed, often at a later date, by others whose job it would be, similarly to Cruzvillegas prioritized the idea over the special hand of the genius, separating the work of execution into its own category of action, thus highlighting labor and in this way further scuttling the capitalist fetish for the “original” or the rare. All of this is as appealing to Cruzvillegas as the dulcet pounding of lines of the Concha Urquiza poems that inspired the show and which were performed at its opening. She was Catholic and a communist, and her legacy was one of change and possibility nurtured in the heart of classical form. A perfect muse for this exercise in rhythm and meaning.

     

    Abraham Cruzvillegas: Tres Sonetos

    Regen Projects, Los Angeles

    March 5 – April 23, 2022

    regenprojects.com