Artillery Magazine

Tag: Art Mag

  • 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

  • OUTSIDE LA: Andy Warhol Aspen Art Museum

    OUTSIDE LA: Andy Warhol
    Aspen Art Museum

    It’s rare to encounter a Warhol exhibition with something genuinely new to say, but somehow Lifetimes (a co-production of Tate Modern, Museum Ludwig, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Aspen Art Museum — its only U.S. venue) accomplishes it. Thanks to both the thoughtful selection of key works and rare, germane ephemera from every stage and vector of the artist’s decades-long career, as well as the bespoke, site-responsive AAM exhibition design by artist Monica Majoli, audiences get evocative experiences along with an intimate re-education on the canon centering the artist’s biography and personal identity in the conversation.

    Majoli described her approach to Andy Warhol as “both concept and a person,” and in this she succeeds, deftly weaving the range of everything we think we know into a deeper dive into his strong family ties, religious life, queer identity, restless curiosity, and prescient cultural critique. As the exhibition proceeds in a double thread of biographical chronology and episodic creativity, explicit connections are illuminated between what his life was like at key moments and the art which he produced at those times. Following a rather Proustian early-childhood period of illness, along through his lifelong closeness and artistic collaborations with his pious, part-muse mother, we see the early attempts to reconcile his working-class ethos with the modern obsession with celebrity shenanigans and the culture’s worshipful trade-in of god for glam.

    Installation view, Andy Warhol: Lifetimes at Aspen Art Museum

    From his early life as a successful ad guy during literal Mad Men times, the show draws a straight line to later iterations of his career in which he gleefully leveraged his fame and personal brand into starring in lucrative commercial ads and even Love Boat guest spots, along the way founding of the avant-garde magazine Interview as a savvy, reverential vehicle promoting the same aesthetic that animated the paintings and films (not to mention to the epic situation with those polaroids) he was making. The post-New Wave, the expressionism-inflected explosion of gestural color, the eroticism of infinite variation, the fetish for style, the addiction to death- and doom-scrolling, and the emerging realization that every choice we make is art, as for better or worse has the power to make us special, maybe — all of this from 40 and 50 years ago will be familiar to anyone who is alive right now. But so too with his humanity, his searching, his doubts, his masks, his pranks, and his prayers.

    Oxidation Painting, 1978 on view in Andy Warhol: Lifetimes at Aspen Art Museum

    A suite of galleries devoted to the role that his queerness played in Warhol’s personal life explicates the narrative through the lens of his choices of medium and subject, connecting sublimated political narratives with tender emotions, and continuing to inform layered understandings of the work. Both controversial and reserved, infused with illuminated relationships to art history and most importantly his own inner life, the choice to gather together these suites of frank but delicate male nude ink drawings from 1954-57 and 1977-78 with large Camouflage (1986) and Oxidation Painting (1978) canvases was inspired. It highlights the aspect of the former which overtakes a militarized pattern associated with masculinity and violence with a luscious queer palette and sparkle, and grounds the latter in the homoerotic physical, bodily process of achieving these chemical responses to AbEx — another machismo-dominated scene that needed queering.

    Ladies and Gentlemen, 1974 on view in Andy Warhol: Lifetimes at Aspen Art Museum

    In the next room, the oft-cited Christopher Makos film Factory Diary: Andy in Drag 2 (1981) anchors a funhouse mirrored disco spaceship installation of the Ladies and Gentlemen (1974) series — portraits depicting trans folks of color, cast from bohemian theatre society and from the gay bar by the Factory. The room is both glorious and a little uncomfortable, but linking these to the film is salient, because on the one hand their juxtaposition signals a broader acceptance of gender-fluid identity, but on the other hand the portraits are themselves problematic, even exploitative. At first the infamously poorly-paid sitters were anonymous or at least unnamed publicly; subsequent scholarship revealed their identities. Questions remain, as this series can be seen as both immortalizing and erasing at the same time. The film both clarifies and complicates this equation, and in its own right serves flirtatious melancholy while evoking the years of similar films which Andy made of all who came through his doors.

    Screen Test videos, 1964-66 on view in Andy Warhol: Lifetimes at Aspen Art Museum

    In the final set of galleries, several of the Screen Test videos (1964-66) flicker in a darkened room, hypnotic and lush; Duchamp, Hopper, Dylan, Nico, Ginsberg, and more just stare back at you with artificial but intense attention. It’s like a life flashing before the eyes of a dying man. These are projected across from a lesser-known and more final body of photo-based works with hand sewing, taking older photographs from 1976 and viscerally, visibly crafting new objects from them in 1986 — a year before his death and very much at the height of the AIDS crisis. This expression of remembering the past and giving it concrete form in a way that directly references a body in need of repair is a ritualistic act, a reach for permanence perhaps, or a look at beginnings as things everywhere were seeming to end.

     

    Andy Warhol: Lifetimes

    Aspen Art Museum

    December 3, 2021 – March 27, 2022

     

     

    All photos by Shana Nys Dambrot.

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: The Loft at Liz’s Group Exhibition "A Practical Guide to Parlour Games & Magic"

    GALLERY ROUNDS: The Loft at Liz’s
    Group Exhibition “A Practical Guide to Parlour Games & Magic”

    Dazzlingly inventive and lovingly curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic, “A Practical Guide to Parlour Games & Magic” at The Loft at Liz’s, features work by Phoebe Barnum, Brad Davis, Adrienne Devine, Doug Hammett, Orit Harpaz, Jason Jenn, Ashley Kruythoff, Lena Moross, Giovanni Ortega, Vojislav Radovanovic, Nancy Kay Turner, and Sean Yang. The exhibition is filled with works that are both whimsical and richly evocative of a more spiritual world.

    Among the many highlights are Barnum’s delicate, Inuit-inspired ceramic masks and vessels filling the gallery’s small side room, along with her talisman-like jewelry that includes natural stones and chandelier parts. Curator Jenn’s large mandala of gold-leaf-painted leaves, a fleeting vision captured for a few moments, is alchemic, as are Radovanovic’s untitled works from his Shooting Stars series. In both works, lustrous elements light up the walls.

    Jason Jenn, a fleeting vision captured for a few moments

    As if placeholders for otherworldly guests, Cole’s untitled (yellow chair) acrylic on canvas painting, and her series of small ceramic chairs, appear to await visitation from fairytale figures. Suspended above and near Cole’s work, dazzlingly intricate wire and bead sculptures from DeVine, such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; snared but awaiting flight. Nancy Kay Turner’s The Pursuit of Shadows is an altar with individual components, a scavenged and repurposed small world which includes a Ouija board and a shoe form, seemingly indicative of a post-dystopian world, in which our present is a memory.

    Adrienne DeVine, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    Adrienne Cole, untitled (yellow chair) and other works

    Sean Yang also has thoughtful sculptural works on display, including the trenchant When Do We Get The Seat At The Table? (cast resin, metal and mixed media.) Resin fingers strain through the surface of a chair, as if grasping an unattainable life—or, perhaps, toward a life in another or otherworld. Pure magic are the magician’s hat, bunnies, and roses presented in a variety of watercolors from Lena Moross; Kruythof’s radiant photography; Davis’ playful recombined found-object figures; Ortega’s delicate floral collage and painted works; and Harpaz’ exuberant black and white Weirdoh Birds wall covering, pillows, and prints.

    This delightful exhibition is up through March 1st at The Loft at Liz, 453 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles.

     

     

  • Shoptalk: LA Art News Art Fairs, Breakout Artists, and More.

    Shoptalk: LA Art News
    Art Fairs, Breakout Artists, and More.

    On a Roll

    LA artist Sandy Rodriguez is having a very good year—her work is currently in a solo show, “Sandy Rodriguez in Isolation” (through April 17), at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, plus she’s part of two major exhibitions in the LA area, “Borderlands” at the Huntington Museum (through fall 2022) and “Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes” (through June 12) at LACMA.

    I love the fact that everything she uses to make her work is carefully considered and contributes to the meaning of the work. For “Borderlands” she created a monumental 8’x8’ map of greater Los Angeles which mines deeper histories of the land. That map—YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Porciúncula /Los Angeles—shows topography, flora and fauna, language and stewardship over time. This work, like much of her oeuvre, is on amate paper, made by a hand-process that predates the Conquest, or the coming of the Spanish to the Americas. It is made from tree bark in a traditional manner involving being pounded by lava rock to bind the fibers. “At the time of the Conquest, it became illegal to make this paper or work on this paper,” she says on a museum video. “If it’s outlaw paper, I’m going to use this paper and tell that story on this sacred paper.” Rodriguez also uses pigments that are mineral and earth-based—in the gallery, there’s a showcase featuring the pigments she uses.   

    The solo at the Amon Carter features 30 new works-on-paper she created during her stay at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency. It was during a turbulent time of COVID rising and nationwide demonstrations against police brutality, and she looked to the natural world around her to guide her. Studying and collecting native plants, she incorporated them as raw material for this series, which includes landscapes, maps, scenes of protests, and botanical studies. A big congratulations, Sandy!

    Fairs Bouncing Back After Pause

    Frieze returns to Los Angeles after a pause last year due to you know what. This time (February 17–20) it’s bound for a new location next to the Beverly Hilton, in a new structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast and his firm wHY, which created the white tent at previous Frieze LA on the Paramount lot. Leading the return is Christine Messineo, newly appointed director of Frieze LA and New York, with the LA edition featuring over 100 galleries from 17 countries. Also new will be a public art component, Frieze Sculpture Beverly Hills, in Beverly Gardens park, with support from the city of Beverly Hills.

    Among the galleries at the main event will be 38 LA-based galleries—(the usual suspects): Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Gagosian, David Kordansky, L.A. Louver, Regen Projects and Various Small Fires (VSF). They will be joined by first-timers Bortolami, Sean Kelly and Galerie Lelong & Co., as well as New York returnees Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Marian Goodman, Gallery Hyundai, Pace, Maureen Thaddaeus Ropac, and David Zwirner.  So, okay, a pretty heavy-duty array. Given the rather riotous success of Art Basel Miami in early December, Frieze should also benefit from people eager to gawk and gab and buy gobs of art.

    Looks like other art fairs will also sprout around that time, including Felix returning to the Roosevelt Hotel, also February 17–20, and a new fair, the Clio Art Fair for “independent artists,” at the Naked Eye Studio on the same weekend. No news on any dates for Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which made an inspired move to the Hollywood Athletic Club in 2020. Apparently, that cost a bundle to launch.

    Meanwhile, Intersect comes to Palm Springs Feb. 10–13, with exhibitors, talks and programming at the Palm Springs Convention Center and some other desert locations. Specifics aren’t out yet as of this writing, but in a brief chat director Becca Hoffman conveyed their commitment to building community and connecting with the local art ecology. Hoffman was formerly director of The Outsider Art Fair. Intersect has already debuted in Aspen and Chicago.

    At the start of the year the long-running Los Angeles Art Show returns to the LA Convention Center, January 19–23, after getting off-schedule in 2021 with a summertime session. This show covers both modern and contemporary art, and is making concerted efforts to be more relevant with special programming, this year concentrating on the global environment. The new direction is being led by Kassandra Voyagis. “With a focus on the global effects of humankind on the planet,” she said in a press release, “It is the right time to present voices from around the world, and I am excited to facilitate this wonderful event.”

    Photo by Libby Lumpkin.

    We Love You, Dave!

    Dave Hickey (1938–2021)

    Dave Hickey, who died this past November, at 82 (about a month to the day this is being composed), was in many ways a godfather to Artillery, friendly with its editor and several of its contributors, but more importantly, in his intellectual scope, irreverence, eclecticism and unflagging pursuit of fresh beauties in every medium and across a richly diverse cultural terrain, a guiding critical spirit. Long after the Cool School’s halcyon days (he wrote the catalog essay for Ed Ruscha’s SFMOMA 1982, I Don’t Want No Retrospective) and his years on the rock ‘n’ roll caravan—including songwriting in Nashville, writing for Rolling Stone, and backing up Marshall Chapman’s rhythm section—his essays for LA’s Art Issues tore a swath through the domain of art and cultural criticism as wide and as glittering as the Vegas Strip. His epochal 2001 SITE Santa Fe biennial, “Beau Monde” (which I covered at the behest of Artillery’s editor), was, among other things, a material and architectural dramatization of the art conversation he had himself ignited, and which not so incidentally foregrounded Los Angeles as an art and creative capital. It gives us no small joy to carry his legacy—“bad acting and wrong-thinking;… courageously silly and frivolous;… enthusiastic, noisy;… seductive, destructive”—forward, because (as he said in the same essay), “art doesn’t matter.  What matters is how things look and the way we look at them in a democracy …—as a forum of contested values where we vote on the construction and constituency of the visible world.” —Ezrha Jean Black

    Other News

    One of the top five art books of the year cited by NPR’s Heller McAlpin is “Master of the Midcentury: The Architecture of William F. Cody,” authored by Catherine Cody, Jo Lauria and Don Choi. Cody helped create the sleek postwar Palm Springs look and designed a number of celebrated buildings still standing, including the Del Marcos Hotel and the Palm Springs Public Library. Yes, you can stay at the Del Marcos and enjoy the updated Mid-century furnishings and the central swimming pool outside your door. Catherine Cody is his daughter. Other books on the list are “Woman Made: Great Women Designers,” “Bird: Exploring the Winged World, “The Unwinding: and other dreamings,” and “William Morris.”

  • Remarks on Color: Recalcitrant Red January's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Recalcitrant Red
    January’s Hue

    Recalcitrant Red has gone on strike once and for all, having shirked his usual duties which include the setting of campfires, blood drives, Naugahyde sex parties, riots and any activity where the devil is set to make an appearance. Recalcitrant Red has turned his back on the industry of violence, even going so far as to boycott action films where his presence is the most necessary ingredient in a culture hell bent on destruction.

    Now when you go to see Keanu Reeves’ latest foray into head splitting, blistering revenge, the requisite river of blood does not flow. Instead, the studios have had to make due with Burnt Orange, which is more reminiscent of Thanksgiving supper than John Wick! Recalcitrant Red’s refusal to participate has not only affected the film industry, but also greeting card businesses across the greater United States where young men can no longer descend on bended knee, extending red roses, to beg their lover’s hand in marriage. Somehow Peonies just don’t cut it! The tried and true red and green Christmas sweater has also suffered, as pink, a last-minute substitute on mittens and sweaters can be seen all across America as Recalcitrant Red continues to test the limits of his absence like a libertine come home from the war

    Recalcitrant Red once famously exclaimed “You can’t give the finger to the blind,” and with that comment was banned irrevocably from The National Federation of the Sightless for all eternity. Recalcitrant had to draw the line somewhere and did make the occasional appearance at several high-end fashion shows in and around Milan, where he could be seen showboating on a pair of gleaming vinyl chaps, replete with two perfectly formed half-moon butt cheeks. Of course, other colors fiercely criticized his complete lack of personal responsibility not to mention his abysmal taste, but rarely does Recalcitrant Red take stock, flanked by his constant cohort, the Devil, and opting instead for the most garish, high profile exit he can muster.

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Jeffrey Deitch Group Show Curated by Kehinde Wiley

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Jeffrey Deitch
    Group Show Curated by Kehinde Wiley

    Born in 1935 and raised by sharecroppers during an era when rural Alabama was segregated, Simmie Knox persevered by making history in 2004 as the first Black artist to have his work selected for the official Whitehouse portrait collection—his rendition of former President Bill Clinton and First Lady, Hillary Clinton. Moonwalking forward, Kehinde Wiley—standing on the shoulders of Knox and other portraiture giants as Charles White, Laura Wheeler Waring and Nelson Stevens—made history in being selected as the first African American to paint an official US presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, former President Barak Obama in 2018. Of current interest at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles is “Self-Addressed,” an exhibition curated by Wiley consisting of self-portraits by 44 contemporary African artists from the multidisciplinary artist-residence program, Black Rock Senegal, that he founded in 2019.

    The infamous white gaze is interrogated, and African aesthetic individuality is unplugged as many of these images unapologetically stare right back at cha seeking neither acceptance nor approval for their intrinsic worth as human beings. Using such materials as acrylic, oil, pastel, charcoal and photography, these works reinforce that creative African expression is multilingual.

    Lindokuhle Khumalo, Smile is Luxury, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Josh White.

    Using acrylic on canvas, Lindokuhle Khumalo captures 21st-century self-perception with Smile is Luxury (2021). Gracing a Kool-Aid purple background is a young man taking a selfie, grinning while holding an iPhone. Facing viewers with a million-dollar smile, wearing a tangerine beanie and lime green T-shirt is enough to make anyone say cheese. In fact, Khumalo is courageous at painting two of the most challenging aspects of portraiture—teeth and hands. He refuses the escape clause of the serious look, or hands in pocket. Although many of the paintings do not reflect proficiency with rendering hands, the act of these artists taking the risk to intentionally reveal perceptions of themselves makes “Self-Addressed” worth seeing. It also leaves one hoping that Wiley will refine his curatorial vision with a reboot, sequel or a trilogy of exhibitions that push even further self-portrait boundaries.

     

    Self-Addressed
    Curated by Kehinde Wiley
    Jeffrey Deitch
    November 6 – December 23, 2021

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Joe Rudko Von Lintel Gallery

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Joe Rudko
    Von Lintel Gallery

    Although photography-based collages by Joe Rudko are aggressively analog as objects, they reference the inherent pixelated optics of the digital world. Each unique piece is physically made of thousands of randomly accumulated, painstakingly spliced and intuitively reassembled photographs in an archive spanning 100 years of vernacular, estate, personal, and sundry sources. In this way, Rudko’s pieces act as archives themselves, despite being rather coy with complete information and context.

    Joe Rudko, Red Scrap, 2021, Found photographs on paper

    In the ten large-scale works included in Untitled Colors Rudko’s organizing principle is color; the photos are monochromatically sorted and gesturally woven/mosaiced into loose grids and sweeps of gradated palettes. The patterns and apparent surface inflections comport with the energy of abstract painting. But as soon as you get closer — like zooming in with your body — the surviving details of the images spring to life. Contemplating the works is like seeing actual footage of memory at work. Pets, gardens, cars, flowers, architecture, food, gatherings, fires, snowfall, desert, blue skies, cloudy skies, ocean waves, city lights — just like the internet, it’s all in there somewhere.

    Joe Rudko, Violet (detail), 2021, Found photographs on paper
    Joe Rudko, Orange (detail), 2021, Found photographs on paper

    It’s intriguing that in the absence of a narrative content for each image, other stories manifest themselves. The performative aspect of Rudko’s process invites the imagination to consider the warehouse of snapshots and the obsessive patience of the sorting, cutting, and assembly of so many pieces that range from small to sliver. But the colors themselves — sexy red lines, steely expanses of cool silver, flickering black like a world of candlelight, soaring blues, fertile green, ice queen white, ember-glowing orange — also spark stories. The emotions ignited by the personality of each color field, belong equally to the artist and to the viewer, and as art does at its best, expressing what is both private and shared.

    Joe Rudko: Untitled Colors

    Von Lintel Gallery

    October 30 – December 18, 2021

     

  • OUTSIDE LA: Jennifer Bartlett Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

    OUTSIDE LA: Jennifer Bartlett
    Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

    Various sizes of square panels mostly covered with dots with groups of parallel lines and occasional fields of paint line the gallery walls of Locks Gallery in Jennifer Bartlett’s installation “Recitative”—its title derived from a rhythmic free form vocal style of 16th-century Florence.Vertical groups of threes begin the left-to-right read and as the gaze traverses the arrangement, resonances build. The characteristic viscosity of enamel paint allows for different thicknesses and therefore different hues of blues, reds, yellows, greens—even as the palette expands. There is a rhythmic build as the eye tracks back and forth throughout the pattern overall, with single panels that emerge causing a momentary stoppage. The mix of making a process-based sequence that follows a rule-based pattern is highly satisfying to the eye and the mind. Bartlett utilizes this trope to create this monumental work that projects simplicity in everything except its reverberations.

    Dot matrices are delineated in grids with only the variation of paint to distinguish one from the other. Elsewhere dots are placed within dots complicating the pattern and becoming targets. Dots move and in doing so become lines that create tangles that seem to be without preplanning. Finally, in one last explosion, the dots become a thick black line that marks off a very irregular squiggle drawn out across 24 overlapping plates. Clearly both the musical inspiration and the reductivist conceptual patterning lean into something other than just a process.

    Installation view, 2021

    Bartlett’s work with steel plates has for many years followed a specific practice. The plates are painted in enamel and then silkscreened with the grid onto which the artist deposits paint. Much of that work is done by trusting that the irregularities of enamel will create differences in tonality and even drips. The grid is light but visible and the variances from the perpendicularity are the point of this technique. Difference emerges ineluctably and watching the smaller and larger square plates as they move up and down from a single horizon acts like a graph bar moving up and down but suddenly in the left or right progression there is a clot of colored plates all adamantly disobeying the previous arrangements.

    The pleasure of this work has always been the interplay between expectation and perception. There is a prelude to the development overall but soon as a viewer traverses the sections, all of the minute differences rush to the fore obscuring the predictability of the pattern. It overpowers believability just like some types of music in which a single note builds overtones and undertones simply because it’s being played over such an extended time.

    Jennifer Bartlett: Recitative

    Locks Gallery

    October 8 – November 27, 2021

  • Bennett Roberts It’s About Time

    Bennett Roberts
    It’s About Time

    Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it to him—before he could read it in the latest edition of Artillery—that we had panned his Kehinde Wiley show.

    Roberts, unflinching, seemed to be suppressing a grin. Was it because a review in Artillery had no significance to him, or was it his absolute confidence that Wiley was already untouchable? I chose to believe the latter. He graciously invited me in to linger at the show and told me not to hesitate to raise any questions. That made quite an impression on me as a journalist; I really respected his very adult manner.

    Fifteen years later, a lone Kehinde Wiley painting hangs on an empty white gallery wall, surrounded by brown-paper–wrapped canvases awaiting installation at Roberts Projects. I assumed the unopened art was Wiley’s; Roberts informed me otherwise, stating it was Amoako Boafo’s next show—the Wiley was there for a client-viewing later in the day.

    The irony did not escape me as we sat down in the main gallery for the second meeting of our interview. The first time was at the Los Feliz home that Roberts shares with his wife and business partner, Julie Roberts. That was nearly a year ago (that pesky pandemic kept delaying things), and it was now September, the start of the new fall art season. Julie, a full and equal partner in the gallery, was in New York at The Armory Show while hubby stayed behind to attend to their upcoming exhibition—there’s a long waiting list for Boafo’s work—“hundreds.” The African artist who has been showing with Roberts Projects since 2018 is super-hot right now; Roberts could not afford to be away that opening weekend.

    Business is going well for the gallery. Many of its artists are in high demand, and artists that have stuck by Roberts over the years are now getting their due—current art star Betye Saar for one. Roberts is in high spirits and ready to begin the interview before I even get the recorder going. He kicks off by singing high praises for LA’s current recognition as an important art center—finally. “It’s always been a great center for artists.”He pauses before acknowledging—for galleries and collectors—“not always so great.”

    In the past, Los Angeles was notorious for its inferior collector-base compared to New York. Roberts recounts the LA collectors of only a few decades ago; “If they’re going to spend 30 to 50 thousand dollars or a million dollars, they’re going to buy from New York. It gave them more confidence.” That is no longer the case.

    Roberts emerged in the LA art scene amidst the ’80s art-world explosion, after returning home from college in Santa Barbara. He grew up in Brentwood, a wealthy neighborhood on LA’s west side, with a producer-writer father in the film and television industry. Roberts attended Windward, “a well-known private school,” he points out, where his best friend was Richard Heller—of the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. In the summer of 1986, Roberts and Heller picked up where they left off and started a gallery in Heller’s father’s garage. They called it Richard/Bennett Gallery.

    Within a year, they were confident enough to move into a “real” space on La Cienega Boulevard near some of LA’s hottest galleries, like Rosamund Felsen, who was debuting the likes of Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman. Richard/Bennett proved to be no slouch either: they were the first to show Raymond Pettibon, and were responsible for introducing his work to Chief Curator Paul Schimmel—who in turn put Pettibon in the famed 1992 Geffen/MOCA show, “Helter Skelter.” Running the gallery was a struggle, Roberts admits, but somehow just when they didn’t think they could cover their rent, a miracle sale would happen, or a collector would buy a few Pettibons for $250 apiece to help them out. With measured success over five years, Roberts and Heller parted ways, both continuing their own successful careers as art dealers.

    Kehinde Wiley, Yachinboaz Ben Yisrael II, 2021, oil on linen, 106.5 x 74.25 x 4.25 in. framed; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California, photo by Joshua White

    RETAIN & MAINTAIN

    According to Roberts, a central challenge in running a successful gallery is retaining your artists. Yes, Pettibon eventually moved on; his career skyrocketed after “Helter Skelter” and today he is represented by Regen Projects in LA and David Zwirner in New York—there’s always a bigger gallery, a better offer. Roberts concedes there’s a long list of artists who got snatched up after he invested in them. But that’s typical and expected. “It’s unavoidable,” he maintains.

    Take Roberts Projects’ biggest artist, Kehinde Wiley—it is by no means the only gallery representing him. Things have changed drastically since the 1980s era, when galleries had exclusive partnerships with their artists. Roberts says he prefers the new system—a more polyamorous relationship, if you will. He concurs, “I like Kehinde showing with someone different in London, someone different in New York. I make less money and get less pieces, but those people have different collectors, different curators that are interested in that program. Artists are seen differently, depending on the program they are in.” Roberts thinks that artists showing with other galleries is not necessarily a bad thing. Another newer trend is for a gallery to have multiple spaces. Galleries don’t often want to surrender their artists to another gallery and take lower percentages (like Roberts did with Wiley). He notes, “It may actually be cheaper in the long run to have another space in New York to show that artist rather than giving the artist to another gallery.”

    Roberts emphatically stresses that it’s all about retaining the talent you’ve developed. “The longer you retain it, it is perceived as important…,” he interrupts himself, “I use ‘perceive’ because everything is about time. Everything in the art world is about time. Everyone thinks it’s about popularity, success, money; it isn’t. It’s about how much time you can keep that person in play.”

    Roberts believes that for an artist to have historical staying power, a cultural discussion needs to revolve around that artist and their work. Until that dialogue expands outside the art world it remains “an inside discussion.” In other words, that work will not make a wider impact, nor make it into the history books.

    Kehinde Wiley’s oeuvre has crossed over to become part of a cultural discussion. Two factors play a part: his commissioned presidential portrait of President Obama and, most recently, his version of the famous Blue Boy portrait hanging at The Huntington (The Blue Boy is on loan to London’s National Gallery). Roberts Projects had a huge part in making that transaction happen. Those projects propelled Wiley into a wider cultural sphere, surpassing just the art world. Most likely, he will go down in history.

    Amoako Boafo, Monstera Leaf Sleeves, 2021; oil and paper transfer on canvas, 77 x 76.5 in.; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

    BLACK ARTISTS MATTER

    The Black Lives Matter movement filtered into the art world quickly; in fact, most would say much earlier than the mainstream cultural embrace. Today, if your gallery doesn’t represent Black and POC artists, or include much diversity, you might as well be showing cave paintings. Roberts had been representing Black artists long before most galleries caught up to speed. His gallery didn’t seem to get much credit for it, but he wasn’t looking for it either. The artist roster has always been inclusive, starting with Kehinde Wiley in 2002, Noah Davis in 2006, Betye Saar in 2010 and recent additions of African artists Boafo, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Wangari Mathenge.

    The Black artist movement is thriving right now and Roberts Projects is right on target. Alongside Wiley, Noah Davis was a big hit for them. Davis, too, is engaged in that bigger historical discussion, as co-founder of The Underground Museum, an institution created to show museum-quality work in a Latino and Black LA neighborhood that was underserved in art exposure. Davis died of cancer in 2015, at the tragically early age of 32, but had left the Roberts & Tilton gallery in 2012 (Roberts’ former gallery with partners Julie, and Jack Tilton, who passed in 2017). All ties between Davis and Roberts & Tilton were severed by then, and David Zwirner obtained Davis’ estate in 2020. (Zwirner needs to hurry and check all those boxes).

    Roberts isn’t upset about that, but more dismayed about the erasure of Roberts’ involvement in developing Davis from the beginning. “I helped sell pieces to fund The Underground Museum.” Roberts pauses with quiet exasperation. Zwirner produced a huge monograph on Davis with nary a mention of Roberts. “It was unbelievable to me how the art world loves to rewrite history and make it seem like only the winners write it. Not the ones that are up-and-coming, or the also-rans.” Roberts was key in putting Davis on the map circa 2007. Roberts & Tilton were participatining in an art fair when Don and Mera Rubell (serious art collectors and clients) stopped by their booth and inquired about a painting. Roberts recalls Mera demanding: Who is this great artist on the wall? “I said, ‘It’s a brand-new discovery of mine. I think it’s terrific, I think you should get something.’ They said, ‘You know what? We’re doing [a show called] ‘30 Americans.’ And he will be the final and youngest artist we include in the show.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”(Let that go down in history—you read it here first!)

    Betye Saar, The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude, 2010, mixed media assemblage, 54 x 43 x 20.5 in., Baltimore Museum of Art; purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

    ONE PERCENTERS

    Let’s face it, the art world is a rich man’s game now, and with the world’s wealth concentrated among the one percent, it’s a small playing field. “It is the game you play after all the other games you’ve played,” Roberts explains, “It is the final frontier.” He goes on, “It is the place that once you’ve made whatever fortune you’ve made and you have what everyone else has… you can differentiate yourself from all the other billionaires by collecting things that are not only great but are truly something that will enhance how you see your own position in things.” Pausing, Roberts surmises, “It’s a game of fortune.”

    One-percenters have needs too. “When you’re that big, the richest people want to buy from you, because they feel secure buying from you,” Roberts says. That’s why mega-galleries like Gagosian can and do exist. At last count Gagosian had 16 galleries worldwide. In today’s global market, having art galleries around the world seems more shrewd than extravagant. Another factor, Roberts explains, “All of those businesses have a very, very vibrant secondary market—that’s truly where all the money is.” At that level, the competition is with the auction houses; they don’t care about other galleries at that point. Roberts acknowledges he’s not in that league—and is relieved not to be.

    Roberts refers to what’s happening right now in the art world as a “sea change.” His and Julie’s gallery is rolling with the new system, and in fact thriving. “I don’t think that I even sell things anymore—I think people buy things from me,” Roberts says reflectively. “Zero pressure. I want the experience to be as clean and as enjoyable as possible.”

    I’ve watched Roberts’ gallery remain fresh, relevant, edgy—top-notch for over 30 years. With Betye Saar’s soaring career, the recent Wiley accomplishments, and rising star Amoako Boafo on board, it is undeniably riding the wave.

    Unsurprisingly, Roberts announced at the end of our interview that they will be moving from their space to La Brea Avenue. The new gallery will be three times larger than their Culver City venue. And no, Roberts Projects will not be adding another gallery; they just need a bigger space for displaying larger works and a nice showing room for their clients—where they can have an enjoyable experience considering the lone Kehinde Wiley spotlighted on the wall.

  • June Edmonds Freedom in Abstraction

    June Edmonds
    Freedom in Abstraction

    The post-pandemic era can offer rewarding challenges, as I found out when engaging in my first Zoom interview. I spoke with painter and educator June Edmonds on the occasion of her current 40-year retrospective at the Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, and a simultaneous solo show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

    Edmonds appeared on screen with a welcoming smile and friendly brown eyes that peered through rectangular glasses. A pair of circular sepia earrings complemented her double-crescent semi-Afro hairstyle with its curled strands.

    When asked about her early years, she fondly recalled, “My mom was a teacher and she loved to draw. She would sit by the phone and draw profiles of people, and I enjoyed collecting those little sketches.” Her mother also took Edmonds on formative trips to the Huntington and LACMA.“When I was teenager,” said Edmonds, “she brought me to see the ‘Two Centuries of Black American Art’ show (LACMA, 1978). These works by African American artists had a profound formative impact upon Edmonds, as did a 1989 trip to Washington DC, where she viewed a Post-Impressionist exhibition.

    June Edmonds in her studio, San Pedro CA, August 2021

    Edmonds related that in her undergrad education in art at San Diego State, “Joy Shipman was super-supportive, and so was Patrick Cauley. I attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Graduate school was very challenging because color was not in—especially for a student who wanted use color in the way that I did, but Stan Whitney was very helpful.”

    Edmonds described two significant events that inspired her to become a public artist—first a trip to Mexico City: “We arrived late at the Museum of Anthropology and we could not get in, so this taxi driver offered to give us a tour and showed us all the important murals that we learned about in art history, and other works that I was unfamiliar with. It was those works made in Venetian glass mosaic and the mural by Jose Chavez Morado that most moved me.”

    The second such event was an exhibition of public art for MTA created by artists of color that Edmonds attended in downtown Los Angeles. This was an opportunity to see proposals (public art models) by Willie Middlebrook, Sandra Rowe (the first Black woman to be awarded an MTA grant), Richard Wyatt Jr., John Outterbridge and Charles Dickson—and to meet those artists.

    Metro Blue Line, Long Beach Pacific Station, (detail) public art by June Edmonds, venetian glass mosaic,1995

    Edmonds remembers, “I was just working, trying to pay off my student loans. I didn’t know where to find such a community.” However, Edmonds began to attend artists’ talks and describes one given by Willie Middlebrook: “I was blown away by his work, blown away to see this Black artist with so much talent, so much confidence to be able to express what he was doing.”

    In 1995, Edmonds was selected to create a Venetian glass mosaic for the Metro Blue Line, Long Beach Pacific Station, making Edmonds the second Black woman to be awarded an MTA grant.

    In 2010, when Edmonds was beginning to focus on abstraction, she was invited by Kathy Gallegos, director and founder of Avenue 50 Studio, to have a solo show. This was a turning point in her journey as an abstract painter. “I love the freedom that it gives, how an artist can create their own language, and how abstraction can even communicate on a spiritual level,” said Edmonds, emphasizing the importance of abstraction to her practice.

    In 2017, during an artist’s residency in Paducah, Kentucky, Edmonds began working in acrylic paint rather than her usual oils. She explained, “[The residency] was only for a month, so I needed a medium that would dry quickly.”

    June Edmonds, photo by Chris Wormald.

    She showed me her sketchbooks and described how she uses colored pencils to work out the composition and its various hues. Her process involves using overlapping circles to intensify negative and positive space and create other shapes that possess spiritual and feminine connotations: “the shape of a seed, the shape of a leaf implying growth, the shape of a vulva symbolizing life, and also the shape of a shield.”

    Edmonds stated that she had a dream of four Black draping flags that inspired the “Allegiances and Convictions” flag paintings that were unveiled at the Luis De Jesus gallery in 2019. “The symbolism was too strong to let go of, and I wanted to use neutral browns with various values that represented skin tones.”

    “Black people… ” Edmonds concluded, “No matter what is said to us, no matter what attitudes are brought to us, we have this amazing sense of ownership of where we are.”

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Tiffany Alfonseca The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Tiffany Alfonseca
    The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

    The two dozen or so paintings Bronx-based artist Tiffany Alfonseca made during a summer residency at the Mistake Room not only represent a kind of reimagined family photo album, but are intentionally rendered with fidelity to those source materials and their awkward vernacular, vintage aesthetic. Further, the works are installed in a unified field of walls painted a pale pink — the same hue that forms the foundational layer for the skin tones in all the portraits. Several threads converge across the suite of carefully rendered, large-scale images, but the mindful rendering of variations in skin tone as a metric for family resemblances and a more insidious intra-community colorism, along with the tumultuous blending of Black and Brown in her own Afro-Latinx family space, is one of the central ones. Like many of the choices Alfonseca makes, the presence of an invisible but universal underlying foundation to her nuanced palette has power in both the formal and narrative dimensions of the work.

    Tiffany Alfonseca, Por Alexandra, 2021, Acrylic, color pencil, charcoal on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber.

    Another example of this is the matrilineal armature of the intersecting storylines — women are at the center of the birthdays, weddings, vacations, chores, candid and quiet moments and formal occasions captured first on cameras, and now in generously evocative paint and pencil. The stilted headshots and defiant children, the richly textured and colorful patterns of clothes from eras and occasions, the pristine upholstery, the glittering bangles, the haircuts and party dresses, the vibrancy of color at every turn, the taut smile held for just a smidge too long — all taken together the whole “album” imparts a sense of a family that is, like everyone’s, both absolutely ordinary and utterly remarkable.

    Tiffany Alfonseca, Alfonseca Rondon, 2021, Acrylic, color pencil, glitter on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber.

    But Alfonseca takes all of this one step further still in her vivid and deliberative studio practice, as she makes the most effective and winsome gestures in the many opportunities to create not only exuberant color fields and patterns, but also a surprising and strategic impasto in hair and sometimes fabric and even concrete. In works like the fantastical “Dahianni” and surrealist “Por Alexandra” as well as the pageantry of a nearly Op-Art, Pattern & Decoration visual workout in “Alfonseca-Rondon,” this alleviates the flatness of the photographic spaces and re-grounds the works in an embodied presence that transcends the informational archive. In this way, Alfonseca does more than chronicle and remember, she creates new things that come directly from her own energy and hands, and she thereby informs her history with the fresh living presence of herself within it.

     

    Tiffany Alfonseca: De las manos que nos crearon

    The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

    September 25 – December 18

  • Dozie Kanu’s “to prop and ignore” Manual Arts, Los Angeles

    Dozie Kanu’s “to prop and ignore”
    Manual Arts, Los Angeles

    The sculptures in Dozie Kanu’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles flirt with functionality but refuse to reveal a clear purpose. Instead, these stylish hybrids possess the elegance of aspirational interior design and the subtle menace of dystopian relics. Many of the works contain familiar elements—a vintage headboard, an ATM machine, rubber plungers—but their relationship to our bodies is permanently transformed. The plunger heads are attached to spiky metal sticks—making them nearly impossible to hold. Meanwhile, the ATM machine stands covered in matte black clay, its buttons buried. These forms speak to recognizable material needs and domestic space, but the logic that binds these combinations remains poetic, not practical.

    Sparsely installed in an airy barn-like structure, Kanu’s material choices invite close study. In trial foundation study for victorian revival (all works 2021), a few stalks of charred bamboo stick out from a large array of earthy-red blocks with rounded edges. The smooth bulbous bricks feel chic and futuristic while the bamboo recalls improvised structures built without steel reinforcing. Though uniform appearance, tiny imperfections in the surfaces of the pillow-like bricks indicate that they are sculpted and finished by hand. A rectangle of plywood lies on the floor next to this cluster, its flat face forming distinct wings of this tidy assemblage. After noticing a sliver of reflected light on the floor, I got on my hands and knees to inspect closer. Kanu placed thin steel plates beneath each block like a metallic coaster—a detail that feels integral to the character of the work even though it is nearly illegible. He also carefully notched the bricks to receive the sections of bamboo, neatly holding them in place. The peculiar specificity of these decisions lands like the syllables of a foreign language in which our comprehension is limited. These delightfully strange moments elicit curiosity, wonder, and excitement punctuated by occasional flashes of recognition.

    Dozie Kanu, trial foundation study for victorian revival, 2021

    trial foundation study for victorian revival resembles modular construction techniques, and a framed floorplan on a nearby wall adds specificity to the architectural allusions in the title. The outline of the structure depicted corresponds to the shape of Kanu’s sculpture and the labels on the rooms in this schematic contain markers of affluence—or at least suburban stability: “family room”, “breakfast nook”, and “two-car garage”. The comfortable proportions of this suburban home contrast with the lean aesthetics of Kanu’s sculpture, which manages to feel both luxurious and like an improvised prototype. The choice to reimagine the foundation of this particular home in a sculptural vocabulary feels personal but without nostalgia. Is this his childhood home? Or a home he coveted? Suburban developments are not known for innovative design, but they document how aspirations coalesce into physical structures. This pairing left me contemplating the seemingly paradoxical accomplishments of visionary architecture: structures that transform the scope of our dreams while responding to practical needs.

    Dozie Kanu, Slessor 2.0, 2021

    Elsewhere in the show, the artist’s juxtapositions strike a more confrontational note. Slessor 2.0 consists of a face-off between two small head-shaped masses that contain bright lights. Modeled on the type of sparring helmets common in martial arts, these hand-carved pieces of black marble are the size of grapefruits and nearly identical except for the pattern of delicate white veins running through the stone. These tiny helmets sit atop steel pipes that connect to a sinister-looking piece of found metal with two dozen openings in its parallel tubes—a gas burner it turns out. The scene is puzzling. Staring through the openings in the marble to determine the source of the light doesn’t yield any more information about the protagonists of this bizarre duel. A piece of frosted glass hides the bulb, and a fan somewhere inside hums continually (presumably cooling the lightbulbs). The individual components of this piece aren’t all that wild, but collectively they generate an unruly energy. This haunted appliance would certainly illuminate a room, but the intensity of its vibes would not be easy to live with.

    Dozie Kanu, At The Moment, 2021

    At The Moment is the most overtly political work in the show, and also the funniest. The sculpture is essentially an ATM machine covered in matte black clay with the artist’s fingerprints visible all over its surfaces. The cash machine sits atop what can only be described as a small prison cell—binding blackness to the racist machinery of carceral capitalism. Kanu’s transformation immediately evokes the predatory and exclusionary financial practices that form one of the sturdiest legs of white supremacy in this country. After all, this is the kind of ATM that you would find at a bodega, not the fancy touchscreen kind at the bank. Other aspects of the work are just plain silly. Oval-shaped wings protrude from either side of this tall box, as to propose that this defunct terminal might as well make itself useful and become a table. The dimpled clay coating also has the effect of making this banking device look plump and cartoonish—as if it were a racist but jovial Teletubby.

    Kanu’s use of found objects brings a layer of complexity into the work without puncturing the ambiguity that makes his sculptures visually compelling. The success with which he integrates heterogeneous materials comes from the focus and restraint with which these elements are composed. Forging new aesthetic languages often requires cannibalizing the past, but the problems we address rarely change. Kanu’s enigmatic assemblages feel like relics from a future civilization whose hopes and fears mirror our own.

     

    Dozie Kanu: “to prop and ignore”

    Manual Arts, Los Angeles

    May 6th – September 15th, 2021

     

    Peter Brock is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY.

  • Remarks on Color: Subterranean Smog September's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Subterranean Smog
    September’s Hue

    Subterranean Smog is not one color or another, but a sickening miasma of grays, browns and a lingering smoky orange. Drawn from the bowels of the earth, SS identifies with the antihero — Pig Pen in Charlie Brown, Sir Gawain, the Green Knight, Alex from a Clockwork Orange, Lestat from the Vampire Chronicles. A self-proclaimed anarchist, apocryphal, and constantly distracted, the Great SS wanders the streets of Boise Idaho in search of the meaning of life. Once, for a moment in October of 1975 he thought he discovered it in the recesses of a cherry donut, but alas it was only a sugar rush.

    In an attempt to counteract his saturnine nature, and to finally commit to being one solid hue, Subterranean Smog purchases thirteen burnt orange suits with matching socks the color of apricots. For the first time in his dingy life, SS commits to something, and the sheer fact of this gives him hope for the future.

    Despite walking down Main Street in the full spectacle of an ever-brightening morning, wearing such garishness as would put Liberace to shame, Subterranean Smog still feels strangely invisible and nondescript. So, he hires a marching band to accompany him to the grocery store, then adorns his body with all manner of orange flowers, and even dips his body in saffron to garner some much-needed attention. But the fact of his inherent and unavoidable bleakness, smoggy and ill-suited to the rarified life, soon catches up with him.

    Realizing he cannot change the truth of who he is and the permanent dinginess of his nature, SS decides instead to embrace it completely, marrying his High School sweetheart, Sky, and even going so far as to open a Smog Check Station in the center of an abysmal little town on the outskirts of nowhere.

  • Remarks on Color: Lachrymose Lemon August's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Lachrymose Lemon
    August’s Hue

    Lachrymose Lemon cannot stop weeping. She sobs uncontrollably at everything all the time: the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, softball games, dinosaur conventions, the day her favorite chicken finally laid an egg. From the moment the sun rises to the last feeble rays of the day, Lachrymose Lemon greets the world through her tears. She’s what’s called an “indiscriminate crier,” “a perpetual weeper,” “a permanently salty dog,” and these monikers have served her well as for decades her tears have been used to great effect, though she claims manipulation never once entered her mind.

    Crocodile tears helped her purchase her first home, a grand affair that sadly overlooked a pig farm in Wisconsin; an Audi convertible with a license plate that reads “cry me a river,” and several whirlwind trips around the world. Lachrymose Lemon discovered that most people are more than happy to lower the price on just about anything in assurance that the sobbing might finally come to an END. In fact, she cries so much that the Guinness Book of World Records once interviewed her for a special edition called The Extreme Body which included a man with hemorrhoids the size of grapefruits.

    She hasn’t watched a sad movie in over thirty years and those various YouTube videos of abandoned and abused animals send her over the edge every time. The governor of California once approached Lachrymose about the drought crisis with the idea that her excessive tears might be desalinized, which could possibly save the entire West Coast from immolation. She agreed quite eagerly at first only to cry about it for absolutely no reason later.

    On any given day you can find various buckets indiscriminately placed throughout the house in case a sudden deluge overcomes her. Her husband often complains that he has yet again “kicked the bucket” on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The fact their house is a veritable minefield of tears makes it impossible to socialize, and so Lachrymose Lemon bumbles on into her oh so solitary life, sour and forever alone.

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Shoshana Wayne Gallery Group Exhibition "Above & Below"

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Shoshana Wayne Gallery
    Group Exhibition “Above & Below”

    Fans of Los Angeles’ Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional.

    The show marks the Los Angeles debuts of Madame Moreau and Yveline Tropéa. Moreau anchors the traditional end of craft in the exhibition with Henry Christoph flag, a beaded ceremonial vodou banner depicting Haiti’s revolutionary war hero and king. Tropéa’s canvases too are covered in beading, illustrating abstracted people and creatures that suggest folklore influences. The French artist lives part-time in Burkina Faso where she has been influenced by Yoruba beading, and where she hires and trains women–disenfranchised kidnapping survivors of Boko Haram–as beaders. Similarly, Gil Yefman felted a bedspread size wall hanging in the show with Kuchinate, a craft collective of African women refugees in Israel.

    Madame Moreau, Henry Christoph Flag, c. 2020.  Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery.  Photo by Gene Ogami.

    Textile art has a long history of dovetailing with feminism, placing value in traditional “women’s work,” as exemplified by Elaine Reichek’s Sampler (A blurred region). Sabrina Gschwandtner likewise draws on this history to pay tribute to early motion picture film editors, largely women whose names are forgotten. Her Hands at Work (For Pat Ferrero) Diptych consists of 16mm film strips sewn into two quilt-like patterns mounted on lightboxes.

    The current textile art renaissance is also dovetailing with the LGBTQ movement. Transgender artist Max Colby’s assemblages burst with camp, sprouting phallic shapes covered in beads, plastic flowers and Christmas ornaments. These works find their closest kin in the show in a beaded and studded punching bag, Cloudbuster, by Jeffrey Gibson, a queer Cherokee Choctaw artist. Conical metal beads known as jingles–which adorn the dress of pow-wow dancers–cover the lower half of Cloudbuster, tempting visitors to punch it and make it rain, at least sonically.

    Jeffrey Gibson, Cloudbuster, 2013. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo by Peter Mauney.

    As well as beading, weaving is a prominent technique in Above & Below, with interpretations by Terri Friedman, Din Q. Lê, Anina Major, James Richards, and Frances Trombly. Friedman’s wall-sized tapestries particularly push the boundaries of weaving with riotous combinations of colors, textures, negative space, and hidden messages. One aptly says, “Alive.”

     

    Above & Below

    Shoshana Wayne Gallery

    June 15-August 28, 2021

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Vera Lutter Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Vera Lutter
    Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    One of the most uncanny things about the photographs in Vera Lutter’s exhibition Museum in the Camera, is the fact that many of the galleries depicted, as well as the buildings themselves are no longer there. Lutter shot on site at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from February 2017 – January 2019, before the recent widespread demolition meant to make way for the new museum structure.

    Using both stationary room-sized and portable smaller-scaled pinhole cameras, Lutter created images of both interior and exterior spaces at LACMA, as well as individual works of art. A pinhole camera is a camera without a lens. Light passes through a small hole that functions as an aperture projecting the object or scene in front of the “hole” onto the opposite wall, photographic paper or film. Pinhole cameras usually require long exposure times that results in motion blur as well as the absence of any objects that move continuously in front of the lens. The image created is also a backwards and upside down negative.

    Vera Lutter, Art of the Pacific, II: September 21, 2017–January 5, 2018, 2017–18, unique gelatin silver prints, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through an artist residency supported by Sotheby’s, © Vera Lutter, digital image courtesy of the artist

    Before gravitating to pinhole cameras in the early 1990s, Lutter turned her New York loft into a camera obscura to project large inverted images onto mural sized sheets of photographic paper to create unique large-scale negatives. She later constructed room-sized cameras she could use on location. Working with a crew at LACMA over two years, Lutter was able to fabricate not just one, but four room-sized cameras that she used to capture aspects of the museum, documenting exhibitions, gardens and the various buildings on LACMA’s campus. She also built smaller pinhole cameras to make individual photographs of specific objects of art and paintings. To create the oversized three panel image European Old Masters: December 7, 2018 – January 9, 2019 (2018-19) Lutter hid the camera behind a specially constructed wall and positioned the vantage point, the gallery lights and even the paintings to perfectly recede in space. The resulting photograph is an eerie and ghost-like image of the gallery in which these old master paintings hung. As a black and white negative, the walls are dark and the is ceiling white with black spots where the lights were positioned. The frames surrounding the artworks glow against the dark walls and in relation to the now lightly rendered paintings. The reflective corridor is devoid of people due to the month long exposure.

    Vera Lutter, Art of the Pacific, II: September 21, 2017–January 5, 2018, 2017–18, unique gelatin silver prints, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through an artist residency supported by Sotheby’s, © Vera Lutter, digital image courtesy of the artist

    Art of the Pacific, II: September 21, 2017 – January 5, 2018 (2017-18) is another three panel photograph (97 1/8 x 168 inches) where Lutter positioned objects and artifacts for the camera. Using objects from LACMA’s Pacific Islands collection, Lutter composed the photograph based on aesthetics, rather than factual relationships stating, “I was allowed to pick all my favorite pieces…. I brought all these characters together that aren’t from the same tribe, and aren’t from the same island, and might not really speak the same language, but I wanted them all to talk to one another.” In the resulting photograph, the three-dimensional objects appear flat, their tonalities a surreal group of tones due to the fact that the image is a negative. The arrangement of objects were similarly finessed by Lutter from inside the camera to maximize the compositional balance within the image.

    Installation photograph, Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2020, art © Vera Lutter, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

    Included in the exhibition are pinhole photographs of individual artworks carefully shot on custom made “copy-cameras.” There are pinhole cameras arranged to face easels onto which Lutter placed specific paintings. Though recognizable as paintings, Lutter’s photographs highlight different aspects of the originals as again they are presented as reversed black and white negative images.

    When Lutter first visited LACMA to contemplate the project, she became enamored by the area known as Rodin’s Garden. Not only was it beautiful, but it represented Los Angeles, with its billowing palm trees and traffic just beyond the fence. The plaza was both quasi-urban and a cultural landmark simultaneously. Her image, Rodin Garden, I: February 22, 2017, (2017) exemplifies this experience. Though recognizable, the quality of light and blurriness of the treetops takes one beyond reality into a dream-like environment. It is curious that Lutter includes two versions of this image, one is high contrast, while the other is much darker (over-exposed) with a more muted range of tones.

    Installation photograph, Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2020, art © Vera Lutter, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

    Lutter’s images call certain photographic truths into question. While they were made with a camera, what was placed in front of the aperture (pinhole) changed due to the long exposures (some took several months). These images are single shots that were created not in fractions of a second, but over time and this durational aspect gives the finished photographs an uncanny quality. Although “real” they appear surreal because LACMA no longer has many of the courtyards or galleries Lutter documented and most of the art is in storage. Wandering through her exhibition, one cannot help but reflect on the demolished architecture and memories of the museum. While the works on view in Museum in the Camera serve as a reminder of what LACMA was, more importantly they are intriguing images and new works of art that re-present what is gone in surprising and unusual ways.

     

    Vera Lutter

    Museum in the Camera

    Los Angeles County Museum of Art

    April 1 – September 12, 2021