Artillery Magazine

Tag: art review

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Nicole Wittenberg at Fernberger Gallery

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Nicole Wittenberg
    at Fernberger Gallery

    Vivid and broad brushstrokes streak across Nicole Wittenberg’s paintings currently on view at the newly opened Los Angeles gallery, Fernberger. The exhibition, titled “Jumpin’ at The Woodside,” marks Wittenberg’s first solo show in Los Angeles and the debut of her new body of landscape works.

    Building from her plein-air studies, Wittenberg’s paintings utilize broad and gestural brushstrokes that render her landscapes less Courbet in style than Sérusier or Vuillard. In place of visual depth, Wittenberg’s works prioritize movement—of both the forms she depicts and of the viewer’s eye. In Strawberry Moon (2023)—a painting of two trees flocking the moon and its reflection on water—the sloping branches of the trees guide your gaze inwards towards both the moon and the leaves of one another. Yet their trunks, which lean into the canvas’s corners, pull your eye upwards and outwards, letting you imagine them growing out of the frame.

    Nicole Wittenberg, Midsummer Morning 2, 2023. Courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

    The (often) lack of a singular punctum combined with the expressive, abstracted forms forces viewers to take in the whole expanse of the painting and give greater appreciation to Wittenberg’s palette. Her combination of deep browns, greens, and blues is contrasted with the bright orange that emanates from beneath each layer. Midsummer Morning 2 (2023) features two trees, one in the foreground and one in the background, set against a flowered landscape. Like Strawberry Moon, the trees of Midsummer Morning 2 pull the viewer through the painting, the background one growing diagonally until it appears to merge into the other. A blackened sky gives the painting a foreboding effect, not so much gloomy or sinister than anticipatory. Peeping through the gaps in the brushstrokes is a vibrant, neon orange—a color Wittenberg uses frequently as a wash in her painting’s backgrounds. The effect gives her works a temporal ambiguity (though often clarified in her titles).

    Nicole Wittenberg, Pieces 2, 2024. Courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

    While the orange is less apparent in Pieces 2 (2024), Wittenberg is still able to imbue the painting with a fleeting sense of time by relying on wide, seeping shapes. Abstracted forms flow across the canvas, forming a languid and indistinguishable landscape of blues, purples and pinks, that appear to be either sky, water or something entirely different.

    As Fernberger’s inaugural show, Wittenberg’s exhibition is a vivid and exciting tease at what’s to come for both the artist and the gallery.

    Nicole Wittenberg: Jumpin’ at the Woodside
    Fernberger Gallery
    747 N Western Avenue
    Los Angeles, CA 90029

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: “Foundations” at Carlye Packer

    GALLERY ROUNDS: “Foundations”
    at Carlye Packer

    Passing through the doors of Carlye Packer brings you face-to-face with Nancy Pelosi. Dressed in a bright blue blazer, mask tight across her face and her right hand grasped around a gavel she has thrust in the air, Pelosi—or rather her likeness—is set center within the mixed media work hung on the entrance wall. Edging in from the bottom and top of the frame are the red and white stripes of flags, and jutting in from the corner is the figure of a woman rendered softly à la classical sculpture. Strewn across the entire piece are brownish blobs, marks that look as though someone soaked a rag in oil and left it on the work’s surface.

    The piece, Ross Edward Doyle’s Go East! (2023), is the entry point to the group show “Foundations,” conceived by guest curator Jason Roussos. The exhibition features Doyle, Sharif Farrag, Magdalena Frimkess, Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Grant Levy-Lucero, Acacia Marable, Serling Ruby and Marley White—a diverse roster of artists of varying backgrounds, materials, career points and themes, yet unified by their respective practices’ nuanced takes on what is “the sculptural.” Although Doyle’s Go East! is a two-dimensional work within an exhibition of three-dimensional art, it ties in seamlessly. Each figure and mark on its surface is translucent, allowing viewers to fall into the depths of Doyle’s piece as they sort through the washed out layers built upon one another, imbuing it with a unique dimensionality. The inclusion of Doyle’s art lends credence to the show being a survey of the multi-faceted ways sculpture is considered and created today.

    Ross Edward Doyle, Go East!, 2023. Photo: Evan Walsh. Courtesy of Carlye Packer.

    In the corner of the gallery sits White’s sculpture, A father is just a child, he sits at the head of the table (2022). Modeled after the ubiquitous, straight-back kitchen chair (think IKEA), it is transformed into a staggering 8 feet tall with a curved seat, making it impossible to sit on without sliding off onto the cement below. Beneath one of the front legs is a true-to-size bronze fig, delicately crushed on one side as it bears the weight of the chair. White’s work toes the line of utility and sculpture as it mixes the rudimentary and (questionably) functional chair with the “fine art” of casting. The chair’s curved spine gives it the appearance that at any moment the fragile frame could topple over and crash, thus playing with the common (mis)conception of sculptures being sturdy.

    Marley White, A father is just a child, he sits at the head of the table, 2022. Photo: Evan Walsh. Courtesy of Carlye Packer.

    Hung alone on a wall facing the other objects in the exhibition is Ruby’s fanged mouth soft sculpture, Vampire 125 (2023),  swathed in bright orange and camo fabric, mouth agape and with blood-red droplets hanging from the fangs. The sculpture itself is an obvious play on Claes Oldenburg’s infamous inversion of the sculpture medium, but because of its placement in the gallery, you can almost imagine it devouring the other artworks on display—a comical nod to Ruby’s practice of digesting mediums and materials and reworking them.

    The other artists in the show play with the medium in similar ways: Desir’s and Marable’s works combine sculpture with play; Farrag, Frimkess and Levy-Lucero use scale, form and iconography to question what is “craft” and what is a “fine art.” The eclecticism of the show works in Rousso’s favor as the artworks—individually and collectively—interrogate what it means to be sculptural, and lay down the beginnings of a new foundation for the medium.

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Ken Taylor Reynaga at The Mistake Room

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Ken Taylor Reynaga
    at The Mistake Room

    Ken Taylor Reynaga’s exhibition, “A Mano,” features a wide array of paintings and ceramics that speak to the personal and shared experience of cultural duality, and interrogate the belief that being multicultural places one in an identity limbo. Using his own experience being Mexican American, Taylor Reynaga’s works eschew realism in favor of abstracted—at times surreal—everyday scenes that appear every bit as personal as they are universal.

    The languid pastoral Hemitite Mountain Range (2021) is, arguably, the most emblematic of Taylor Reynaga’s aesthetic style. The painting features a black road weaving through vibrant, sunset-colored mountains backed by a pastel blue and pink sky within which floats a large white cowboy hat. Like Magritte’s The Son of Man (1968) or Time Transfixed (1938), the hat hovering mid-air appears like an out of place intrusion (even more due to the hat’s uncanny resemblance to UFOs). Yet the cowboy hat also seems to blend perfectly into the environment, like at any moment it could plop atop the mountain’s peak as if that were natural.

    A symbol of vaqueros and cowboys alike, the cowboy hat plays a recurring role in Taylor Reynaga’s work. The small painting Blue Man’s Heart (2020) depicts a blue colored man standing before a red wall, his face obscured by his cowboy hat and an anatomical black heart on his chest. The bright red and blue play with one another; each color competing for attention while also heightening the other’s brilliance. Their only converging point is the small purple shadow the man casts against the wall. It’s a highly emotional painting that plays into the trope of “the lonesome cowboy” to depict isolation and despair. With the hat in mind, one could assume Blue Man’s Heart to be a metaphor for being Latinx in the United States. However, Taylor Reynaga’s ability to render a moment simultaneously specific and universal allows the painting, and the exhibition, to be a touching off point for how we consider intersectional identities.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Paul Paiement at Tufenkian Fine Arts

    Paul Paiement
    at Tufenkian Fine Arts

    Painting is, quite possibly, my least favorite visual medium. I’m not being disdainful, far from it—it’s simply that I gravitate toward mediums that are more immersive. That said, I was curious to see Paul Paiement’s recent exhibition, “Nexus,” as he created many of these paintings during a 2022 residency in the unincorporated community of Neskowin, Oregon. I was drawn to it because most of my childhood summers were spent in the little town of Otis, a mere nine miles down the 101; it is a landscape I’m wholly intertwined with. So, despite my lack of zeal for the medium, I went to Paiement’s show to see if he too found himself enchanted with the land.

    Entering the gallery, I quickly realized that although Paiement created many of his landscape series in Neskowin, not every painting depicts that locality. Some of the works are references to views he’s seen elsewhere, such as the sunlit woods of Custer, South Dakota, and the yellowed range of Dixon, Montana. The works are exquisitely detailed—Mannerist in style—rendered in richly vibrant colors. Paiement’s process is a nuanced take on plein-air; he layers cut plexiglass atop his landscapes in patterns akin to modernist architecture. The works are positioned as a seamless blend of the man-made and the natural, a subversion of the trope that man is destroying nature. While the idea is laudable, the paintings didn’t read as a positive reconciliation, but rather as a collision.     

    Paul Paiement, Salmon River Marsh, 2, Oregon, 2022. Courtesy of Tufenkian Fine Arts.

    This conflict is exemplified by the piece Chamberlain, South Dakota (2016). Paiement’s intricate landscape features an open field with a path running through it, flanked on the left by a grassy knoll, and on the right by an endless expanse of field. Splicing the painting horizontally is a sheet of plexiglass cut like a blueprint for a contemporary cabin. The overlay mirrors the landscape beneath it; the slope of the hill becomes the slant of a roof, the rolling fields become floor levels. The effect is not the subtle melding of organic and artificial—it’s jarring. The building Paiement depicts is a sleek and seemingly high-end cabin that appears to smother the landscape. The paint and plexiglass act in sharp contrast to one another, making it impossible to view the overlay as anything but an unwanted intrusion on the bucolic scene.          

    Although the show fell short of fully visualizing the reconciliation it aspired to, there were a couple of paintings that were more successful: those of Neskowin. Salmon River Marsh 2, Oregon (2022) portrays the salt marshes found by a turnoff from Highway 101. In the foreground is a single arching tree, and in the background the hills of Cascade Head. This too features an overlay shaped like a cabin, but unlike Paiement’s other pieces, it is made from painted plywood so that the landscape flows smoothly—hardly a man-made encroachment at all. Moreover, these Neskowin works come closest to capturing the harmony Paiement envisioned, and, while I’m certainly partial to the scenes, they made me realize I may have been overlooking some of the possibilities of painting. Maybe it’s not my least favorite medium after all. 

  • PICK OF THE WEEK: Bambou Gili at Night Gallery

    PICK OF THE WEEK: Bambou Gili
    at Night Gallery

    Taking its name from The Chick’s 1999 song “Goodbye Earl,” Bambou Gili’s solo Night Gallery exhibition is a beautiful, yet ominous, exploration of the power and potential of womanhood and female friendship. The exhibition loosely follows the song—the story of Mary Anne and Wanda, high school best friends whose paths diverge following graduation, only to reunite to off Wanda’s abusive husband, the titular “Earl.”

    While The Chick’s song is quick paced and upbeat, Gili’s visual interpretation is strikingly different. The show begins with a large, somber painting of two young women—Mary Anne and Wanda—dressed in pastel blue and pink dresses, holding one another beneath a banner that reads “Class of 1999.” The muted colors and hauntingly blank stares of the women are discomforting, making the painting eerily reminiscent of the aged, yellow snapshots found tucked in drawers at antique stores.

    Bambou Gili, Earl’s Descent, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.

    This painting is the only one in the exhibition that casts Mary Anne and Wanda in this innocent, nearly pitiful light. In other paintings, such as Goodfellas (2022), Gili’s protagonists are expressive and active, their faces radiating power and revenge rather than passivity. At times, the figures appearing entirely different from preceding paintings, making Mary Anne and Wanda placeholders for any woman.  The scenes vary from direct references to the song to moments that capture the various obstacles women face today.

    The show appears to reach a crescendo with Earl’s Descent (2022), a large painting that shows a body falling to the bottom of a richly blue lake. But it’s the smaller-scaled painting, Jam Stand (2023), that marks the climactic end to Gili’s exhibition. Gili paints the women in a soft, warm light that mirrors the serene landscape they’re cast in. Though the women appear relaxed, there’s a look in their faces that make clear they’re not going back to the innocence captured as they stood beneath that “Class of 1999” banner. Gili’s work transforms Mary Anne and Wanda into more than simply characters from a ’90s ballad, she makes them an example of women do what they need to survive: As the song goes: They sell Tennessee ham and strawberry jam / And they don’t lose any sleep at night / ‘Cause Earl had to die.

  • PICK OF THE WEEK: Vanessa Prager at Diane Rosenstein

    PICK OF THE WEEK: Vanessa Prager
    at Diane Rosenstein

    Richly colored, blossoming pseudo-portraits comprise Vanessa Prager’s solo exhibition titled “Portraits” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Each painting depicts a bloom of vibrant flowers sprouting from the necks of the (assumedly) human subjects. Prager’s works are a nod to the classicism and the tradition of still lifes, but are imbued with her own take on the transitory nature of identity and humanity.

    Varying in size from the minute to the massive, the works blend the human and the floral in tantalizing reflections on metamorphosis, both literally and figuratively. Each painting brings to mind Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action, which recognizes that “bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties; they are material discursive phenomena.” “Portraits” visualizes this potential for hybridity and interconnectivity as the flowers stretch to the edges of the canvases, teasing the possibility of thriving out and across the gallery, growing into one another and the viewer.

    Diane Rosenstein Gallery
    831 N. Highland Avenue
    Los Angeles, CA 90038
    On view through April 1, 2023

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: James Cherry at NOON Projects

    GALLERY ROUNDS: James Cherry
    at NOON Projects

    The nuance of intimacy is the focal point of James Cherry’s solo exhibition at NOON Projects. Entitled “Fraternal”—a nod to both Cherry being a twin and to relationships amongst men—the exhibition presents as an exploration of relationships, specifically queer ones, and how we find otherness, likeness and kinship in their complexities. 

    Part of the exhibition consists of several amorphous lamps Cherry made using found materials and coats of resin. From afar, the lamps appear pristinely refined, but up close their artifice of high design gives way to contours made by the push and pull of Cherry’s hand. At times elongated and at times bulbous, the lamps are reminiscent of the gestural materiality of Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptures (an artist who similarly played on the “other” to depict kinship). The curves and lines of each lamp casts a subdued glow that emanates throughout the exhibition and seems to echo the softness of the drawings that accompany them.

    The walls of the gallery are hung with large, gesso covered panels marked with graphite. Cherry draws with fine strokes that capture movement in a way that echoes throughout the gallery room. Each drawing seems to capture a fleeting moment—glimmering ripples around someone floating topless in the water, the moment of a four-way kiss, dogs chasing one another in the hazy sun—moments frozen in a single scene that flickers across the mind. 

    Though each scene is taken from memories recorded in Cherry’s journal, they’re hardly voyeuristic. Rather, these private moments appear inviting, as if we too have felt them, or someday could.     

     

     

    James Cherry: “Fraternal”
    On view through February 11, 2023
    NOON Projects

       

     

     

     

     

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Joan Didion: “What She Means” at The Hammer Museum

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Joan Didion: “What She Means”
    at The Hammer Museum

    In the late winter of 2019, I became enamored with Joan Didion. I and my then partner were driving the backroads of Tennessee and North Carolina as a leg of a cross country move from Portland to Philadelphia. Somewhere along our trip I picked up a copy of South and West—Didion’s notes on a road trip through the south—looking to find a sliver of kinship or a new perspective as I traveled East and North. I never did have the knack for the journaling—or rather, reflecting—that Didion did, but as I came across dilapidated churches with overgrown gravestones, hidden bars in dry counties that served whiskey in mouthwash cups, and the view from our camping spot overlooking the valleys of Gatlinburg (a view so idyllic I still question its reality), I did my best to take in the images as I thought she would: split seconds in the ceaseless film that could in some way, someday, explain something to me of life.

    Andy Warhol, Reel of 77 (Four Stars) (“Sunset”), 1967. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

    Explanations, or gestures towards them, are intrinsic to Didion’s oeuvre. She has built a career based on noticing, reflecting and attempting to form a narrative—if not for her reader than for herself. As she wrote in her 1979 book The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience” (The White Album, 11). For Didion, the seemingly singular temporal moment has become expansive, fleeting moments are forever engrained in the writer’s mind and pen.

    Hilton Als’ exhibition “Joan Didion: What She Means” is a grasp towards Didion’s intentions, however ambiguous they can seem. The exhibition, separated into three large rooms, appears to take Didion as a moment of departure. Rather than creating an exhibition that functions as a reflection of her—”exhibitions as portraits” as Als calls them, referencing his past shows on Toni Morrison and James Baldwin—”What She Means” acts as a jumping off point. The layout of the exhibition is linear, tracing her oeuvre from her works on the early West, to the infamous helter-skelter of the 1960s, to her soul crushing yet elating works on death and grief. These blips in Didion’s—and America’s— history function almost as vignettes; moments that flow into the mind and leave traces that imply a future. The exhibition carries a whiff in the air; a moment amongst many.

    “Joan Didion: What She Means,” installation view, 2022-2023. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

    Whether this whiff is accessible  to everyone is the question. In recent years, Didion has been called out for her presumed elitist and whitewashed perspective. I have neither the expertise nor the time to debate the merits of these claims, but I can say so much: The exhibition, however accurate a representation of Didion it may be, is not for the lay person. To walk through it even with an intensive dive into Didion’s works requires interrogation and self- reflection. Within the era specific rooms, the works adorning the walls have no explicit linear arrangement. The pieces adorning the walls (a mix of paintings, photographs, archival materials and the like) are presented alone or at times juxtaposed against a snippet from a Didion text that may or may not provide the unfamiliar with clarity amidst what at moments feels hurried and oddly-placed. How are we supposed to accept and appreciate the appearance of Betye Saar’s Mystic Chart for the Unemployed without considering Didion’s discussion of the fatalism of the 1960s? What good is a side by side of Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Spirit Brother and footage of Patty Hearst and the S.L.A. without being familiar with The White Album?

    Als’ curative style is reflective of Didion, yet at points it falls short. We lose touch of the mind behind the media, the freezer of the phantasmagoria that is the exhibition. Is the show still worthwhile? Undoubtedly. If Didion’s legacy means anything, it’s to note where we are and then wait a while.

     

     

  • OUTSIDE LA: Will Rawls Adams & Ollman

    OUTSIDE LA: Will Rawls
    Adams & Ollman

    Will Rawls’ solo exhibition, “Amphigory,” at Adams & Ollman in Portland, OR binds a weightless density to a lexicon of its own creation. Multi-panel installations of black & white abstract prints on paper line the three walls of the gallery space, as well as the smaller exhibition space in the back. The word amphigory itself implies a discordant tone, a nonsense verse that might seem to have a deeper, latent meaning but ultimately is revealed to be meaningless. Given this fixed precept, the intentionally blurred and glitching letters within each frame – a scattered “CA” or “IV” or “IFE” – bear little grammatical context. Yet, the subtle semantics of the visual pieces become apparent as a common narrative is deciphered as the works are observed not individually but instead assembled as a collective whole. 

    The phrases “Woops! Game Over”, “The Thing About Life” and “You Can’t Escape Alive” take shape upon a more concentrated consideration of the temporal logistics of each hanging print. What at first appears to be nonchalance, a disavowal of rationality, flows more eloquently when read traditionally left to right, top to bottom. Borrowed from the artist’s father’s vocabulary, the sentences formed evoke a more personal resonance. “Amphigory“ serves as a natural extension of Rawls’ creative practice spanning performance, video, text and installation, wherein the artist’s mark is visibly traced into each pixelated and distorted letter. A mark is extended, scraped across the paper, or, in other instances, incomplete, leaving the moment of signification in flux. Each of those sites of expression are imbued with the artist’s fascination with language as a locus for discourse, allowing words to morph, become muddled, and open new avenues of translation. 

    Will Rawls, “Amphigory” exhibition installation view, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and Adams & Ollman.

    In this vein, Rawls’ wordplay allows for a multi-layered meaning to grace the space of the gallery. The only four unframed works present in the space are hung higher, above the central framed statements and slightly apart from the cohesive suite of script. How I discern these outliers is something akin to shapeshifters – linguistic glyphs that can serve as either punctuation or as unique morphemes to build new units of conversation. 

    01 is the sole figural element within this exhibition, located in the backroom of Adams & Ollman alongside the phrases “Woops!” and “Game Over”. Sculpted of foam, resin, epoxy, electrical conduit tubing, LED lights, acrylic paint, wood, and woodstain this lifesize likeness is a literal representation of “a body of text”. The almost humanoid sculptural stands on a wooden base, lit from within in one “hand” and in the head-space of the figure while appearing almost to bend back on itself in a concave, unnatural manner. The structural composition of this piece toys with similar qualities employed with the two dimensional works, continuing the rhetoric around abstraction and free-form interpretation. If a body can confuse analysis under these circumstances, what is to be said of concrete, printed matter?

  • PICK OF THE WEEK: Rebecca Morris Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

    PICK OF THE WEEK: Rebecca Morris
    Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

    The Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris is an obsessive abstractionist. The grid serves as her compositional playground where shapes and colors frolic and meander. The 21-year survey exhibition “Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art presents a dynamic group of rigorous large-scale paintings that reveal the artist’s longstanding commitment to abstraction. Morris’s work has always resisted definition and categorization–a quality I appreciate and struggle with as I try to find adequate words to describe her strange multivalent paintings. There is, however, one consistency in her work–the grid motif. Weird shapes in spray paint and globs of oil squirm in and around these taut borders. This kind of painting is awkward, even ugly at times, in a way that continues to enthrall me. Upon leaving the gallery, the artist’s words ABSTRACTION FOREVER! (from her famous 1994 manifesto) ring in my ears.

    Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
    1717 E 7th Street
    Los Angeles, CA 90021
    On view through January 15, 2023

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: June Edmonds Riverside Art Museum

    GALLERY ROUNDS: June Edmonds
    Riverside Art Museum

    The spirograph galaxy of Rhythmic Inquisitions, an exhibition of works by June Edmonds at the Riverside Art Museum, unmercifully hypnotizes.  Expanding boundaries, this 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient injects Aretha Franklin’s Respect (1967) into Abstract Expressionism. The guest curator, Lisa Henry, envisioned acknowledging Edmonds as being “part of the tradition of Black abstraction.” Representative of Edmonds’ four phases, these works include late 1990s black and white drawings, smaller mixed media expressions, her signature Energy Wheel paintings and large-scale interpretations on canvas.

    Standing on the shoulders of Beauford Delaney, Norman Lewis and Alma Thomas with unwavering intentionality, Edmonds swirls analogous hues and complementary compositions in the Untitled work that is representative of her visceral color wheel paintings; these psychedelic rainbow rays appear as if clocking forward and backwards simultaneously.   The chromaticity demonstrated correlates with the “School of AFRICOBRA” (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) whose philosophy of artmaking testified to the preeminence of Cool Ade Colors–brightness, intensity, harmony–as well as clothing worn by Black people throughout the diaspora.  In fact, such diverse application of paint implicitly interrogates the marginalizing tendencies   of the canon with its near-sighted gatekeepers who have traditionally excluded women–especially those of color.

    June Edmonds, “Know Thyself (Slippin’),” 2015.

    In Know Thyself-Slippin (2015), purple oil paint strokes drip like grape taffy tidal waves.  I can almost see Jackson Pollock stepping back with his head swiveling with envy checking this out!  Moreover, the repetitive meticulous violet tints are reminiscent of Lunar Surface (1970) by Alma Thomas. A second reading kidnaps the eyes on an upward curve as if surfing on a plum colored roller-coaster.

    Finally, there is Only a Gardener (2021) with its earthtones and complementary curves ascending and extending an invitation to taste with eyes and hear with soul. Coinciding with the title are suggestive half shapes of seed and leaf implying life, growth and maturity that is a long time coming like Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come (1964).

    Ultimately, Rhythmic Inquisitions inspires the courage of spiritual investigation inwardly; it encourages healing of life -soil where unprocessed memories traumatize, and unquestioned paradigms divide.

    Rhythmic Inquisitions
    Riverside Art Museum
    August 27 to November 27, 2022
    3425 Mission Inn Avenue
    Riverside, CA 92501

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Abe Odedina Diane Rosenstein Gallery

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Abe Odedina
    Diane Rosenstein Gallery

    Abe Odedina’s “You Give Me Fever” embodies the spirit of a universal human emotion: desire. In his Los Angeles solo debut on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, the architect-turned-painter considers desire with a kaleidoscopic gaze, depicting deep-seated longings for freedom, for triumph and for connection. The ambitious collection of nineteen acrylic paintings on plywood panels invokes influences ranging from Yoruba to Greek mythologies in an effort to mine the sublimity of longing. Its manifold symbolism suspends the exhibition just above time and space, implying the timeless universality of its insights.

    Odedina’s subjects are often witnessed in their solitude. Some we find contemplating the open road, others seeking the affection of a lover. Yet, despite the diversity of their circumstances, recurrent imagery of water, birds, butterflies and a shared landscape suggest that they are actually occupying the same affective space, embodying different aspects of the very same feeling.

    Abe Odedina, “You Give Me Fever,” 2022.

    In my personal favorites, High Roller AM (2022) and High Roller PM (2022), mirror images of a young child encapsulate the best of desire. Standing confidently against the exhibition’s expansive oceanic frontier, they appear optimistic about the path ahead. Here, desire seems to represent a space of boundless possibility. On the coast of the same body of water, the figures in  Triumphal Arch (2022) co-create a desirous realm of loving veneration and euphoric surrender. And in the exhibition’s titular work, You Give Me Fever (2022), viewers are invited into an intimate moment of stillness between two people in bed. They are physically close, and yet, they strike me as profoundly wistful, their gazes evading one another. Situating these polarities within one aesthetic landscape, Odedina reminds viewers that desire is complex terrain imbued with both elation and melancholy–a universe unto itself.

    The show’s emotional acuity is facilitated by Odedina’s skillful use of color and layering. Lively hues layered atop plywood panels that are first covered in black acrylic paint undergird the artist’s prismatic outlook. From underneath his subjects’ otherwise vibrant exteriors, resounding shadows peek through. Balancing these many dimensions of light and shadow in an impressive act of equilibrium, Odedina positions each manifestation of desire as an indispensable expression of human experience.

     

    Abe Odedina
    You Give Me Fever
    On view through October 29, 2022
    Diane Rosenstein Gallery

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Caleb Stein ROSEGALLERY

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Caleb Stein
    ROSEGALLERY

    And we’re back… back to communing for art’s sake. If you’re looking for something intimate and off the trodden path, there’s Caleb Stein’s exhibition “Down by the Hudson.” It’s a focused collection of subdued, low-contrast, black-and-white photographs featuring water in nearly every shot. Reflected light is always at play, mirroring and distorting the subjects. The photos present a pseudo-timelessness, as though these shots could have been taken last century, last year, yesterday, or tomorrow. There are no dateable electronics. Boys wrestle with each other. Girls lounge along a creek bank in plain swimsuits. A teen boy bathes himself; his sudsy, somewhat chubby torso carefully directed into a Madonna-like tranquility. Given the singular setting, it’s as if we’re invited into an exclusive hideaway of “rushed footsteps” and “subsequent splash” (or so claims the press release). Without context, it could be mistaken as an unvarnished space that the artist happened upon. But no—the artist admitted during opening-weekend conversations that the photos were mostly choreographed. Stein’s relationship with the subjects took years to cultivate and each image took hours to individually generate.

    Caleb Stein, “MATTHEW & ODEN.” Image courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY.

    However, not all were so meticulously crafted. The photo entitled SHANJAY & SHERIKA was almost cut from the exhibition because it was shot happenstance. It’s my favorite piece, too. The shot is a closeup of a Black teen couple submerged up to their shoulders. The woman wraps herself around the man, sideways practically. Is this an embrace? Is she guarding him? Or are they a unit that’s guarding the creek from outsiders? The man, kept within her pomerium, appears perfectly tragic. They gaze at us with this quixotic look. Maybe haughty disdain verging on prideful scorn? Is this their earnest reaction to the invasion of an emergent artist, one ostensibly caucasian and London-born? Or has Stein molded them into his likeness, a less egalitarian world where conferred subjects sit (or in this case, tread water) with the demeanor of a court painting? There’s so much to consider when a London-born artist showcases Black and white subjects in America; more than can fit in one review. Especially when the subjects appear so graceful and at ease. Given our situation, this is clearly fantasy. Yet, this is why Shanjay and Sherika hold the key to the exhibition. They feel as if they too are raising their own suspicions about the placid nature of the many staged photos surrounding them.

    ROSEGALLERY
    Bergamot Station Arts Center
    2525 Michigan Avenue, B-7
    Santa Monica, CA 90404
    On view through October 29, 2022

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Olivia Hill at Bel Ami

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Olivia Hill
    at Bel Ami

    Since I first saw Olivia Hill’s solo exhibition “Strike-Slip” at Bel Ami, I’ve found myself returning to one work in particular—one of the smallest in the show, a sunset-hued rendering of sandy terrain. Entitled Tire Mark in Yucca Valley 34°12’27.9″N 116°26’17.2″W (2022), this purple-flecked painting is emblematic of the elusive allure underlying Hill’s work, illustrating how an uncanny creation can come from human interference in nature.

    Olivia Hill, Tire Mark in Yucca Valley 34°12’27.9″N 116°26’17.2″W, 2022. Photo by Evan Bedford. Image courtesy of the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles.

    Working from her own photos and stills from Google Earth, Hill’s landscapes imply an indexicality that, on closer inspection, is fabrication. Arriving home after Hill’s opening I typed the coordinates listed in the title into Google Earth and found my screen honing in on a beige patch in the Yucca Valley. From afar, the aerial image presents a clear, purportedly exact view of the expansive desert with the grid-style roads that occasionally cut through. But as I zoomed in the details began to fade, giving way to a loosely muddled landscape where the “grid-style roads” are nothing more than the haphazard treads of bygone cars. I tried to zoom in as close as I could to recreate what Hill saw, but at this proximity the terrain below my cursor was a blur and the sparse shrubbery and horizon line little more than pixelated blobs. Though Hill cites a specific place when painting her landscapes, it is clear the referent is not exact. Her beautiful landscapes are an amalgamation of fact and fabrication.

    Olivia Hill, Cave Painting, Bronson Caves 34°07’17.4″N 118°18’51.9″W, 2022. Photo by Evan Bedford. Image courtesy of the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles.

    The combination of reality and imagination at play in Hill’s paintings are a nod to the surreal landscape that is greater Los Angeles. As a city memorialized through Hollywood, images have become ingrained in our collective memory so thoroughly that the cityscape can be called to the mind even by those who have never been. Hill’s exhibition points out both the underlying artifice of these immortal images, such as her piece Cave Painting, Bronson Caves 34°07’17.4″N 118°18’51.9″W. Without looking at the title, it would be easy to read this painting as a classic, somewhat impressionist-style painting of a foreboding cliff face and cave entrance. However, the title reveals that this cave is neither mundane nor natural but made by men blasting their way through the canyons of Los Angeles to create a set for Hollywood Westerns and the infamous entrance to Batman’s cave in the 1960s show. Stylistically, Hill mirrors the illusion of the Los Angeles landscape by mixing materials and brush strokes, creating a piece that, from afar, appears cohesive, yet—like the Google sources she references—come apart when seen up close, leaving your eyes to fill in the details.

    Hill is an undeniably talented painter and one whose work I look forward to watching progress. An exemplary exhibition, the uncanny landscapes of “Strike-Slip” linger in you long after you’ve seen them, seeping into your own memory of Los Angeles.

    Olivia Hil
    Strike-Slip
    Bel Ami, Los Angeles
    July 23 – September 17, 2022
    belami.info

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Life By Design Gresham Gallery at San Bernardino Valley College

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Life By Design
    Gresham Gallery at San Bernardino Valley College

    In a planet crowded with polarizing paradigms, is it possible to contribute aesthetically to larger conversations about culture and existence? Life by Design, a group show currently at the Gresham Gallery at San Bernardino Valley College (SBVC), masterfully interrogates this possibility. Life by Design curator and SBVC art instructor C. Ian White democratizes access to contemporary gallery and museum practice. The son of Charles White—one of the 20th century’s foremost and prolific figurative art masters— curator White’s curatorial vision assembles a collage of internationally accomplished blue-chip artists from the previous century into a cohesive visual statement relevant for our current period.

    Life by Design installation view, 2022. Courtesy of Gresham Gallery at SBVC.

    Prescient issues such as isolation, emptiness, and environmental anxiety are addressed in three-dimensional works by Kirsten Stingle Stephen Braun and Seiji Kunishima. Relatedly, two-dimensional works by Thelma Johnson Street, Romare Bearden, Kerry James Marshall, Andy Warhol and Ben Sakoguchi seep messages about culture, commodification, and consumerism.

    Two works in particular hit the curatorial bullseye. First, is Virgil Abloh’s Receipt Rug, IKEA Collaboration (2019). Abloh’s vanilla colored textile work addresses the hegemonic belief systems exerted by the capitalistic ruling class over what it truly means to furnish a space. His piece asks how a first-world, filthy rich nation can allow rampant houselessness to flourish so much it is nearly a country within a country — the wealthy elite being a sovereign body engaged in economic voyeurism of the so-called have-nots.

    Life by Design installation view, 2022. Courtesy of Gresham Gallery at SBVC.

    The second stand-out work is Shepherd Fairey’s Make Art Not War (2017), which mirrors the message of Edwin Starr’s 1970 Motown hit song War. A bold lithograph on paper, Fairey’s Make Art Not War upsets the Western imperialistic narrative popularized through disinformation campaigns. By celebrating the creation of art Fairey empowers the unfiltered and unplugged.

    Ultimately, Life by Design asks to be consumed by those who in the, words of saxophone great Charlie Parker, “Hear with their eyes and see with their ears.”

     

    Life by Design
    Gresham Gallery at San Bernadino Valley College
    April 11, 2022 – July 28, 2022
    701 South Mt. Vernon Avenue
    San Bernadino, CA 92410