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Tag: Bel Ami
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J. Parker Valentine
at Bel AmiThe one large abstract drawing here, wedged precisely in between the ceiling and floor, explores a relationship between geometric form and explorative mark-making. The light touch is enticing, but the sketchy linework feels too beholden to the diagonal lines and ovals as if loosely re-tracing them. The sculpture suffers a similar fate. Lassos dyed in subtle colors are arranged on a screen-like steel armature — letting the curves fall where they may. These, too, are torn between the physicality of their material and their careful presentation. The natural dynamism of
lassos happen in three dimensions—in two, they are just ropes. -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Olivia Hill
at Bel AmiSince 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 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: CFGNY
Bel AmiArchitectural remnants of cardboard and porcelain stand scattered across Bel Ami gallery, like elegant queer ruins. “Import Imprint”, curated by Talia Heiman, is CFGNY’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles. Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kristen Kilponen and Tin Nguyen form the New York-based collective known as Concept Foreign Garments New York (CFGNY), sometimes referred to as Cute Fucking Gay New York. The exhibition is a culmination of the group’s ongoing interest in US consumer culture and reproduction, as it relates to Asian American identity, or what they refer to as “bootleg identity.”
Fragments of familiar household objects such as vases, clothing, and toys sit precariously on inoperable ledges and suspended from the ceiling – devoid of their original function. The porcelain casts appear inverted and mutilated, mass-produced yet unique. The object’s fissures and seams, held together by welded steel braces, serve as a metaphor for fractured and imaginative Asian Diasporic identity. These metamorphic objects are set against wallpaper by Asher Brown Durand, which depicts a bucolic colonial-era landscape painting reproduced from pixelated images found online. This play between past and present is a purposeful nod to the post-WWII era in the US, which saw the popularization of porcelain goods in American homes. Porcelain homeware, appropriated from Asia, became mass-produced symbols of modern American sophistication. CFGNY’s focus on this refined earthenware speaks to a larger conversation about the history of material culture and global trade across the Pacific. Porcelain itself becomes the metaphor for how these economic and political factors impact modes of identity formation. These are “bootleg identities,” which perpetually morph and expand, as they furiously metabolize and transform in the face of global exchange. CFGNY presents imagined archaeological remnants that softly whisper stories of diasporic origins and the pull of America’s amalgamated culture.
Bel Ami
709 N. Hill Street #105
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through May 21, 2022 -
Emblazoned World — Bel Ami
Where “Everything Is Illuminated” — Lucy Bull & friends find the light in the dust.It was really a break from a break from a break from a longer art project (which is what art features turn into after they’ve been festering and metastasizing for more than a month or two) that brought me out to Bel Ami – a gallery I’d never been to located in the same Chinatown building that houses the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive—next door in fact, which may or may not have had something to do with the scrum my pal and I walked into for what was ostensibly the opening of a show of (mostly) paintings curated by the artist, Lucy Bull (herself a formidable painter)—who I was almost surprised hadn’t included herself—she would have been in good company.
Lee Mullican, Untitled (‘marble’ drawing, c. 1969) oil pastel on paper And yet of course even from what little I know of Lucy Bull’s work, I sort of understand. This isn’t simply an “Emblazoned World” (the title she gives to the exhibition, taken from the Lee Mullican “marble drawing” (really a painting—with yet another in a similar vein on view here), it’s really more of a submerged world—off the deep end and full-fathom-five, where Bull’s own work ranges into a more dispassionate, almost discursive range. But we see easily just how these works sank their hooks into her imagination. (There’s a personal angle, too: Bull came to know Mullican’s son, artist Matt Mullican; and through him and his father’s estate, Mullican’s widow, the artist Luchita Hurtado.)
Mullican’s work also has a radiance—not simply the ‘marble drawings’, but also a more classically rendered canvas exhibited here, Premier Mirage (1949), with its massed and swirling ridges and striations in yellows, grassy greens and russet hues—converging worlds of suspended geometries, vessels and biomorphic shapes suggestive of arcane rituals and animal silhouettes, from a period of Mullican’s work that continued through the 1950s and well into the 1960s. Mullican does not ignore shape in the ‘marble’ paintings and drawings; they alternately morph and undulate—as they do here in a more dual-chromatic vibrational field with blues and violets floating in a field of feathery green striations (1969)—bodies within bodies of cellular color; or fill the surface with plaited and patterned beadwork surfaces as if for an ornamented textile (Emblazoned World).
Bull also shows one of Luchita Hurtado’s (untitled) “moth light” paintings (from 1975)—which she reports were calculated to “attract moths.” Whether or not they succeeded, they draw the viewer in almost magnetically—a trench of luminosity with a white square at its center carved out of a dense grid of umber-browns and burnt-sienna. It’s a 50-year jump from Mullican’s ‘emblazoned marbles’ to Kinke Kooi’s seemingly beaded, cushiony paintings on paper with collage, equally ‘emblazoned’ and submerged—as if the collaged ‘angel’ in one holds a threatened cloister tower in place (Support, 2016), Q-tips and painted jonquil pressed into fleshy jewel cases for Visit 3 (2019); yet they might float comfortably side-by-side. E’wao Kagoshima’s demi-mondaines seem to have evolved from other worlds altogether, whether a Shibuya schoolgirl’s dream or a spider’s web in hell (yet retaining the souvenirs of this one—the pencils attached to Distortion One’s (2015) frame originating anywhere from the Dixon Ticonderoga factory to New York’s Central Park).
E’wao Kagoshima, Distortion One (2015) acrylic on paper, wooden frame and pencils There is nothing in the show that doesn’t compel fascination. But perhaps most fascinating (no surprise that Bull singles it out for her statement) is Eugene von Bruenchenhein’s otherworldly oil-on-masonite panel from 1957, a kind of tempest of bristling, spined and segmented biomorphic forms that seem to float up out of a churning chasm of deep blue and luminous ambers and yellows. Redon couldn’t have painted this work, but he would have understood it. Yet there is an energy and dynamism that belongs to von Bruenchenhein alone. Von Bruenchenhein was featured in the 2018 Outliers and American Vanguard show (that was at LACMA)—but it seems almost absurd to attach such a label to work this compelling, whatever the eccentricities of the artist or the means he employed to produce it.
Nancy Lupo, Currency Exchange (2020), mixed paper, glue, mica pigment, bass wood and bamboo skewers, fiberglass mesh, graphite Kentaro Kawabata, Seed (2021) glazed porcelain Arrayed around these remarkable paintings, is a variety of objects that live up to such dual standards and eccentricities – from Nancy Lupo’s almost indescribable raft of tufted, flesh-colored fibreglass, paper, and who-knows-what-else (Currency Exchange, 2020), to Kentaro Kawabata’s esoteric porcelain vessels (Seed, 2021); from Guillaume Dénervaud’s cratered Mars-red moon-sphere to Elizabeth Englander’s “Bikini Crucifixions” (one of which seems to give an entirely feminist reworking of the original Christian mythology); from Nik Gelormino’s cedarwood spirals to Joseph Grigeley’s Blue Conversations (cautionary random fragments to variously inspire alarm and envy—sitting “next to Jackie Onassis” on a “10-seater plane to Martha’s Vineyard”?—can we bloody talk?!?). The young, largely unmasked crowd outside the gallery gave me some alarm on my way into the Bel Ami space. But once safely inside, this was a world I was in no hurry to leave.
Elizabeth Englander, Bikini Crucifixion No. 1 (2020) old bathing suits, steel, cotton thread Emblazoned World — Group show curated by Lucy Bull — Lee Mullican, Luchita Hurtado, Eugene von Bruenchenhein, Kinke Kooi, E’wao Kagoshima, Elizabeth Englander, Nancy Lupo, Kentaro Kawabata, Guillaume Dénervaud, Joseph Grigeley, Nik Gelormino – at Bel Ami – 709 N. Hill Street (2nd Floor), Los Angeles, CA 90012 (Chinatown) – through October 30, 2021
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Hanna Hur
Hanna Hur believes in art’s power to generate supernatural experiences. By repetitively drawing geometric forms and fashioning chain mail sculptures link by link, she places herself in meditative states of mind receptive to subconscious thoughts; the resulting artworks are later employed in mysterious private rituals influenced by shamanisms from various cultures. Although the exact nature of Hur’s personal ceremonies and revelations remains ambiguous, her paintings, drawings and sculptures convey the impression that long contemplation of them might induce some psychic vision. Her visual lexicon of circles, grids and stylized figures recalls numerous spiritualistic abstract painting antecedents including Eastern mandalas, Agnes Martin, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint. Most of the work in this exhibition, “Signal at the Wheel, Hover at the Gate,” was inspired by her recent trip to visit shamans in Seoul. Ethereal for its translucence in colored pencil on silk, The Wheel (2019) portrays an ancient Korean ritual in which Hur partook to appease her troubled ancestors. In more abstract paintings such as Signal ii (2017-2019), circular motifs seem to glow and whirl like pinwheels as you stare. Completing the esoteric atmosphere, copper chains hung in gallery corners ostensibly represent the eight legs of a supernatural spider; while in the center of the floor lies The Gate (2014-2019), a mat composed of chain mail grids appearing imbued with ritualistic function as a portal through which spirits may pass.
Bel Ami
709 N. Hill St.
inside Asian Center
upstairs suite # 105
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through Jul. 20