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Tag: Cole Sweetwood
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Pick of the Week: Lawrence Calver
Simchowitz GalleryLawrence Calver’s first US show at Simchowitz Gallery, “On the Off Chance,” is one of the most fascinating studies in material of any show in Los Angeles that I’ve had the chance to review. Calver is not a traditional fine artist; his background is in creative direction for fashion shows. Here in “On the Off Chance,” he relies on this training and eschews traditional mediums, creating strong, symbolic canvases out of stitched fabrics, often times found fabrics.
The canvases that Calver assembles are rooted in a color-field, Soviet aesthetic. There are strong, bold lines and geometric patterns to the fabrics. Many of the works are landscapes with pared down houses, while others illustrate roughly human figures. They tap into a rustic urbanity, creating within them a conflict between the old (traditional fabrics and dyes) and the new (abstracted forms with an emphasis on color and texture.)
But the true magic of the show, as I suggested before, is the subtleties in which Calver works. We’ll start with the figures themselves. The blocky representations of people in Calver’s works have a common element: pointed hats. While a pointed hat is a symbol used by any number of cultures and peoples, the sourcing of Calver’s materials in India points to the reference being to the Tibetan monk’s pandita hat. This certainly enforces the idol-like nature of the figures and their blank, serene depiction.
And Calver’s sourcing of materials is evident without even reading an excerpt about the show; within the works themselves, Calver maintains the original logo of the fabric companies that he’s sourced the materials. Printed in English, these logos cite manufacturers like Kohinoor Rubia and Bhoja Ram Mukand Lal. The use of fabrics made in India by a British artist echoes the long, colonialist connection between these two nations, a connection reinforced by the inclusion of patches of vintage Western fabrics.
Through his inventive use of fabrics, Lawrence Calver questions our pattern of consumption which has its roots inextricably tied to our colonialist history, and demonstrates what an artist can accomplish with material alone.
Simchowitz Gallery
8255 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90048
Thru June 26th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Guy Yanai
Praz-DelavalladeGuy Yanai is irreplaceable. Not simply his vibrant, structured style (though that too is unique,) each of Yanai’s paintings carries an air of individuality and transience. Seeing them for the first time is a new wave crashing on the shore of your subconscious, dousing you before receding again. At his new show at Praz-Delavallade, “The Caboose,” Yanai showcases a collection of works combining his distinctive palette of colors with dreamy, narrative scenes that inspire a deep wistfulness.
But this wistfulness isn’t grounded. Despite the strong, decisive brushstrokes, Yanai paints scenes that he hasn’t experienced, and are mostly drawn from photographs or films. Claire and her boyfriend (2021) or Pauline Reading (2021), for example, do not depict exact memories but rather ideas of memories – pleasurable moments that, in their non-existence, are as real as our memories. The pictorially flat and colorful scenes, be they a couple embracing, a figure reading alone, or a simple house-plant, are singular and unique from anything you might find in a nostalgic moment.
I’m beginning to think that nostalgia is a curse. The desire for a happiness never to return can blind you to the happiness which might exist right in front of you. And yet this desire is addictive; like any good curse, it draws you in before binding you in a wicked web. Nostalgia promises an ideal yet provides only an imitation – and a fleeting one at that.
To this effect, Yanai references the essayist Roland Barthes, quoting him thusly:
“This is to say the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. … Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”
While Barthes is talking about a streetcar, the sentiment also applies to the work of Guy Yanai. Each painting, while existing in concert with each other, are still independent and unique. They bring with them their own kind of joy, longing and profound. But unlike nostalgia, that accursed and remote bliss, the paintings of Guy Yanai are not perpetually out of your reach; they will summon the same vanished pleasure each and every time.
Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048
Thru June 26th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Arnold Kemp
JOANArt is a reflection of the artist. The culmination of personal experiences, years of study, and distinct perspectives that comprise their life emerge in their works. But none of us are infinitely unique – which is good, for if we were, we’d have no way to relate to one another. In this way, art too must be a reflection of the viewer. The issue is muddied further by greater questions of who is the artist and who is the viewer, both easier asked than answered. These matters of authorship, language, memory, and perspective are masterfully explored in Arnold Kemp’s show “False Hydras,” on view at JOAN until June 19th.
“False Hydras” is obviously composed of sculptures, photographs, and other works by Arnold Kemp the artist and educator, but it features many different Arnold Kemps. Even the title is a reference to a “Dungeons & Dragons” monster created and posted about online by a different Arnold Kemp. Within the game, the memories of any person the monster consumes are wiped from the minds of those who knew them – a fitting beast for a show which deals so heavily in Kemp the artist’s own life.
Another Arnold Kemp referenced in the show is the artist’s grandfather, a tailor from the Bahamas. The work Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), is comprised of a limestone sculpture made by Kemp in 1984, draped with shorts created by his grandfather. In one of the nooks of the sculpture, there is a cellphone from a performance piece done by Kemp and his father in 2003 about communication between father and son. This work is a culmination of generational artistic efforts, a bridge between Arnold Kemp the tailor and Arnold Kemp the artist.
The most prominent work in the show is Mr. Kemp: Yellowing, Drying, Scorching (2020). A black leather chair is stacked with forty copies of Eat of Me: I am the Savior, a book from 1972 by Black nationalist author, Arnold Kemp. There is a transposition of identity, a conflation of artist and author.
Finally, lying on the floor, there is a single piece of paper which punches straight through the show. Upon the page is written three lines: “I Would Survive; I Could Survive; I Should Survive.” These declarations are affirmations of self, of personal identity untethered to the other; they avow that, even in a world of false hydras, you will always remember yourself.
JOAN
1206 Maple Avenue, Suite 715, Los Angeles, CA 90015
Thru June 19th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Federico Solmi
Luis De Jesus Los AngelesLos Angeles is coming back to life. That’s a sentiment that somehow simultaneously feels cliché and unexpected all at once. But just look around: concerts are being promoted, theaters are rescheduling shows, and bar hoppers are, once again, singing far too loud at far too late on my street. The party is just beginning, and the perfect celebration of this return to normalcy is Federico Solmi’s new show, “The Bacchanalian Ones,” on view at Luis De Jesus’ new Arts District location.
Bacchanalia, the Roman era parties to honor Bacchus, the god of wine and festivities, and are associated with a commiserate level of drunkenness. In Solmi’s show, the artist incorporates his background on illustration and animation with a renewed emphasis on painted works to illustrate some of Western history’s controversial heroes.
The majority of the works on view are LCD screens displaying animated videos of immense celebrations, set into sumptuous and ornate painted frames which carry on the themes of the scenes. In attendance at these celebrations are familiar faces, albeit twisted to possess terrifying, toothy grins and wide, unblinking eyes. The main work, entitled The Bathhouse (2020), has five screens depicting Julius Caesar, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus among others partaking in the festival. In other works, such as The Golden Gift (2020) or The Indulgent Fathers (2020), we see these same characters partying through historical moments, such as Columbus’ crusade landing or the crossing of the Delaware.
Solmi reimagines these figures as devilishly smiling partiers, who are unconcerned with the people – particularly Native victims of colonialist action – who are trampled over by their revelry. The show, through all its varied mediums, points a finger towards the rampant deification of these historical figures despite the atrocities and pain they perpetuated and profited from.
In our return to normalcy, it’s important to continue the interrogation of the history we’ve been given which has started anew in this past year. We will return to the parties, the galas, the concerts, and the shows – but will we work to create a better status quo? Will we have the strength to tear down the monuments to misguided men, and to look at the world through fresh eyes? This is yet to be seen, but it’s through the work of Solmi’s Bacchanalia that we can begin the task of dissecting the complexities of our Western “heroes.”
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
1110 S. Mateo St., Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru June 19th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Roland Reiss
Diane Rosenstein GalleryIf the uncanny valley had an interior decorator, their name would be Roland Reiss. The recently departed artist has a new exhibition at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery, featuring not only a host of recent works but also Reiss’ ground-breaking installation, The Castle of Perseverance. Through his moralistic and post-modern approach in depicting modern life, Reiss not only blurs the division between reality and unreality, but reminds us the importance of truth in the face of falsehood.
I’ve just recently commented on this divide between the real and unreal in a review of Richard Nielsen’s show “Past Imperfect,” but unlike Nielsen, Reiss extends the argument even further. Beyond illustrating the divide as a reflection of our current moment, Reiss physicalizes the division and invites you to immerse yourself in it.
The Castle of Perseverance (1978) is a particle board recreation of a 1970s living room, right down to the curved bar, copious ash trays and cigarettes, and vintage tv stand. The more time you spend in Reiss’ castle, the more you are drawn into its world, and the less you question real vs. fake.
In time, the question becomes who are the people who occupy this space, and what are their stories? Why are there loose pills, and loose firearms? Who needs this many keys (I counted at least ten!) The narrative which is simultaneously hidden and yet made so evident is the heart of Reiss’ works, in which falsehoods become so realistic that it is impossible to separate them from reality itself.
This effort is enforced with his work in miniature and diorama, of which many of his series are on display from throughout his career. An original diorama from the 1980s, Adult Fairy Tale: Language and Myth (1983), shows a well-dressed man and woman arguing in a traditional office space, while a third woman looks on, disapprovingly. It’s unclear whether this third woman will act as arbiter or merely observer. This vignette brings the themes of the Castle of Perseverance to life, underscoring important lessons about the necessity of objective truth and the danger of being caught up in a glass enclosure – or a particle-board world.
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
831 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90038
Thru May 28th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Richard Nielsen
Track16The line between the real and unreal is a thin one. Just beyond the horizon, and beyond the corner of our eye, exists only the expanse of our imagination – what you might call magic. And it’s in this liminal space between magic and matter, fact and fiction, that you find “Past Imperfect,” a new exhibition of paintings by Richard Nielsen at Track16.
Nielsen’s works, many of them portraits of masked people or surreal landscapes, tap into the unease of our contemporary moment. I can say with absolute certainty that if you polled people in at the start of the millennium how they thought the country would look in twenty years, no one would have even been close. The images and news stories of today would have been impossible to imagine for many Americans. And by juxtaposing paintings of cryptid monsters and psychedelia with paintings of masked faces and hospice rooms, Nielsen draws out that subtle divide.
One of the most striking paintings that lies completely in this divide is one of a zookeeper, dressed in a loose fitting panda costume, swaddling a cub. The caretaker stands on a flat green background adorned with prints of deciduous leaves, hand-feeding and looking down at the small cub like a doting mother. It’s surreal and bizarre, but it’s based in reality – zookeepers actually dress like that to handle a new cub, so as to acclimate it to other pandas.
But Nielsen does not just deal with the bizarre reality of our present, but ties it also to our tumultuous past. In the painting Antifa Denmark 1945, Danish Freedom Fighters, Great Uncle (2020), we find five well-dressed men, standing in a variegated cobblestone street – members of the Danish resistance, as the title suggests. Nielsen connects this earlier form of anti-fascism – that is, freedom fighters working against Nazi Germany – with the more modern catch-all movement titled Antifa, which has become a bogeyman for ultra-conservative nationalists. In doing so, Nielsen contextualizes the modern Anti-Fascist movement with grass-root anti-fascism throughout history, letting the past meet the present to make sense of our reality.
Track16
1206 Maple Ave., #1005, LA, CA, 90015
Thru May 29th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Paco Pomet
Richard Heller Gallery“Beginnings,” the new show from Spanish artist Paco Pomet, is funny. Hard-hitting criticism, I know, but humor can be a rarity in the world of contemporary art. Most art that one could even remotely consider funny is usually of the ironic, intellectual variety, like Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. or Magritte’s The Treachery Of Images. But Pomet’s oeuvre of surrealistic landscapes possesses a genuine, accessible humor that is a refreshing departure from the self-serious, incisive world of the global contemporary.
Instead of trying to explain the humor of “Beginnings” – an endeavor that is always doomed to fail – it’s best to start with the value of humor in art in general. Art can do many things, but it’s especially good at reminding us how to feel. Most often prized are the profound feelings, like sublimity and sharpness, but there is equal value in reveling in absurdity and levity. Pomet’s brilliant painting draws out the admirability of these over-looked feelings, elevating them to equal profundity.
And Pomet appears aware of this dichotomy between profound and absurd, as he borrows imagery from very profound works. In Das Erhabene Büro (2020), Pomet borrows the central figure from Casper David Friedrich’s classic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). In an example of Romantic sublimity, Friedrich’s titular wanderer stands atop a mountain, looking down towards a mist-covered valley; by contrast, Pomet’s wanderer instead looks out from his rocky perch onto a 1920s office, complete with candle-stick phones. Pomet’s office is in grey-scale, except for a sun, blazing yellow and white in an adjacent room and giving our wanderer a warm glow.
The absurdity of Das Erhabene Büro (German for “The Sublime Office”) is valuable because it encourages us to consider the very real absurdity of our lives. Be it working in a modern office or the Cold War anxiety of nuclear destruction, Pomet weaves scenes with humor and beauty that challenge the sophomoric conception of our world as a serious place. Yes, our world is a place where serious things happen, where profound feelings are felt, but it is equally a place where silly things happen, where people laugh and feel light – and both are worthy of art.
Richard Heller Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave., B-5A, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Thru May 8th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Anna Weyant, Alexander Tovborg, & Asuka Anastacia Ogawa
Blum & Poe[et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]Belief – whether you call it religion, spirituality, or anything else – is as vital to our lives as shelter or sustenance. Myth-making is how lessons are passed down, how mysteries are explored, and how home is remembered. These functions of belief are all found in the works of Anna Weyant, Alexander Tovborg, and Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, whose works are on view in three separate shows now at Blum & Poe.
Admittedly, when I was planning this review, I was only going to write about Anna Weyant’s show “Loose Screw,” because it’s just simply that good. In terms of technical ability, Weyant’s works rival the Dutch Golden Age masters which inspire her work, and in terms of narrative, she surpasses them. Through her beautifully rendered oil portraits and still-lifes, Weyant constructs fantastical vignettes engaging with absurd and often unsettling subjects. These scenes are modern fairytales, which grapple with lessons of loneliness and pain – a woman falling down stairs, another laughing alone with her hand wrapped in bandages, and a horrid dinner of raw eggs, piranha, and impaled bread.
But while I could write a full review on Anna Weyant alone, it would be to the great disservice of the spectacular paintings and sculptures of Alexander Tovborg in his show, “Sacrificial Love.” Tovborg weaves a complex web of mythology in his show, using a dazzling array of gemlike colors to create muses, goddesses, and idols of every variety. The paintings are of an imposing size, and the figures within them emerge from their settings as if etched into rock faces. Female figures clutch instruments and are wreathed in foliage, while a few hold young girls in reimagined depictions of Virgin and Child. Tovborg invites us to reckon with our connection with history and mythology, and how the way we view the world has been informed by the stories of our past.
But while Tovborg and Weyant explore the beliefs of societies both real and imagined, Ogawa’s collection of works is far more personal. Within the brightly colored, pictorially flat paintings, Ogawa amasses figures and stories which represent her own interpretation of home and history. She wields her mixed Japanese and Brazilian heritages like twin torches, equally illuminating the canvases. The figures – mostly Black children, with almond eyes and simple clothes – participate in mysterious rituals or performances, often staring out at the viewer as though the curiosity that they inspire is mutual.
Blum & Poe
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2727 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034
Thru May 1st, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Ana Serrano
Bermudez ProjectsOur city’s beauty is often overlooked. This is a subject I’ve touched on in the past, and it’s an unfair generalization that Los Angeles is an “ugly” city. Maybe it’s because our city is difficult to walk through, and so you don’t notice the beauty. Maybe it’s only ugly in comparison to the beauty of the nature surrounding it. No matter the reasoning, one thing is clear: LA has an image problem. Unlike New York or San Francisco, the neighborhoods in which the vast majority of Angelinos live are not glorified in media, if they are ever shown in the first place. This is why Ana Serrano’s show, “a sense of place,” will bring the beauty of Los Angeles to the fore and change how you see our city.
Serrano’s show is composed of cardboard, diorama sculptures of single-story, LA houses, along with a pair of cardboard trucks. The space is also adorned with LA-inspired installation pieces, like paintings of ravens and hummingbirds and paper wisteria flowers, which work to ground an atmosphere for the sculptures. It really feels as though the neighborhood surrounding the gallery has seeped within its walls.
The cardboard houses, emblematic of much of Serrano’s career, are simple at first glance, but their pastel colors entice you in like a bakery display case. And once you’ve been drawn in, the exquisite detail in the sculptures shines through. The wrought iron gates, the door ornaments, even the basement vents are expertly placed and crafted, demonstrating a real care not only for the objects themselves but for their real world analogues.
And this push for close inspection defines the show. Serrano, more than many artists, wants you to take lessons learned in her show out into the world. The real houses – often the homes of LA’s working, immigrant population, whom Serrano identifies her work with – are frequently ignored, and even maligned. So after you visit, take a few moments to walk around Los Angeles, look at the houses, and the birds, and the wisteria trees, and take in what Serrano is really trying to show us: the beauty all around.
Bermudez Projects
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90065
Thru May 15th, 2021; Tues-Sat. noon-6 pm -
Pick of the Week: Amy Sherald
Hauser & WirthThe Impressionists, at the end of the 19th century, turned away from traditional muses and academies and became chroniclers of their contemporary era. They were described as flaneurs, self-styled spectators of modern life and people in leisure. But throughout their work – and throughout the art historical canon – there is a notable exception: people of color. Even the few that were depicted were ignored for decades, such as Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Laure, which was originally named La Négresse, a reductive title which obfuscates any true identity. This historical mistreatment is why Amy Sherald’s first solo west coast show, “The Great American Fact,” is so vital.
Sherald’s show illustrates Black Americans at leisure in Sherald’s signature style. Whether they’re posing with surfboards or leaning on bicycles, the monochromatic models exude a powerful peacefulness amid vibrant colors. Unlike some of her more famous subjects, like Michelle Obama or the late Breonna Taylor, the figures of “The Great American Fact” are intentionally ordinary. They could be anyone, a fact reinforced by their gray-scaled skin – there is not even an emphasis on the color or shade of their skin, but rather their beauty as human beings.
This is not to say that Sherald treats these people as ordinary. In As American as apple pie (2020), two figures stand in front of a ranch-style home and a vintage Cadillac. The woman wears all hot pink with a beehive haircut, the man cuts a spitting image of the iconic James Dean. It is as Americana as you could imagine, yet features two people whom America forgot – but were always there.
Sherald’s layers of nuance seemingly never end. In a portrait of a young woman entitled Hope is a thing with feathers (2020), Sherald emblazons the too frequently violent arena of a Black woman’s body with the universal symbol of peace: a dove. The relaxed repose of the model, arms loose at her side and face neutral, underscore that resilient vulnerability which is necessary for peace. To borrow from the Dickinson poem which Sherald references in the title, her work “sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.”
Hauser & Wirth
901 E 3rd Street, LA, CA, 90013
Thru June 6, 2021; Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Patrick Wilson
Vielmetter Los Angeles[et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]There’s no such thing as an alright abstract painting. They fall, without exception, into two categories: great and garbage. And for whoever’s looked at an abstract artwork, smugly harrumphed and muttered, “I could do that,” I’d point to any of the works hanging in Patrick Wilson’s “Keeping Time,” and ask, “Could you really?”
Abstraction is difficult enough to get right, but hard-edged, color-field abstraction? Doubly so. There’s a reason why the critic Clement Greenberg, by the late 1950s, had more or less eschewed the works of the “action” painters like Jackson Pollock in favor of color-field abstraction (what Greenberg called “post-painterly abstraction.”) Color-field abstractions, like the works of Patrick Wilson, boom or bust on the artist’s ability to convey through color and balance alone.
In this regard, “Keeping Time” is a stroke of mastery. Wilson’s frame within frame style always manages to keep you on your toes as the works, never culminating, constantly build and subtract within themselves. We can see this effect in a work titled Afternoon Breeze (2020). A patch of blue, in one place vibrant, melts into the red background with a mild transparency, and is harshly bisected by a think pink frame. Nearby, a pink and orange frame overlaps a field of subtly gradating maroon and sienna, capturing on one end a shred of the hot pink background. Finally, the offset canvases abutting at a hard right angle throw the entire work into a rectilinear staccato.
But the peak of the exhibition lies at the end of the gallery, with a work titled Night Bloom (2020). Here, Wilson does it all. While the blocks of color – pink, lilac, sky blue, maroon, merlot, etc. – form a brilliant and vivid cascade, the triumph is in the detailing. All throughout the painting, Wilson uses millimeter thick lines to create boundary after boundary, stacking them one atop another, obscuring some with the fields of color and cutting straight across others with reckless abandon. But still, it all stays within the canvas. That final boundary remains unchallenged, and everything you need to see is within it.
“Keeping Time”, on view at Vielmetter Los Angeles until April 24th, is a high-wire act – and Patrick Wilson doesn’t stumble.
Vielmetter Los Angeles
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1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101, LA, CA, 90021
Thru Apr. 24, 2021; Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Alissa McKendrick & Diane Kotila
de boer galleryEveryone has a fascination with the more macabre parts of life. Not that everyone is John Waters, but there’s a reason we all slow down to look when we pass an accident. It’s just human nature to be transfixed by the dark and the deadly, to find it not only shocking but enchanting. Our morbid curiosity (and the accompanying absurdity) is explored at de boer gallery until April 17th with a pair of shows by artists Diane Kotila and Alissa McKendrick: “Boy Kings” and “Electric Guitar Players.”
“Electric Guitar Players” is, well, electric. An absurd, almost whimsical energy courses through the color-field landscapes, upon which women serenade skeletons and mermaids with un-plugged electric guitars. The scenes carry a mysterious cadence, drawing inspirations from places as far-flung as Narcissus’s pond and Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948). But instead of a windswept young girl on the prairie, McKendrick inserts a skeleton, lounging and staring off at a distant cityscape. McKendrick experiments with death’s odd familiarity, and her paintings are as finely detailed as they are expressively impressionistic.
“Boy Kings” is a series of portraits of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, or, affectionally, King Tut. Tutankhamen is a figure that has been perennially fascinating since the uncovering of his tomb, having taken the throne at just eight years old. The Pharaoh in Kotila’s painting is just about that age, a young boy just at the precipice of his reign.
The paintings Kotila has rendered of the Tutankhamun illustrate her fascination with the ruler. They are somber, even haunting, with one’s face wrapped in gauze and another just a limbless torso, covered on one side in stab wounds. The boy kings appear as Tutankhamen did in real life: frail and anxious.
Kotila works to bring back the Pharaoh, but the most striking portrait is not of Tutankhamun, but of the boy who rediscovered him. Hussein Abdel Rasoul, the boy who discovered the first step to Tutankhamun’s tomb and once wore the jewelry of the Pharaoh, is recreated by Kotila. But with those shadowed eyes and the sensation of weight upon his shoulders, the line between Rasoul and Tutankhamun blurs.
de boer gallery
3311 E. Pico Blvd, LA, CA, 90023
Thru Apr. 17, 2021; Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Caitlin Keogh
Overduin & Co.With spring just ahead, we are on the precipice of a momentous transition. Rays of hope are beginning to warm the cold landscape of our world, as they have again and again throughout humanity’s existence. Caitlin Keogh explores this cyclical nature of history (and our position within it) in her new show, “Waxing Year,” on view until April 3rd at Overduin & Co.
Keogh centers her show around the pagan traditions of the Oak King, as identified by Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess. The “waxing year” is the time between spring and autumn equinoxes, during which the Oak King spreads new life and revives the old, peaking in his strength at Midsummer. While Keogh cites a collection of muses, from Piet Mondrian to her therapist, the bulk of her art strongly feature collected and collaged images and items from her studio and previous works.
Keogh channels this pagan vivacity and strength through a series of large, ethereal paintings (Waxing Year 1-7 (2020)) which are linked compositionally in groups of two to three. She fills her works with personal aesthetic references and, with elements painted as if literally tacked onto the canvas, they act as a mood-board for art history and Keogh herself. The works lack a strong grounding in any reality, but occupy an unreal, underground space. With roots hanging down from above, one can even find Persephone and her pomegranates traversing in Hades below the mantle.
But despite the relative chaos of these paintings, there is a vitalizing energy which courses through them. It belies a growing momentum below the surface. As for Mondrian (who himself lies deep below the ground), we can see his influences in the lattice motif which extends across the paintings, uniting together. Are these lattices forming, or dissolving? Are they the building of new connections, or the cage now being torn asunder?
The waxing year is upon us all in just a few days more and Keogh’s “Waxing Year” reminds us not only of the energy waiting to be released when the Oak King presides again, but also the importance of wielding this power to create and heal.
Overduin & Co.
6693 Sunset Blvd., LA, CA, 90028
Thru Apr. 3, 2021; Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: John Waters
Sprüth MagersSprüth Magers is currently exhibiting two shows by two of the most notable creatives of the last forty years: Cindy Sherman’s “Tapestries” and John Waters’ “Hollywood’s Greatest Hits.” Though, if you’re anything like myself, one will leave you elated, and the other, deflated.
If you were hoping for a glowing review of Sherman’s new works, I’m sorry, because honestly, I’d recommend walking straight through it, up the stairs, and right into Waters’ exhibition. Sherman rehashes the same disguised self-portraiture concept she’s explored since the 1980s, this time “elevating” her Instagram posts by weaving (or having Flemish tapissiers weave) them into large tapestries. They’re works that—while stunning in their craftsmanship—are more clumsy than clever, though sure to thrill the postmodernist diehards.
“Hollywood’s Greatest Hits,” by contrast, holds some of the most engrossing art showing in Los Angeles today. The perpetual outsider, John Waters takes jabs at filmmaking, the art world, and his life throughout an array of sculptures, photographs, films, installations and more.
There are, as to be expected, the numerous references to death—a familiar theme for the noted provocateur. There is the darkly humorous In Shoulda! (2014), a piece which pairs photos of deceased starlets like Princess Diana and Whitney Houston with a movie poster declaring “She Shoulda Said ‘NO’!” There’s also the tragic and macabre Stolen Jean Genet, a copy of early activist and writer Jean Genet’s headstone.
But what’s most interesting is Waters’ exploration of his own life through his work. In 45 Days (2003), Waters assembles notecards on which he wrote daily to-do lists and the number of days since his last cigarette—now scratched through and completed. Organized in a massive collage, the note cards are not only the representation of Waters’ tireless creative efforts, but also become a chaotic, Twombly-esque abstraction. One can feel periods of greater stress and tension emanating from certain areas and times over others, the ink darker and obliteration more complete.
Overall—and as always—John Waters is not to be missed. He dances through the darkest parts of life with charm and wit, exchanging the deathly somber for the dearly sensitive.
Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Blvd., LA, CA, 90036
Thru May 1, 2021; Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Michael Henry Hayden
Moskowitz BayseA painting requires nothing more than a painter. Everything else is malleable. Once a painter has been established, that which they create are paintings no matter the form. Michael Henry Hayden is – as he has been throughout his long career – a painter. But in the sculptural works in his new show at Moskowitz Bayse, “Waiting for the Canyon’s Echo,” Hayden pushes the boundaries of painting and explores new, mixed media compositions.
The works throughout the show are generally inspired by natural scenes and imagery: broad leaves, granite mountain ranges, tree bark, and more. In some paintings, these sculptural natural elements take center stage, such as in Leaflet (Anthurium) (2021), where an aquaresin leaf acts as the canvas for green and white acrylic. In others, a traditional linen canvas acts as the stage where natural elements find their footing.
The most striking example of this canvas-sculptural mixed painting is Plein Air (2019). In this work, a canvas painted with a soft sunset gradient is flanked on both sides by aquaresin granite slabs. Hayden mixed the aquaresin and Sierra mountain granite dust to create a highly realistic analog. Even upon close examination, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
“Waiting for the Canyon’s Echo” questions not only what qualifies as painting, but what qualifies as natural. The leaves, the rocks, the bark; these all appear as if they were plucked straight from a botanical garden, and yet are all fabrications. In his role as painter, Hayden strives not only to create art, but to create nature – or rather, to recreate it.
But in this effort, there is a conflict. Of course, no matter how realistic the recreation is, it isn’t strictly speaking natural. It did not arise by natural means, but by the careful, calculating effort of a human being. Hayden himself explores this tension himself with works like Greenhouse (2020), in which the leaf motifs are bound and locked behind wrought iron gates. Here, the difference between manmade and naturally occurring are placed in direct conflict, and we the viewer are left to interrogate the uneasy balance, and whether there truly is any difference.
Moskowitz Bayse
743 N. La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Doug Aitken
Regen ProjectsIn the 1950s-60s, Jasper Johns created two works – Flag (1954-55) and Target (1961) – which both carved his place in the art historical canon and established a new conceptual framework for art. These encaustic versions of instantly recognizable icons (an American Flag and a simple series of concentric circles) represent a dramatic shift in art theory. Simply put, before Johns, a flag wasn’t art. Neither was a target. And without Johns, we would not have the newest show from Doug Aitken, “Flags and Debris,” on now at Regen Projects until March 13th.
The show consists of large fabric tapestries and a video installation which uses those tapestries to garb dancers performing throughout Los Angeles. The first connection from Aitken to Johns is with Aitken’s own Target (2020), a tapestry composed of scavenged mixed fabrics. Not only is this piece visually inspired by Johns’ work, but its material and the way it flows off the wall inspires the feeling of a flag.
And from this initial connection to Johns, we can see the conceptual diversion from Johns that Aitken takes with the rest of the show. While Johns suggested that a flag could be art, Aitken suggests a work of art could be a flag. Other than Target, the rest of Aitken’s tapestries and banners contain some kind of textual element — mostly phrases or slogans. Some phrases are uniting (almost to the point of being banal, such as We The People (2020)), while others are simply referential of our era, like Digital Detox (2020). But a flag is more than a rallying commonality, and certainly more than an inert object which hangs on our walls.
Aitken’s video work, Flags and Debris (2020) uses choreography developed with LA Dance Company in order to explore the conceptual power of flags. Aitken uses dancers completely enshrouded in his flags to show how they may act like suits of armor. The flowing, expressive movements of the performers highlight the malleability of a flag’s material and essence, but their inability to escape the shrouds illustrates the danger of covering yourself in ideology. While it can protect you, it can just as easily trap you.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd, LA, CA, 90038
Appointment Only
