Tag: ken gonzales-day

Be careful not to break a mirror, or it’s seven years of bad luck. Don’t hang a horseshoe upside down unless you want the luck it holds to trickle out the ends. Step on a crack, break your mama’s back. Though they are most often recalled trivially and half-jokingly, the superstitions we abide by our entire lives are punctuated by undertones of suffering and darkness. Noelia Towers’ exhibition “Opening an Umbrella Indoors,” mines the connections between bad omens and earthly tragedies through a series of photorealistic paintings rife with displays of pleasure and pain, intimacy and mortality.

Undeniably, Towers is a beautiful technical painter. From gentle cascades of hair to the glistening sheen of leather loafers, the works are rendered in impeccable detail. Still, the hyperrealism of the paintings is hardly as striking as the subject matter itself which ranges from scenes of bondage and self-harm to cries of self-help and attempts to escape, with Towers serving as her own model and muse. By carefully omitting her face, the works (all 2021) thus become representations of our collective experiences of pain and longing.

In Vow of Silence, Towers dons a frilly floral dress and full-face leather hood and poses as if she’s about to sever her own tongue with scissors. Picnic for Two shows her in a similarly submissive position, bound from her ankles by a BDSM spreader bar and sprawled on all fours on a checkered picnic blanket while clad in white. The juxtaposition between the innocence of her garb and the unsettling anticipation of pain evident in each scene reflect the threat of impending doom despite how bright and sunny life may seem, a common thematic thread throughout the show. Mementos of death loom around every corner, particularly in Memorial to Self and Ferit de mort, which respectively depict a commemorative bouquet of lilies in a high-heeled boot and a dying swan bleeding from a fresh bullet hole.

In Bad Luck, Towers stares wistfully out an open window while holding an open umbrella indoors and a thorny rose behind her back, as if longing for freedom from the curse of misfortune. The exhibition becomes a brutally honest manifestation of fears and forebodings, many of them self-inflicted but no less real. The artworks are deeply personal, but the story Towers tells is universal and one I empathize with — that of a young woman struggling to make meaning of her life and forge her way in the world while dogged by harbingers of hopelessness, entrapment and self-doubt.

De Boer Gallery
3311 E. Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90023
Thru Feb. 26th, 2022

In “Another Land” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day invites viewers to face the ugliest parts of ourselves and our nation’s history: its legacy of racialized violence. This latest series of drawings is informed by Gonzales-Day’s extensive research into the history of lynching in the conquest of the Americas and are a continuation of his “Erased Lynching” series, in which he appropriates and reinvents historic lynching images and artworks.

For this show, Gonzales-Day recreates a collection of paintings, drawings and prints originally presented in a 1935 group show, titled “An Art Commentary on Lynching,” designed to condemn the then-widespread practice of lynching in the South and persuade Congress to outlaw it. Paying homage to the participating artists and demonstrating his impressive stylistic range, Gonzales-Day painstakingly and lovingly recreates each artwork in ink-and-pencil drawings.

However, he makes the brilliant decision to remove any traces of violence and humanity present in the original works. Devoid of victims or ropes or lynch mobs, the new works suddenly feel even more hollow and sinister, especially when rendered in grayscale. We see craggy, blackened trees, coiling plumes of smoke, crumbling infrastructure, animals cowering in fear. There is an unmistakable air of terror and a visceral absence of people — there is no human life, only the ghosts of their violent past and the haunted landscapes they left behind.

Going back even further in time, Gonzales-Day also recreates four larger-scale watercolor drawings based on artworks from the 1500s-1700s that document the colonization of the Americas. Although they are similarly wiped of all evidence of human intervention, the vibrant colors and classical compositions look like pages out of a storybook, a fairytale façade belying the racial tensions between conquistadors and indigenous populations that were already taking root. Lurking in the recesses of these colorful landscapes is a haunting reminder that America has never been as pristine or innocent as it would like to appear.

What makes Gonzales-Day so special is his recognition of how the utilities of an archivist and historian go hand in hand with those of a visual artist. The importance and impact of his work in contemporary social justice movements beyond the art world cannot be understated. His academic and artistic investigations come together beautifully in “Another Land to” shed light on racialized legacies that we should all continue to confront and dismantle.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
1110 Mateo St
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Feb. 19th, 2022

Jane Margarette’s otherworldly sculptures and installations mine the tensions between the rough and the sensual, the realistic and the fantastical, the mechanical and the organic. In her exhibition at Anat Ebgi, A Honey of a Tangle, Margarette has created a suite of wall-mounted ceramic sculptures that are spirited in color and form yet retain an undeniable hardness and foreboding. Seeing distinctive forms of locks, pocket watches, insects and birds rendered in huge, 3-D scale, I was instinctually compelled to see these artworks as playful, even cutesy. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Margarette’s fantastical flora and fauna are imbued with more sinister elements, resulting in a paradox of allure and aversion for viewers. Miserable with Carefulness, a large sculpture of a butterfly, is adorned with childish charms of fruits and smaller butterflies on chains. But the butterfly also dons a basket full of loose ceramic teeth, and something has taken a bite out of its right wing. Sing Me a Spell / Drowsy Dreamer takes the form of a bat with a locking apparatus held together by a knife in its chest. In other works, pastel colors and delicate forms belie more threatening components like spiked collars, bear traps and locks. Although there are certainly signals of outside threats and the sculptures largely feature symbols of self-defense, Margarette still manages to make them feel harmless in their absurdity.

The latches and hinges accenting each piece give the implication of movement, like each sculpture is meant to be interacted with. It was easy to imagine playing with each piece like a blown-up sensory board for toddlers to tinker with locks, switches and gadgets. Softness and hardness, weightlessness versus bulkiness were also at odds, as if each butterfly and bird could fly away in the blink of an eye, if only they weren’t weighed down by chains and hardware.

Throughout, I felt like I was walking through an Alice in Wonderland-esque realm, where the natural world exists, surreal and dream-like, without regard for constraints physics or logic. And where the most innocent concepts and creatures may reveal their ominous intentions at any moment, but there is the luxury of waking up and realizing how silly you were to have ever thought there was any real danger in the first place.

Anat Ebgi
2660 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Thru Feb. 12th, 2022