Your cart is currently empty!
Tag: LA
-
Secret Garden: David Horvitz
Exploring the Balance Between Private and PublicI met David Horvitz three years ago when he hand-delivered me an edamame plant he had been offering to his community via social media. Now, three years later, we meet again to conduct this interview in the garden he has been building. The garden in question is a previously vacant lot in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, near the Underground Museum and his studio. The lot, which became vacant after the house on the property burned down, is roughly 5,000 square feet and, prior to Horvitz’ interventions, was mostly dirt, grass and weeds. “I’m always finding buried knicknacks from the house when we dig. A lot of marbles,” Horvitz tells me.
Horvitz has worked with horticulture in several instances, though this is certainly his largest-scale and most ambitious plant-based work to date. The artist, age 39, who now lives and works in his native Los Angeles (after a stint in New York on graduating from Bard’s MFA program in 2010), first exhibited horticultural work when he planted seeds in a book that eventually grew into a tree. The seeds used were collected from Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests there. When making this work, Horvitz was “thinking about the trees as shelter and also as witness to this political moment that was happening in the background of the landscaping.” The tree was donated to, and currently resides at, Bard College, where it was planted in the ground and has since grown quite large. This notion of trees in the foreground, with bodies as subplot, persists throughout his oeuvre, culminating in his most recent work, his garden.
Early stages of David Horvitz’ garden. Image courtesy of artist. Photographer Olivia Fougeirol. When I arrive, the garden, which is still awaiting its concrete benches, is awash with midday sun. The space is entirely exposed, as much to the elements as to the street. The street, despite its proximity to bustling Washington Boulevard, is residential and fairly quiet. We walk through the garden while Horvitz gestures and tells me each tree or new bloom’s horticultural story—where they’re native to, where the seeds are from, and how they grow. He spots a new bloom—a tiny green leaf sprouting from the soil almost invisible to the untrained eye—and is visibly excited, placing a rock next to it to ensure “we (I know that in reality he means me but is too polite to say so) do not trample it.”
After obtaining permission from the lot’s landlord, Horvitz teamed up with architectural design firm TERREMOTO to transform the derelict space into a garden. When planting they talked about holding a designated space reserved for people but decided, instead, to allow the trees to dominate. In urban gardens, trees typically exist in the background, activated by the bodies that visit—thinking of his earlier project, they wanted to consider how it might feel for bodies to take a backseat while the trees hold centerstage. So far, they have planted over 100 trees. The garden’s concept required rocks so Horvitz and David Godshall, of TERREMOTO, reached out to LACMA Curator Christine Y. Kim to gather rubble from the museum’s demolition site. The result is a zen rock garden, a transplant of urban ruins from a renowned longstanding art space repurposed to another (much more transient) art space. If LACMA’s controversial and politicized demolition has been critiqued as a symbol of waste and excess, then Horvitz’ garden is the antithesis; a space lacking in financial incentive built up from the ruins of a domestic building and incorporating ruins from an institutional one.
Freshly cultivated garden by David Horvitz and David Godshall. Image courtesy of artist. Photographer Olivia Fougeirol. The Davids (Horvitz and Godshall) are unclear exactly how the location will be used. They may open it up to arts programming such as related talks, performance and happenings. Though it may just be a garden, open by appointment. He mentions its visibility to the public and that some neighbors have expressed wanting to have a BBQ or party there. While wanting the space to feel communal, there is simultaneously a need to preserve. The main rule is that it is a place for the plants, where the people are merely visitors. This tension of public vs. private continues to make itself known; the garden is visible from the street but behind a gate under lock and key. There have been several instances of graffiti which Horvitz is undecided on how to address. “I’m tempted to keep it,” he says. “Or incorporate it into a mural.”
Horvitz has long been considering the boundary between public and private. Since graduating from Bard in 2010, he has become quite known for his mail art and virtual artwork, drawing on the influence of conceptual artists before him like Bas Jan Ader and On Kawara. His early film “Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film” (2009) was uploaded to YouTube under the premise that it was “found in Ader’s locker at UC Irvine after his disappearance at sea in 1975, and that the film was assumed unusable because it abruptly runs out just as the figure enters the water.” The few-second-long black-and-white film depicting a figure biking into the ocean was then made into an artist edition book, published by 2nd Cannon Publications. This blurring of fact and fiction, or history and mythology, discreetly inserts itself into the narrative—thus questioning the bounds of privacy by pushing them. I was first introduced to his practice with his 2007 work, I will think about you for one minute, where one can pay $1 and Horvitz will think about them for one minute, emailing them the time he starts thinking, and the time he stops. With this piece (still ongoing) he challenges the intimacy and visibility between artist and audience, momentarily collapsing the distance between the two. Particularly notable is the second email he sends once the minute is up: “I’ve stopped thinking about you.” Here, Horvitz draws a stark line between the public and private.
Horvitz tending to the garden. Image courtesy of artist. Photographer Olivia Fougeirol. Central to Horvitz’ work is the notion of access. Alongside many gallery and institutional exhibitions, including a group exhibition at the ICA Los Angeles this Spring, a solo at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden in Germany earlier this year and exhibitions at Praz-Delavallade and Yvon Lambert in 2020, Horvitz extends his practice to inexpensive printed matter and free downloadable materials. His books are translated into 32 languages (so far), and his web content is downloadable via PDF, audio file or transcript from the website itself. He refutes the gate keeping oft associated with the arts and refers to his collectors less as “buying” his work, instead favoring the word funding. In one body of work, “Donations to Libraries” (2010), Horvitz donated archival boxes—one of which went to MoMA New York. The boxes, which appear as first-edition hardbound books but in reality contain a bottle of gin and a glass, were purchased by collectors who, in the acquisition contract, agree to buy a new bottle for the bookcases (which still live at the respective libraries) each year.
Horvitz addressed the public property conversation head-on in his two bodies of work: “Public Access” (2010–11) where he photographed himself on various California beaches and uploaded those images to the beach’s Wikipedia pages, and “Private Access,” where he did the same thing but on east coast beaches which are adversely privately owned. Exerting his public right both physically and digitally (in the case of the publicly gathered encyclopedia, Wikipedia) Horvitz explored the bounds between private and public access and the feeling of existence and visibility in both spaces. In a similarly terse video work made around the same time, A Walk at Dusk (2018), Horvitz walked through Trump’s Golf Club on the coast in Palos Verdes planting seeds from the Washingtonia robusta, a native Mexican fan palm. A gestural action in the face of the Trump presidency and his intended “wall,” Horvitz reclaims the land (which must, by California law, provide beach access to all 24/7) with native Mexican horticulture, collected from his grandmother’s garden.
Portrait of David Horvitz in his garden. Image courtesy of artist. Photographer Olivia Fougeirol. Horvitz, who has been working with galleries and institutions for the past two decades, has made a habit of pushing boundaries. For a Frieze New York Project in 2016, curated by Cecilia Alemani, he hired three professional pickpockets to attend the fair and stealthily distribute artworks to randomly selected fairgoers. At last year’s Frieze Los Angeles in Ruinart’s Champagne Room, he organized to gift glass artworks. The caveat being that in order to receive one you had to repeat the daily rotating password, which was shared without context by a mysterious gentlemen whose main role was to walk around the fair whispering the elected password into the ears of the public. Horvitz maintains that he does not eschew the traditional buy/sell market dynamic, rather he prefers to “make it a bit more difficult.”
Horvitz’ garden, as yet untitled, includes an artwork (or group exhibition, as he sometimes refers to it) which is collaborative in nature. Dirt Pile (2021-ongoing) is a cumulative pile of soil, so far featuring contributions from international artists. Morphing his own work with the contributions of other artists, Horvitz shirks direct ownership and invites other artists to inhabit his garden, via the soil from their homes. The garden—to which the landlord could at any moment extinguish David’s rights—is a practice in cultivating the ephemeral. Throughout this project, and over the course of his practice, Horvitz explores the balance between private and public, relishing the tensions between the two. Participating in both public and private spheres, Horvitz straddles both sides and revels in their inextricability.
-
Provenance: Senga Nengudi’s Public Rituals
Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978)What makes some spaces private and others public, if not rituals? In Los Angeles, a complex series of rituals reify our belief in private property. Property deeds, for instance, give physical form to a political notion; signing a deed a symbolic ritual that shapes spatial realities and delivers economic consequences. This is a ritual of exclusion, an agreement that this parcel of land is private and not public; it is mine and not yours.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic development print; series of 11, each: 12 × 18 in. © Senga Nengudi. Photo: Roderick ‘Quaku’ Young The pandemic greatly altered our daily rituals, sequestering homeowners to their private spaces, while those without a deed are left to live “private” lives in “public” spaces. Throughout modern history, few factors have had a greater impact on shaping urban landscapes than contagion. In 15th-century Italy, an epidemic led to the construction of leper islands; in newly industrialized 18th-century London, the outbreak of cholera resulted in modern sewage infrastructure. These upheavals remind us that urban spaces reflect rituals that are neither determined nor static. These spaces are daily experiments in collective living and continuously reconfigured by competing visions for the future, which contour the conditions and needs of the present.
In her 1979 documentary Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes, Barbara McCullough interviews fellow LA artists of the 1970s Black Art movement (known as LA Rebellion) on the meaning of ritual in their work and practice. In the film, sculpture and performance artist Seng Nengudi describes her public performance work Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978) as a ritual that used public space as its medium.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic development print; series of 11, each: 12 × 18 in. © Senga Nengudi. Photo: Roderick ‘Quaku’ Young In the performance, Nengudi gathered several artists from the Studio Z Collective (1974–1980s) together under a freeway on Pico Boulevard. The participants carried instruments and small talismans and tokens, while adorned in head wraps, sheet scraps and other garments constructed by Nengudi from the nylon mesh of women’s tights. During the performance, artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger danced and dueled to free-form jazz, acting out the tensions between “feminine” and “masculine” societal poles. Nengudi—draped in a large sheet—presided over them to perform an impassioned and improvised ritual of healing between them.
In a 2018 interview with Frieze magazine, Nengudi reflected on the performance’s freeway underpass locale, where “the energy of humans” was “already infused” by the unhoused people who had made it their home. A steep ledge beneath the freeway created a raised plateau where they had built encampments and left behind remnants of daily life. According to the artist, it was here, in a shadowy recess above LA’s privatized public space that people felt “protected,” and subsisted in an “almost ancient way of survival” akin to “Native American cliff dwellings.” Her performance sought to make these invisible rituals visible.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic development print; series of 11, each: 12 × 18 in. © Senga Nengudi. Photo: Roderick ‘Quaku’ Young Nengudi was exploring ritual as a means of transforming the mundane materials, bodily habits and forgotten land of everyday life into something sacred. Ritual can create a moment to acknowledge change and turmoil—but harness it towards collective healing, rather than strife. Today, when collective grieving, healing and recognition feel imperative and yet unattainable, Sengudi’s work reminds us to question the rituals that dictate urban space. Mass upheaval can open space to create new rituals, to choose how we change, and decide what is to remain sacred.
-
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
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
2727 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034
Thru May 1st, 2021 -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Stanley Whitney
Matthew Marks GalleryStanley Whitney’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “How Black is That Blue,” reads like poetry. Utilizing his consistent style of painting “top to bottom,” Whitney’s colorful square works reveal several paintings within each piece. Favoring the asymmetrical, polyrhythmic shapes that he cites in Gee’s Bend quilting, Whitney’s stacked colored rectangles are not neatly packaged. Instead they bleed, drip and scrape, squishing their neighbors and shrinking in size. It is in this sense that his 11 new paintings on view read like poetry, their lines and gestures functioning as punctuation and line breaks, each scrape or nick of exposed white canvas abundant in unspoken meaning.
Stanley Whitney, Sun Moon, 2020 While the paintings are restrained and visibly specific (they feel decidedly finished, in a way I’m not sure I am used to seeing), there is a meditative quality to them. In making these works, Whitney remarks, “When you face the canvas and you’re painting, you have to bring everything to it. […] What comes out of my growing up? What comes out of my Blackness, my maleness, just being a human being? When you’re facing a blank canvas, you need all of these things to make it something.” The result is none of these things, and yet all of them at once accumulating to posit something new, something that looks like this exhibition, where each painting feels like a meditation on being and being in the exhibition is overwhelmingly meditative.
Stanley Whitney, Memory Garden, 2020 Entering the gallery is breathtaking. Each room presents one singular painting — large and mighty in stature — on its own wall. Given ample room these paintings seem to breathe, conversing with one another, each composed of the same parts and yet strikingly different. Whitney is a master of color, evident in his bold usage. Though the paintings are made up of blues, pinks, greens, reds and everything in between, I can be sure to tell you which the “green painting” (Twenty twenty), “yellow painting” (Sun Moon) or “pink painting” (Memory Garden) is.
Though they are boldly multi-hued, as well as significantly sized, they do not appear “colorful” or oppressive but rather muted and pensive. This speaks both to Whitney’s expertise of color and also his understanding of harmony and proportion.
Stanley Whitney, “How Black is That Blue” at Matthew Marks Gallery, 2021 This genre-spanning exhibition takes its influence from many forms — Gee’s Bend quilters as previously mentioned, architecture (look closely and the paintings will start to look like buildings, smartly constructed which, when placed in the context of this exhibition exist as landscapes or cityscapes), and jazz music. The off-beat, whip-smart irregularities of jazz are mimicked in Whitney’s obscure rectangles which have most in common with Beat poets and stream of consciousness method of writing. This exhibition, which can be best described as transcendent, reconciles form and meaning and, alike poetry, surpasses language and the words that construct them.
Stanley Whitney: How Black is That Blue
February 13 – May 8 2021
Images ©Stanley Whitney, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
-
GALLERY ROUNDS: Hana Ward
Ochi ProjectsOchi Projects’ current exhibition, “an exit from this room and others like it,” features the latest painting and ceramic work of artist Hana Ward. In this show (all works 2021) both objects and paintings reflect on themes of time and isolation; feelings we are all too familiar with this past year. However, Ward takes these somewhat somber sentiments, and through luscious colors, illustrative marks and whimsical compositions, depicts scenes of power and potential.
Hana Ward, that drinking-wine-kind-of-thinking, oil on canvas, 2021 The show is made up mainly of paintings of Black female figures existing alone in wistful, reflective states. Rather than seeming to abide existentially in limbo though, Ward’s figures appear purposeful, even hopeful. Most of the paintings the women are in domestic settings as in that drinking-wine-kind-of-thinking, where a woman sits alone with a glass of wine at a dining room table. The illuminated figure appears in contemplation and the window behind her reveals an ethereal moonlit landscape. Although she exists alone in the confines of the dining room, the glow of the moon hints at the beauty and mystical world just beyond the window. In an exit from this room and others like it, a woman stands in the foreground of a room with a red painted floor extending behind her. The focal point leads to an open door, emitting a warm yellow glow that she looks toward hopefully.
Hana Ward, ima koso (now is the time), ceramic, glaze, clock, 2021 Themes of domesticity and time are further explored through the handcrafted ceramic wall pieces that are also a strong component of Ward’s practice. Clocks and vessels of sculpted faces are inter-dispersed throughout the other paintings, directly referencing concepts of time and space with titles such as ima koso (now is the time) where hands of a clock extend from the forehead of the woman they rest on—portraying how time is on the forefront of the mind.
In a year seeming to have no measure, Ward encapsulates this concept in reflection and celebration and looks towards the future. An exit from this room and others like it, reminds us that this moment will hold its mark for each of us, yet progression is in constant forward motion.
Hana Ward: an exit from this room and others like it
at Ochi Projects
March 27 – May 8, 2021Images courtesy of Ochi Projects.
-
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 -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Ishi Glinsky
Chris Sharp GalleryIshi Glinsky’s exhibition explores monuments of survival that honor the sacred practices of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Upon entering Chris Sharp Gallery I am instantly subsumed by Glinsky’s monolithically scaled leather jacket that levitates in the middle of the room. Coral vs. King Snake Jacket (2019) is colossally sublime, towering just over 10 feet tall. I feel an immediate desire to get close to the sculpture. I imagine crawling into the pocket of the worn-in jacket to discover an old receipt or a matchbox. The teeth of the zipper form interlocking arrowheads. Each crease in the leather recalls a story, a gesture, a history; each stud a piercing act of violence. As I look over each intricate detail, I notice that the jacket is adorned with an assortment of patches and pins, as leather jackets often are. Some are insignias for bands like Public Enemy and the Dead Kennedys, while others signify Native American activist groups, such as AIM (The American Indian Movement), and MMIW, stitched in black and red beads to represent missing and murdered Indigenous women. The sleeve of the jacket reads “YOSEMITE MEANS THOSE WHO KILL.” While the leather jacket’s hard exterior is a cultural symbol for rebellion, it also offers warmth and protection. Glinsky’s work embodies Indigenous history, resistance and survival.
Coral vs. King Snake Jacket, 2019 The radically oversized scale of Glinsky’s sculpture pays homage to Indigenous practices and native land that has historically been exploited and unrecognized. Western-hegemonic art history recalls monumental art by minimalist giants and land artists like Donald Judd and James Turrell, who have historically exploited stolen land, using it as a backdrop for their work. Art history works to reinforce violent colonialist narratives. We need new monuments and new storytellers. Glinsky’s sculpture acts as a counter monument that acknowledges and celebrates Indigenous people and their survival. While minimalism offers ahistorical universal ideals, Glinsky’s monument denounces dominance and claims resistance.
Coral vs. King Snake Jacket (detail), 2019 Indigenous scholar and activist Gerald Vizenor characterizes “survivance” as an active sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry. Survivance carries forward Indigenous stories through collective memories and embodied practices.[1] Glinsky’s monument announces and honors Indigenous survival, demanding space for remembrance and existence.
Installation view: Friend ore Foe, 2021; Blue Rider, 2019 Chris Sharp Gallery
runs thru April 24, 2021 -
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
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101, LA, CA, 90021
Thru Apr. 24, 2021; Appointment Only -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Brenna Youngblood, “The LIGHT and the DARK”
Roberts ProjectsHow we balance our individual experiences within the larger scope of our lives in many ways determines who we are, and how we understand and relate to the world around us. Reflecting on the dense and often traumatic events of the past year, which included a global pandemic and a re-awakening to racial injustice, Brenna Youngblood, in her inaugural exhibition at Roberts Projects, mediates her personal associations to these very public events as all of the works in the exhibition comprise a space for both reflection and determined response.
Brenna Youngblood, INCARCERATION, 2020, Mixed media on canvas, 69.75 x 40 in; Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California; Photo Alan Shaffer Blurring the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, and speaking directly to the title of the exhibition as a whole “The LIGHT and the DARK,” i.e., the balance between light and dark, works like INCARCERATION (2020), imply human culpability through the empty hull of a black-and-white striped sweater, the pattern of which is reminiscent of prison uniforms that date back to the 1820s. In this system, prisoners had to remain silent, walk in “lock step” and wore the distinguishing black-and-white stripes, which were meant to suggest the prison bars they lived behind. In Youngblood’s rendition of mixed media, the sweater appears to be trapped within its own incessantly theatricalized and poignant gestural sweep across the canvas, and yet it also appears strangely frozen in space, which further suggests the idea of opposites, of balancing the light with the dark, the good with the bad, the pain with the rapture. The fact the price tag dangles from the bottom left of the frame in a gesture reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s dirty pillow in his seminal work Canyon (1959), further aligns the idea of prejudice and injustice with commerce.
Brenna Youngblood, Hourglass, 2021, Mixed media on canvas, 72 x 60 x 1.5 in (182.9 x 152.4 x 3.8 cm); Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California; Photo Alan Shaffer Youngblood’s use of everyday materials including a pair of her own worn out shoes and an assortment of colorful buttons constitute a grouping of assembled collage works that allow her to imagine a new-fangled topographical facade which she then enhances through a variety of processes including thick impastos, transparent washes and variously loose and smooth brushstrokes. Hourglass (2021) employs hundreds of black buttons pushed to the very top of the picture plane like small circular creatures, jostling each other to and fro and desperately trying to come up for air. Metaphorically, this work specifically speaks to notions of disparity, prejudice and social inequality, and one has the sense that these buttons would rather be anywhere else than variously collected in this tightly claustrophobic mélange of darkness. A strange and hapless cloud floats beneath them, and one can’t be sure if the buttons are trying to escape it or seeking reentry.
Brenna Youngblood: The LIGHT and the DARK
March 20-May 15
Roberts Projects -
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: 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 -
Pick of the Week: Ludovica Gioscia
Baert GalleryThe artistic process is often private. Artists seldom actively show the steps taken to craft an end product, but to some, like Ludovica Gioscia, revealing all is vital to their work. In a large, multi-faceted installation at Baert Gallery entitled Arturo and The Vertical Sea, Gioscia displays every detail of her process.
The installation is principally composed of three large, wooden structures, upon which hang various works: dream robes, portals, double-sided wall papers, and papier-mâché. The first time walking through the space is disorienting, seemingly intentionally so. The wooden structures stick out at odd angles and carve the gallery into diagonal sections. The large, eye-catching works are so diverse in material and inspiration that it overwhelms even your sense of direction.
But slowly, the intricacies of the show appear. Detailed plans for the dream robes and the wallpaper and trial attempts for the brilliantly colored papier-mâché works are also on display, tacked to the wooden structures. They act as narrative markers for the show, a road map through which an understanding of the story can be explored.
This initial stage of the process is vital for grasping Gioscia’s vision. Using, for example, the list of ingredients for her papier-mâché, we gain an understanding of her inspirations. Gioscia details not only the kind of paper and color of dye, but also makes use of less traditional ingredients, like cat hair and joy.
And from those early drafts, we can snag the central thread of the installation: Gioscia’s cat, Arturo. The key inspiration for the works, according to Gioscia herself, stems from a dream in which there were “many Arturos floating in the sea, floating in an incredible mass of vertical water.” This description ties many of the seemingly disparate elements of the show together: the aquamarine robe which Gioscia used to harness her dreams, the wallpapers which flow like waterfalls, and the many Arturo effigies in ceramic, papier-mâché and watercolor.
Arturo and The Vertical Sea is a beautifully orchestrated installation exploring the dreamy and delightfully surprising mind of Ludovica Gioscia and her beloved Arturo.
Baert Gallery
1923 S SANTA FE AVENUE
LOS ANGELES, CA 90021
Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Jeffrey Gibson
Roberts ProjectsI am certainly not alone in feeling that their idea of the American identity has changed drastically in recent years. The “American Dream” has proved itself to be as fanciful as the name suggests. It simply never existed for the majority of Americans. Even the American flag, at one time unifying, has been so thoroughly tainted by the racist, fascist, far-right nationalists that it inspires more hatred than harmony. But, a hopeful, progressive American identity can still be found at “It Can Be Said of Them,” the newest solo exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson.
Throughout his career, Jeffrey Gibson uses his art to explore his identity as gay man of Choctaw and Cherokee heritages, particularly in relation to the broader American identity. Principally, Gibson utilizes bold geometric patterns, traditional Native American craft materials such as beads, precious stones, and fringe, and a Post-Modern use of language to challenge ideas of gender roles and heteronormativity.
The mixing of material and meaning shines with the pair of punching bags suspended in the main hall. With them, Gibson transforms traditionally masculine objects into brilliant, beaded works, labeled with declamatory statements like “CAN THEY SHE HE DO IT? YES WE CAN!” The fusing of stereotypically masculine and feminine activities (boxing and bead craft), adorned with the gender-inclusive rallying cry, presents a powerful, progressive perspective of identity and unity.
Alongside these inspiring rallies, Gibson also recognizes our current cultural crossroads in the hanging bead tapestry, ONE FOOT IN GLORY, ONE FOOT IN HELL. This work again uses Gibson’s customary bright colors and strong geometric patterns and is roughly the size and shape of a flag. It is a new banner to unify under in a time that feels on the edge of immense progress or imminent disaster.
Finally, we come to the paper works, which are some of the strongest and most historically conscious in the show. These collages mix abstract fields of color with advertising, propaganda, and other material surrounding Native American experience throughout the 19th and 20th century. They describe a history that is not at all distant from today and reflect that the histories we’ve been taught are seldom the whole truth.
Roberts Projects
5801 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA, 90232
Appointment Only