Tag: Pick of the Week

I’ve written a lot about Los Angeles and how it’s mistakenly known as an “ugly city.” And while before I’ve been willing to blame that mistake on biased reporting, I’m starting to believe that the call is coming from inside the house. Truthfully, we have only ourselves to blame for our city’s image problem. And it’s more than just the labels we self-ascribe. It’s the images and impressions that have become iconic to Los Angeles. The palm trees and deserts, the waves and sunsets – we supplant the city that we built with the nature that we conquered. These natural icons act as the subjects for the incisive paintings from Jason Mason in his show, “California Rhythm,” on view at Bill Brady Gallery.

I was first struck by Mason’s work when I immersed myself in the details. Mason possesses an immense technical ability; from the gentle gradations of color in waves of water or sand, to the hyper- realistic palm tree on a millennial pink backdrop, he shows himself to be an outstanding painter. He renders the symbols of southern California with an exacting and fine eye.

But the power of his works is not built on technical mastery alone, nor on a sentimental awareness of our cities iconography. Rather, Mason injects into his natural images telltale signs of humanity: like trash floating in the sea or construction equipment. Mason goads the viewer into recognizing the identity of their city not only in the natural beauty but also in our human intervention. These suggestions of humanity highlight the dichotomy of a city like Los Angeles, and the difficulty of aligning a city with natural symbols.

These ideas come to the forefront with the works which introduce textual elements. Cloak and Dagger (2021), for example, takes the classic palm tree vignettes and flips them by transforming them into cell towers. The text (“Cloak and Dagger” written across the canvas) illustrates the thin veneer of Los Angeles’ identity. We want to put forward this front of splendor and iconic nature, but at our core we are a city of wires and towers.

The “California Rhythm” is a syncopated one; it upends our traditional understanding of our city and its iconography, but still ends up with a beautiful melody.

Bill Brady Gallery
603 N. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, California 90036
Thru Oct. 16th, 2021

As an omnipresent symbol across the history of humanity, the ocean assumes many roles. It is a healing force, and is immensely destructive; it is divine and earthly. The ocean encompasses the myriad of natural and mystical forces which have captivated our imagination as a species ad infinitum, inspiring visions of deities and monsters alike. “Obsidian Butterfly,” the newest show from Camille Rose Garcia on view at KP Projects, encapsulates the depths of the ocean and our connection to it.

For the past year, Garcia’s work has centered on the ocean as the Pacific became a refuge for her after being evacuated from Northern California during the wildfires. Across twelve works on panels (often adorned with driftwood) and fourteen smaller works on paper, Garcia draws on this experience to explore the shamanic and healing properties of the ocean. In her brightly colored paintings, Garcia often personifies the ocean as a healer/goddess figure, adorned with shells and sea stars.

In the titular work, Obsidian Butterfly (2021), we see one such goddess archetype articulated in Garcia’s signature style. The macabre, black-teared woman evokes the dualistic symbolism that the ocean itself evokes. While herself appearing as a kind of witch, gesturing out a spell with a wave of her hand, the warm, almost neon, palette is inviting and enticing – a sirens call. This sunburst scene is encircled by a vignette ocean floors and jungle vines, as if peering through a portal to another world.

One of the most striking works, Serpents of the Abyss (2021), again utilizes the sea-witch figures, this time in accompanying roles. They pick up instruments constructed of sea shells to announce your arrival to yet another realm, this one far ominous. A cave – or perhaps a maw – shrouds a spiny conch shell, which in turn has its own secrets. The entrance, however, is guarded by four identical serpent heads – the hydra. Smoke billows from their eyes and creates a psychedelic haze, one where the line between enchantment and peril is inexorably blurred.

Above all else, “Obsidian Butterfly” – and in fact, the entire oeuvre of Garcia’s career – is as aesthetically appealing as it is deeply rooted in the collective history of the symbols of our world, both natural and supernatural.

KP Projects
633 N. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, California 90036
Thru Oct. 9th, 2021

Paper is a flexible medium. It is unconstrained frames and backings, untethered by nails or staples, and has become essential across countries and centuries. Still, in the canon of western art history, the primacy of canvas painting has pushed works on paper aside, and only recently have they been able to garner serious appreciation. However, with a wide variety of accompanying techniques ranging from ink prints to spray-paint, paper has been a wellspring of mastery for artists around the globe and throughout history. Four contemporary artists – Amadour, Artiste Ouvrier & Zeto, and Dennis Muraguri – have been brought together at Athenessa Gallery to explore paper’s extensive repertoire in an aptly titled show, “ART ON PAPER.”

Amadour, a recent UCLA graduate, was the original driving force behind my interest in visiting this show. Their works of ink on paper are enchanting landscapes of familiar locales: Brentwood, Kenter Canyon, and others. The particular flatness of Amadour’s paintings, coupled with their inversion of the traditionally white negative space to be black, creates a mysterious and ethereal aura around the works. The dense and acute works are striking examples of ink-on-paper and are promising for a young artist.

But while Amadour’s monochrome paper works are structured and clean, the joint efforts of graffiti artists Artiste Ouvrier & Zeto are delightful jaunts across art history and their own long careers. The works begin with Artiste Ouvrier hand cut stencils, the same kind he uses in his street art but now transposed to paper. Whether incredibly detailed renditions of cathedrals or reproductions of Alphonse Mucha, Ouvrier’s stencil work is impressionistic and masterful, but the work is only half done. Zeto, a graffiti artist working since the 1980s, paints over the works, adding his signature pink elephants and aping Murakami. Zeto’s additions add a level of whimsy and make clear the hand of the artist which is absent in stencil-based works, an effect which is heightened by the artisanal paper on which the work occurs.

Finally, we come to the large wood-block prints of Kenyan artist Dennis Muraguri. On large sheets of paper, Muraguri imprints scenes of Matatu culture: highly decorated and vibrant privately owned buses which compete for customers throughout Nairobi. The prints are intricately detailed, demonstrating Muraguri’s impressive wood-carving skills and technical prowess. The medium of printing is particularly notable, drawing connections between the commercial nature of Matatu culture and printing’s roots in mass media.

Athenessa Gallery
616 S. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, California 90036
Thru Aug Sep 28th, 2021

It’s hard to imagine another time in my life when the word “home” will carry so much weight. The past year has redefined it for all of us. Home has become more vital than ever, yet home is more unstable than ever. Home is where we were told to stay, but home has been found in the most far-flung places. Home is safe and home is scary. It’s jamais vu: that which has always been intimately familiar is now strangely foreign. This derealization of our interior world – of our homes, of our society, of ourselves —  is the focus of the current group exhibition at Maddox Gallery, “Dysmorphia,” on through August 31^st.

The concept of the interior space is most readily explored with its most basic interpretation: the physical space which surrounds us. This interpretation is found in “Dysmorphia” through the works of Andrew Cooper and Nevena Prijic. Cooper’s paintings, such as Breakfast is Ready (2021), are pictorially-flattened, brightly colored illustrations of unpeopled spaces, reminiscent of early Matisse works like Harmony in Red, where the elements of the room themselves become decorative. Prijic, by contrast, inserts herself into the interior spaces – sprawled on a couch or sat tucked into herself. This highlights the solitude of the literal interior space, closed off both physically and emotionally.

But we also find society itself as an internalizing and unreal force on display, particularly with the expansive works of James Verbicky and Wyatt Mills. Mills’ Vague Traditions (2020) draws upon the art historical motif of the Madonna and Child, creating a wildly expressive yet recognizable representation of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. As the name implies, it asks us to consider the impact of Christianity and Christian symbols on our society, how the traditions are twisted and reformed to fit new purposes with familiar faces.

Finally, we are confronted with the most interior space of all: the self. All of the artists in this show – and most art today – deal in some way with our conceptions of self, but Sol Summers, Jahlil Nzinga, Sean Crim, and Justin Bower are notable for their directness. Their works, in particular Summers and Nzinga’s collaborative work Did You Find What You Were Looking For? (2020), question the ways we view ourselves, harmonizing the intense complexity of the inner world and the stark simplicity of our exterior actions. A sense of home may be difficult to find again, but perhaps it’s plainer to recognize than we imagine.

Maddox Gallery
8811 Beverly Blvd.
West Hollywood, California 90048
Thru Aug 31st, 2021

I feel like most people would have a tough time imagining something more ideologically opposed to art than data analytics. Even the phrase sounds unartistic, more at home in investment banking than gallery houses. Art just feels too subjective to be encapsulated by the rigid world of sums and figures. But perhaps that’s the wrong perspective. In the Royale Project’s new group show, “Off the Charts,” we see a collection of artists engaging with how data can be encapsulated by art.

While numbers are objective, the visualization and illustration of them is far from it, and can take surprising and beautiful turns. Take, for example, the computer generated, two-toned painting from Ken Lum, The Path from Sanity to Madness (2012). A labyrinth, like all puzzles, forces your brain to act in a programmatic way. When you view Lum’s work, you become a computer working your way methodically through a maze from entrance to exit. Just like in life, you must find your way through it – though this maze in particular is much more easy than the maze of life.

Other works in the show draw not upon computer generation but upon the natural world, attempting to physicalize things we only know through the lens of data. Sway to the Sun: Motion No. 1  (2021) from Luftwerk is one such sculpture. The neon light, twisting and spiraling until shooting upwards like an out of control firework, is a visualization of the growth of a peppermint plant. All plants twist and turn to chase the sun and respond to wind and rain, but their slow development makes it impossible to perceive except through careful measurement. This sculpture freezes in place what is an otherwise invisible dance.

But others in the show are not so abstractedly related to our experience as dancing plants and computer mazes. The two works from Josh Callaghan, Apocalypto Ticket Sales by Week (2018) and Work Place Injury by Type (2008), are fascinating because of the divide between the minimalist beauty of the work and absurd nature of the subject. Particularly Apocalypto, which juts proudly into the space as steeply inclined graph made of red steel. Their titles being the only insight into their design, they call into question the pure aesthetic qualities of data visualization and the power of artistic context.

Royale Projects
432 S. Alameda St.
Los Angeles, California 90013
Thru Sep 30th, 2021

While painting may, in most cases, operate within the mind alone, sculpture is intrinsically connected to the body. Sculpture itself has a certain corporeality. The works aren’t abstracted onto a wall, but rather exist in the world among us. We are forced to reckon with their existence because we have to adjust ourselves around sculptures. To take them in, we have to navigate around them, walking around, over, under, or through them. The physical nature of sculpture and its broad array of functions is on display at Various Small Fires’ new group show, “Psychosomatic.”

Many of the works have an overt connection to the body, like Isabel Yellin’s Gut Feeling (2021) or Nevine Mahmoud’s Untitled (2021). Mahmoud’s work in particular is striking for its erotic posturing of a marble female nude, drawing on imagery found throughout Mahmoud’s other works. But most interestingly is the rough, unfinished edges of the otherwise smooth and polished form; they provide a tactile sense of craftsmanship, giving evidence of the ever-working hands of the artist molding the work. This craftsmanship is seen again in the workman’s table upon which the statue rests, a coarse pedestal for a classical medium.

Still other works deal with the connection between body, mind, and art in a more tacit fashion. Amelia Lockwood’s excelsis (2021), a ceramic work, is a colorful altar, inviting visitors to approach and participate in its ritual nature. The work possesses a certain auspiciousness, with its visual similarities to a menorah and highly decorative patterns. It sits powerfully in the space and demands attention. Lockwood’s work relates that religion, similarly to art, can act as a bridge between mind and body.

Finally, we come to the works of Kristen Morgin – some of the last seen in the show. Morgin, unlike Mahmoud or Lockwood, draws firmly from contemporary culture. Her clay recreations of children’s books and old DVDs, like the items from Claes Oldenburg’s store, invite you to take the sensations of viewing art out of the gallery. What would happen – to our minds, our bodies, or even our souls – if we were to look at a real used copy of Mr. and Mrs. Smith with the same awe?

Various Small Fires
812 North Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90038
Thru July 16th, 2021