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Tag: POTW
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Pick of the Week: Theodora Allen
Blum & Poe[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]We are supposed to wish upon them when we see them fall. But however sentimentalized shooting stars may be, they are merely rocky debris skimming the atmosphere — all their mythology is manufactured by those of us watching in awe from our Earthly confines. In the five new paintings of Theodora Allen on view in Syzygy, utopian and metaphysical ideals meet celestial bodies and ethereal mindscapes in Allen’s timeless, contemporary visual lexicon.In the centerpiece of the exhibition, the triptych Syzygy (Narcissus) (2021), two shooting stars encircle a flaming central star. Aligned diagonally across the panels, this titular work has achieved syzygy, an astronomical phenomenon where celestial bodies configure in a line. It’s also bursting with mythology and Allen offers a grounding touch by portraying scenes from different interpretations of the myth of Narcissus in the center of each star so that they look like diamond portals. Through Allen’s rigorous painting process, the triptych assumes a translucent, ghostly quality, as though the shooting stars are supernatural overseers of human stories and affairs.
Just as Narcissus became enamored with his own reflection, the rest of the exhibition is rife with mirror images and repeated symbols. Falling Star (Memento Mori) (2021) is a similar image to the triptych but unlike its counterparts, it shoots straight down rather than toward the orbit of another star, serving as a standalone reminder of mortality. Employing mirrored color palettes, composition styles and motifs throughout the series, Allen engages with themes of regeneration and cyclicality, the creation and destruction of the natural world.
In the trio of smaller scale geometric paintings — The Amulet, Origin and Struck (all 2021) — infinity symbols interlock, the tails of comets link to form shields and an arrow pierces a heart into symmetric halves. Though the symbols are imbued with familiarity and history, the originality with which Allen wields them transports viewers into her otherworldly realm full of imagined landscapes, images and ideas. In Allen’s hands, everyday emblems become meditative and elusive, positing existential questions about whether we are looking inward and outward from ourselves.
The reality of shooting stars may not be as romantic as their lore and astronomy may have disproven their magic, but Theodora Allen beautifully reminds us of how they tether us to our instinctive needs for reflection — of the past, of the future, of ourselves and others.
Blum & Poe
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2727 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Thru Feb. 26th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Noelia Towers
de boerBe 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 -
Pick of the Week: Ken Gonzales-Day
Luis De Jesus Los AngelesIn “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 -
Pick of the Week: Jane Margarette
Anat EbgiJane 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 -
Pick of the Week: Shrubs
Night GalleryUpon entering the stunning new group show at Night Gallery, one of my first thoughts was: Why is it called Shrubs? A shrub conjured in my mind a certain nondescript, low-growing bush — nothing memorable and certainly nothing to write home about. But after walking through the galleries twice, I realized just how aptly and brilliantly the show was named; shrubs encompass an impressive breadth of earthly flora characterized by their resilience and diversity. As a title, Shrubs connotes a certain manifold spirit and quotidian quality captured perfectly across geographies and mediums by the 37 contemporary artists in the show, all of whom intimately explore human relationships with the natural world.
There is nothing new about art that reacts to nature, but Shrubs somehow introduces a groundbreaking approach by coalescing an array of inventive artists working in sculpture, photography, landscape painting, still-lifes, and more. Each work is breathtaking in its own right and deeply personal to its creator yet contributes deftly to an overarching contemplation of how nature exists both in opposition and in tandem with the modern world.
We see calmative scenes of everyday interactions with the outside world, such as in Hayley Barker’s Side Yard with Kali (2022), an oil on linen portrayal of a flowering yard replete with potted plants. Melanie Schiff’s suite of three pigment prints (all 2021) of chamomile buds scattered atop silhouettes of limbs invoke the inextricability of nature, humanity and art. Meanwhile, Sterling Wells’ watercolor Agaves of Auto Zone (2022), which depicts garbage nestled under succulents in a parking lot, is an indictment of human intrusions affecting the plant species native to Southern California. And we see Sam Moyer’s While I’m in Paradise (2021), a plaster-coated canvas inlaid with marble fragments in a skeletal formation, in conversation with Beatriz Cortez’s unyielding wiry, steel sculpture of a tree, Roots 6 (2021).
There are simply too many notable works for me to do them all justice, but what I found especially refreshing about Shrubs is that the show doesn’t favor any one perspective or mode of meaning. Instead, the show honors each artist’s relationship to nature equally and celebrates a miscellaneous collection of responses to a world rife with spectacles. It’s exhilarating to see how so many talented artists view the world we inhabit and conjure abstractions or representations of it in so many different ways.
Night Gallery
2276 E 16th St
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Feb. 5th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Kentaro Kawabata
Nonaka-HillTo walk through Kentaro Kawabata’s solo exhibition at Nonaka-Hill is to be constantly excited by original and unexpected forms around every corner. Working with porcelain clay, Kawabata creates an alchemical wonderland by amalgamating innovative materials into sculptures that range from graceful to awkward, otherworldly to earthy.
I was immediately drawn into the fine details of the works and his ability to transform porcelain by adding new materials to achieve a fascinating fusion of forms. His sculptures are each accented with bits of glass, stone, metal or sand worked into the surface of the porcelain at various stages of their production. The most striking effect is that of the pulverized stained glass which creates beautiful cascades of color when pressed into the white porcelain and melted in the kiln. Some works are glazed to a sheen while others are coated with silver and dipped into a sulphurated hot spring to achieve a matte iridescent varnish. Other works still are finished with a wash of oxidized silver that turns dry and brown, like rusting metal.
This latest series, titled Soos, is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the word “source” as well as a reference to how Kawabata answered the SOS call for attention from his unfinished clay projects. All the sculptures are made from leftover clay from previous pieces that Kawabata felt compelled to recycle and give new life to. This sense of cyclical energy and renewed vivacity is abundantly clear in the way his forms masquerade as decorative objects or traditional sculptures but are revealed to be something else entirely upon closer inspection.
The works feel simultaneously improvisational and cohesive, clearly from the hand of a master with reverence for his craft and the courage to experiment. Knowing that the artist worked with his hands to crimp and manipulate the material, the works are (literally) imbued with a deeply personal touch. There is an unmistakable delicacy to the porcelain, but there is also an unprecedented roughness in the surface textures, fractured edges and gilded platinum studs hiding in the crevices, thus revealing a darker side of a traditionally exquisite material or perhaps of the artist himself.
I thought I was seeing the forms of serving bowls, deep sea coral or collectible trinkets, but I didn’t fully begin to appreciate Kawabata’s innovation until I discarded my own preconceived notions of what his sculptures should be. While they do recall organic shapes in flora and anatomy, in truth, his ceramics defy all characterization and are best seen as brand-new harmonies, whimsical and unique in their own right.
Nonaka-Hill
720 N Highland Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Thru Jan. 29th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Paolo Colombo
Baert GalleryAs the omicron variant tightens its grip on the world, it seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is receding, evading us once again. For the first time in a long time, I recalled the anxious uncertainty that became all too familiar to us all in the early throes of the pandemic. Many of us again sought out ways to comfort ourselves and find solace in the little things. My search for calm led me to Baert Gallery where, upon seeing Paolo Colombo’s works, I immediately knew he was an artist who captured the essence of balance and meditation we all so desperately need.
In his second exhibition at the gallery, Colombo presents several large-scale watercolors that merge abstract forms with organic subject matter. Poppies, small forest creatures, and levitating circles are carefully inlaid over colorful panels of fine freehand crosshatching. We see hummingbirds reaching for floating flowers, a hedgehog curled playfully on its back, a woman’s face wearing a soft smile — all suspended in an enigmatic, figurative dreamscape.
The watercolor works are painstakingly detailed, best viewed as closely as possible, with each panel taking up to weeks to complete. It’s easy to imagine the 72-year-old artist hunched over a sunlit table with nothing more than paper and watercolors to occupy his mind for hours on end. The lines are perfectly imperfect, thicker in some places and wavier in others, signaling a more lighthearted approach to an otherwise mechanical technique. Sober and delicate, the lines also give the impression that everything harmoniously coexists within the artist’s abstracted realm of consciousness, that this strange dimension of colors and lines is no less alive than the fully formed animals and flowers that occupy it.
It was explained to me that the artist spent hours and hours at his studio during the pandemic, patiently sketching fields of crossing lines and shading hares. I can only presume that he regarded this extra time to create as a privilege, for every meticulous stroke is applied with such thorough care, a true labor of love. I was drawn into every intimate detail as if I could feel exactly how his hands once gestured across the page. For Colombo, to create these works must have been just as meditative an experience as it is to view them. For me, the artist’s tranquility became mine by invitation.
In a recent interview, Colombo, who was first an established curator before resuming his work as an artist, refers to curating as a discipline and art as a practice. “I like curating, but painting is like breathing,” he says. Well, thanks to his calmative compositions and the refreshing sensation Colombo so fluently distills, we can all breathe a little easier.
Baert Gallery
1923 S Santa Fe Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Jan. 22nd, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Hugo McCloud
Vielmetter Los AngelesWalking into Vielmetter Los Angeles’ sunlit loft, it’s easy at first glance to overlook the series of flower paintings inside as traditional floral still lifes. But the stark white backgrounds, untraditional choice of medium, and emotive compositions belie Hugo McCloud’s skillful mastery of manipulating abject materials into visually stunning forms.
Self-taught with a background in industrial design, it’s obvious that McCloud is a restless experimenter. In “translated memories,” McCloud continues his practice of incorporating plastic merchandise bags to investigate connections between industrialization and the natural world. Delicate slivers of colored plastic making up pots, leaves, and petals are cut with a razor and applied with heat piece by piece — at the end of the painstaking process, the plastic looks as liquid as a brushstroke.
As I inspected the surfaces of the works, I found it nearly impossible to discern where the swaths of plastic ended and the paint began. To me, the ease with which the plastic blends into the oil and wood panels echoes the lack of separation between the natural world and manmade pollutants. The temporality of the flowers contrasts beautifully with the tenacity of the non-biodegradable plastic to create tension and meaning beyond their physical forms. In turn, the works double as collaged records of urban decay and economic displacement in the communities from which the materials were collected.
The most compelling aspect of the exhibition aside from the exquisite use of plastic is the multifaceted biographical interpretations of McCloud’s upbringing and his time in quarantine. Inspired by elements of his father’s sculptures and his uncle’s floral still lifes, McCloud mimics artistic lineages on both sides of his family and marries disparate practices to pay homage to his culturally mixed identity. By titling the works after the dates they were created, the artist also creates a visual diary of his quest for calm and beauty over the last year of his life.
Further, McCloud capitalizes on universal memories of seeking stillness and reprieve from the chaos of the pandemic years. The flowers, their fleeting beauty suspended, capture the feeling of the entire world grinding to a halt and provide a meditative viewing experience. Still, the flowers are in flux. Budding stems and unfinished lines suggest the potential for newness and growth. Different views of the same bouquets over time signal the ever-forward passing of seasons and a sense of long-term hope. We too, McCloud reminds us, will change with the times.
Vielmetter Los Angeles
1700 S Santa Fe Ave, #101
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Jan. 8th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Wolfgang Tillmans
Regen ProjectsIn our post-truth age, where it’s easy to assume any image has been digitally manipulated, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ stands out from the pack for his striking candidness. In his eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, the German artist presents a diverse array of works ranging in genre from portraiture and landscape to architectural and abstract photography, and enunciates his longstanding commitment to capturing the truth of how it feels to be alive today.
Spanning nearly three decades, the photographs in the show are a natural evolution, decidedly not a revolution, of Tillmans’ famed practice as a zeitgeist documentarian. True to his roots, the show is punctuated with astrophotography and snapshots of underground counterculture that become poetic through Tillmans’ lens. In turn, these vignettes of his childhood passion and social life unwittingly transcend his personal history and become part of a shared cultural experience with the viewer.
Other works in the show of found objects and settings feel like they were captured offhand in the artist’s everyday adventures but remain deeply personal and honest. Tillmans sees life everywhere; in the industrial, the natural, the photomechanical. To Tillmans, every nook and cranny of the world is worthy of artistic investigation and every seemingly trite or random image has value in forming a holistic perspective.
With clear reverence for the aesthetic and conceptual capacities of the photographic medium, Tillmans is also interested in portraying transient moments of matter in motion. The exhibition’s titular work, Concrete Column, captures a pillar of wet concrete being poured, freezing the substance in its transitory state between liquid and solid and giving it eternal life in an otherwise ephemeral split-second. Through restless seascapes, shifting shadows, and celestial movements, Tillmans magnificently makes the impermanent permanent.
The exhibition is complemented by the soundtrack to Tillmans’ debut full-length album, Moon in Earthlight, which effectively heightens the imagination and senses by making the viewing experience more intimate and immersive. Accompanied by a film playing on loop in the gallery’s listening room, the 53-minute audio project fuses divergent production methods in the same vein as Tillmans’ photographic practice.
No one understands better than Tillmans that the truth is elusive because it is subjective. Recognizing the inconsistency of our lived experiences, he then seeks to depict common grounds and explore existential queries that plague us all: Who are we? Where did we come from? How are we all connected? Perhaps Tillmans’ greatest genius lies in his ability to imbue the ordinary and the familiar with a renewed sense of wonder and universality, a reminder we all need now more than ever.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Thru Dec. 23rd, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Anna Valdez
Ochi ProjectsSince moving out of my hometown, I have amassed a small trove of Polaroid photos documenting the clutter in all my living spaces. I’d always liked the idea of keeping pocket-sized time capsules of the things I used to own and person I used to be in those places. Walking into Anna Valdez’s exhibition My Own Private Arcadia at Ochi Projects, I immediately knew that this impulse to document our environments and ephemera was something we shared.
At first glance, the subjects of Valdez’s richly hued paintings seem like curated collections of found objects, the canvasses crowded with patterned fabrics, conch shells, houseplants, art books, and decorative vases. But closer inspection reveals that, altogether, these items of personal significance conjure narratives about the artist’s own domestic life and serve as autobiographical records of her human impact on places and things.
Valdez’s mastery of painting across genres is abundantly evident in the way she reinvents and honors its lineage. She gives a nod to the Dutch still life tradition by incorporating cultural objects and animal skulls, symbolic reminders of contemporary life and mortality. Across paintings, ceramics, and one sweeping mural, Valdez boldly commands a hyper saturated spectrum of colors and creates compositions that are endlessly stimulating without being overwhelming.
Certain objects take on multiplicities of meaning, too, and seem to coexist in parallel realities — such as the same flowerpot or red bandana being depicted several times in different mediums and varying levels of realism. Valdez thus blurs the line between representation and abstraction and reminds us à la Magritte that the image of an object is not the object itself.
Although Valdez offers a generous peek into her sacred arcadia, there is also the uncanny feeling of absence and lack of human intervention in her representative spaces, leaving me wondering who or what might be hovering just out of the artist’s gaze, remaining forever unknown to the viewer.
I could never fully explain why I so dutifully photographed all my living spaces, chalking it up to my sentimental nature for years, until Valdez showed me why she does it. She recognizes that the objects of our surroundings — the trinkets strewn across tables, the books we dog-ear and re-read, the views from our windows — have the capacity to outlive us and tell stories about who we were in those bygone moments.
Ochi Projects
3301 W. Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Thru Dec. 18th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Lindsay August-Salazar
Lowell Ryan ProjectsFew grasp the power of language to be visually enthralling while expanding our consciousnesses as well as Lindsay August-Salazar, whose solo show at Lowell Ryan Projects, “There’s No Place Like No Place” brings these questions to the forefront. Employing vibrant color schemes punctuated by a symbolic lexicon of the artist’s own invention, August-Salazar challenges us to recall a poetic past and make our own meaning in the face of our ever-changing mediascape.
The exhibition opens with six large-scale, burlap-grounded paintings that showcase August-Salazar’s fearless command of color and energetic brushwork. In her animated compositions that appear to levitate off the canvas, every rhythmic swath, gesture, and shape are as cohesive and captivating as recorded choreography — vestiges of her background as a hip-hop dancer.
The paintings also feel distinctly collage-like in their amalgamation of symbols and use of cutouts that tease fragments of coarse burlap beneath the glib acrylic. In referencing collage, August-Salazar reiterates the sheer multitude of histories, meanings, and interpretations that characterize her exploration.
Up in the sun-soaked loft, August-Salazar displays a suite of 47 unframed works on paper that echo the vibrancy and linguistic themes of her paintings, furthering them through repetition. I felt like I was entering a secret playroom or ancillary studio space brimming with insights to her creative process or possibly long-awaited clues for translation. Hanging gracefully off the wall, these delicate works introduce an element of levity and evoke a sense of childish whimsy and wonder to complement the palpable intensity of the paintings below.
At every turn, certain symbols of August-Salazar’s visual vocabulary (which she fittingly titles Abstract Character Copy) jump out — a smattering of English letters, a trio of hieroglyphics, a half-crown, an arc of yellow reminiscent of a Warhol banana. Each individual element of her wide array of visual signs felt vaguely familiar yet entirely unprecedented, like faces I’d seen in a dream that I yearned to recognize.
Through the eccentricity and indefinability of her visual vocabulary, August-Salazar conceals more than she reveals and offers little more than a sparing understanding of a hidden message only she knows. She thereby creates the uncanny feeling of walking through her own personal utopia — one that I was overjoyed to have been invited into even though I didn’t speak the language.
Lowell Ryan Projects
4619 W. Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
Thru Dec. 11th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Unseen Picasso
Norton Simon MuseumMy first review for Artillery Magazine – almost two years ago now – was for my favorite museum in southern California, The Norton Simon. I recently went back and reread that article, and I found that my own writing was, to be kind, academic. Dry as a bone, really. There’s a strong voice, but one that is far more interested in saying something than showing something. It reduces the art to a history lesson instead of elevating it to the contemporary moment. But that’s what first steps are all about, making a place to look back and see how we’ve grown. Artillery Magazine has awarded me with that opportunity, and so for my fiftieth (and final) Pick of the Week, we’re revisiting The Norton Simon Museum and their new exhibition, “Unseen Picasso.”
I don’t love Picasso. I have a hard time liking the work of artists who I feel I would’ve disliked personally. It’s why I prefer Cézanne to Gaugin, or Caillebotte to Degas. But with Picasso, it extended further than the personal; I found his work, particularly later works, to be uninspiring and disconnected. In short, I’m a Georges Braque die-hard.
But it’s time to put old biases aside and welcome a new side to Picasso – an unseen side, if you will. Through this exhibition’s collection of lesser known lithographs, prints, and linocuts, I saw the threads of Picasso’s creativity and genius manifesting around me. In Dove (1949), for example, the bird, jutting out in sharp relief from the swirling gradations of black lithographic ink, is masterful and subtly detailed. It’s gentle gaze echoes its status as a symbol of peace.
What’s special about the prints in the exhibition is not only the technical wizardry and expert use of vibrant color (as in Bacchanal with Goats and Spectator (1959)), but the nods to Picasso’s creative process. The small inscriptions, the notes to the printers, the Roman numeral dating – these signs of the artists method in the work are personal in a way that is refreshing in a Picasso. They elevate the work as they ground it, making clear the labors of creation. In this room at the Norton Simon, Picasso is no longer a titan of Modern Art, but a craftsman, one who iterates ideas and claims perfection with a decisive “bon à tirer” – ready to print.
“Unseen Picasso,” and Picasso himself, conveys that we can all as artists and people strive for nothing but growth. I am immensely grateful for my time growing as a columnist with Artillery, and I look forward to continuing to grow and forge works that I too will proudly stamp, bon à tirer.
The Norton Simon Museum
411 W. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, California 90232
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Amoako Boafo
Roberts ProjectsIn his essay on photography entitled “The Decisive Moment,” Henri Cartier Bresson describes the intricacies of portraiture and the subject. He writes that the ideal portrait is a “true reflection of a person’s world – which is as much outside him as inside him.” We are just as much individuals as we are part of the larger whole. And while Bresson writes about photography, this lesson applies well to painting, where the artist can make far more deliberate choices as to what is reflected in the subject. The portraits of Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo in exhibition at Roberts Projects, “Singular Duality: Me Can Make We,” express complexities both internal and external in a vibrant celebration of Blackness.
Black portraiture – which has been routinely excluded from the western art historical canon – is a subject that has been by some of the greatest contemporary artists, the likes of Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. But what sets Boafo apart is the personal and impressionistic style of his subjects. The textured brushstrokes of the skin, mixing tan, blue, and black to create a complex color gradient, point to the intense care that Boafo wields. These direct signs of the artist illustrate the time and thought with which Boafo approaches his craft.
Contrasted with these apparent brush strokes are the striking fields of color that act as garb and backdrop for the subjects. The backdrops in particular are intentionally plain, with near shadows which cause the sitters to pop off the canvas and into the room. Combined with their larger than life stature, there is an immediacy to their presence – they exude an effortless confidence and ease, and above all comfortable with their self-expression.
But there is more than ease in these subjects. In Yellow Throw Pillow (2021), we see a seated figure resting their head on their folded hands, staring past the artist in a moment of reflection. The plaintive, wistful air surrounding the work is in contrast to the joy of Red Collar (2021) or the decisiveness of Purple Shadow (2021), demonstrating Boafo’s interest in capturing the wide-range of emotion, particularly for Black Americans in this past year.
Amoako Boafo’s work is simultaneously deeply personal, reflected in the care with which he paints his subjects, and illustrative of the wide range of human experience. Boafo offers ledgers of Black experience both inside and out, the individual and the whole.
Roberts Projects
5801 Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90232
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Humming to the Sound of Fear
Helen J. GalleryThe Korean Peninsula is a region rooted in duality. It is a land both literally and ideologically split down the middle, a lasting result of Cold War-era proxy wars, Western imperialist action, and an on-going brutal dictatorship. And even before the interventions that created the north and south, the peninsula has long been a place of dueling characteristics. The Korean identity has been hard-fought, being constantly re-defined and altered through centuries of alternately Chinese and Japanese colonialist action. This dualistic identity is explored in Helen J Gallery’s current group exhibition of four Korean and Korean-American artists, “Humming to the Sound of Fear.”
The most immediate work upon entering the gallery is the soundscape created by YoungEun Kim. Inspired by the loudspeakers which constantly blare information across the de-militarized zone between North and South Korea, Kim creates her own speaker system. Using only the highest frequencies of famous South Korean love songs, Kim organizes a fragmented and chirping melody, reminiscent of bird calls. This creates an ambient juxtaposition between the natural and man-made, carried through in the works of the other artists.
Two in particular who carry this theme are Jae Hwan Lim and Song Sumin, painters exhibiting a wide body of work in the exhibition. Sumin’s works of acrylic on canvas capture the mountainous ranges of Korea, blanketed in thick canopies, yet streaked across in billowing clouds of smoke. In white stain (2017), we see the smoke stretch across two canvases, first appearing as benign fog until it crashes cataclysmically into the earth, revealing itself to be a missile strike. This conflation of nature and war, violence and serenity, lies at the core of many of Sumin’s works.
Lim’s examination of duality, on the other hand, lies in a simultaneously traditional and radical use of medium, as he applies traditional ink painting techniques to large sheets of plastic. The painted mountain scenes, all inspired from Mt. Kumgang, a mountain which famously acted as a reconciliatory bridge between North and South Korea until 2008. The ink paintings create a familiar mixing of natural and manmade, of new and old, and are striking reminders of the immortality not only of artistic forms but of the plastic we use every day.
Finally, we arrive at the work of Kyle Tata’s photo collage series Lookout Mountain Lab Production Notes. Diving into the archives of the US military backed film producer, Lookout Mountain Lab, Tata examines the far-reaching tendrils of war during the 20th century and the ways in which conflict and propaganda can color every aspect of life.
Across the four artists in “Humming to the Sound of Fear,” we find the myriad of ways that we interact with conflict, nature, and borders both real and psychological.
Helen J. Gallery
929 Cole Ave.
Los Angeles, California 90038
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Devin B. Johnson
NicodimGrief comes in countless forms. There are as many ways to feel the peculiar sensation of loss as there are things to lose. One can lose another, something external, and just the same – or just as differently –one can lose oneself. With bereavement, there is no wrong way and there is no manual; it is intensely personal and yet universal, one of the few things that we are all assured to feel regardless of how long we live. And one a time like the present, so deeply entwined with grief, we should confront it head-on. In Nicodim’s current exhibition, “My Heart Cries, I Set Out an Offering for You,” we see how loss and grief can manifest through paintings and sculptures from stellar young artist Devin B. Johnson
What we find in Johnson’s abstracted and ethereal paintings is not loss, but the echoes of loss. We witness the people who are still here and must meet that loss. Those who lay lilies at street corners. Those who come home to empty apartments or huddled families. Those who are haunted, as we all are, by one ghost or another. These representations of loss are more striking than others because they illustrate the subtle and quiet moments that come in its wake.
The paintings utilize a sepia-toned palette, reflecting the somber emotional state induced by his paintings. They are highly textured paintings evoke sensations of rust and ash, forms of loss in their own right. Johnson’s use of mixed-media paints for his more abstracted work, along with the understated gridlines and swaths of color, pay homage to some of the great Black abstract artist whom inspire him like Torkwase Dyson and Cullen Washington Jr.
Coming off of an unintentionally extended residency at Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock, Senegal and responding to the on-going battle for civil rights occurring in the United States, Johnson’s interest in loss, grief, and memory are deeply rooted to the current moment. An unexpected word is quietly repeated through his paintings: GLORY. It’s an odd word to be associated with loss, and reminds me of a statue that recently captivated me at the Met: Antonin Mercié’s Gloria Victis, glory to the vanquished. The work, depicting the winged goddess Pheme carrying a dying French soldier, reminds one that even in the most tragic moments of loss one can find uplifting strength. Johnson’s work reminds us that only by fighting through these darkest hours can we possibly find our destined glory.
Nicodim
1700 S. Santa Fe, #160
Los Angeles, California 90021
Thru Oct. 16th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Ariana Papademetropoulos
Jeffrey DeitchFairytales operate in a special place of human consciousness. They offer the building blocks of moralism and societal standards, for better or worse. Though folk stories, myths and fairytales are found throughout every culture, there are many common elements: simple language, universal symbology, repeated characters and motifs – essentially, they are created to be easily accessible. This may seem at ends with fine art, for which inaccessibility has been a hallmark for the better part of the last century. But the pick of the week (and perhaps the best show in Los Angeles) works to unite the two; with original works and a curated group show, “The Emerald Tablet” from Ariana Papademetropoulos at Jeffrey Deitch is a must see.
We’ll start with the originals. The large scale paintings offer a good introduction to the tone and rhythm of the show as a whole. They feature Papademetropoulos’ spectacular painting ability and weave a miraculous worlds of impossible proportions. Be it ghosts, unicorns, alien landscapes or wicker furniture, Papademetropoulos’ works entice the viewer into her occult dimension and prepare them for the magic which awaits them in the subsequent galleries.
The group show is a confluence of some of the greatest contemporary artists that Los Angeles has to offer. From up-and-comers like Lucy Bull to past powerhouses like Mike Kelley, Papademetropoulos gathers works which build off her own foundation and carry the ideas of occult happenings to new heights. The most striking works in the main room are the carousel from Raúl de Nieves and the witch-faced cottage from Jordan Wolfson, but the magic really begins in the final room. With the walls painted a deep, emerald green, rock monoliths pierce into the space, creating a feeling of sanctuary and ritual. In the center, a fantastic city under glass from the aforementioned Kelley evokes the emerald city imagined by Frank L. Baum in his timeless work, “The Wizard of Oz.”
But that quick comparison is not the base from which Papademetropoulos operates, though that is what first comes to mind. The show itself, “The Emerald Tablet,” is named for the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, an Arabic text that was foundational to the history of western occultism. This layering of meaning, hiding deeper, secret knowledge under the guise of something recognizable and mundane, is the core of occult working, and the core of Papademetropoulos efforts, both personal and curatorial.
Jeffrey Deitch
925 N. Orange Drive
Los Angeles, California 90038
Thru Oct. 23rd, 2021
