Erin Calla Watson ~ Haena Yoo October 26 — December 8, 2019 As It Stands, Los Angeles Night Repair. To keep from rotting, add a frame. Some art builds to a point, the artist keeps adding, then they stop and package it. Other art starts decaying as soon as it’s named. Subtractive art: appropriated from the dump, pulled out of the great garbage gyre of consumer society, the eighth continent; gathering strength as the planet warms. It’s an honest kind of advertising; a shallow quarter-inch of acrylic, the sheen on a package–it advertises its syntheticness, its packagedness. You know what you’re getting. You know that once you open it up, all promises are void. But there’s no reason to do that–there is nothing inside that transparency, that seduction, that you haven’t seen already. You’re buying that feeling you get when you look. The erotics of slick, pre-fab sexuality undoes the potential for intimacy or shame. Erin Calla Watson undoes the shrinkwrap on a football made of sausage. The laces are made of faux gut. Encased now in a resin globe; the resin is faintly scented, lightly browned. The matter-of-factness of a plastic surgeon’s ad in Playboy. The pragmatism of the id and the ego taking salsa lessons. You can see what he did there: the 10-year-old Brooke Shields made up like an ageing showgirl, nude in a jacuzzi of dry ice. After shooting this notorious spread for Playboy, the photographer turned to his other passion: he spent the last thirty years of his life training and photographing dogs. Graying ones, especially. Beautiful old dogs. Watson wraps them in plexiglass, she showers them with glitter, the aspirations of the middle class. Consumption is the breath of desire. The plexiglass holds packets of Chinese herbal medicine and cosmetics. Plastinated organs, baked with chemotherapy, pills for organelles. Some of Haena Yoo’s sculptures tell the story of her mother’s fight with cancer; they embody the consumption we undertake in order to halt death, to put it on pause. You will live forever, the product says, and we know it’s lying, but we like the way it lies. Yoo points out a cutting fact, that Estée Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair was a must-have for her mother’s generation. Constant consumption: inside and out; pushing the consumption outside, to keep the inside. Just to keep it, like it is. The Venuses of Willendorf and of Rome. The former pouring fermented water, the latter dressed in transparent lingerie. — Travis Diehl — October 2019 Erin Calla Watson lives and works in Los Angeles. Exhibitions include Lemon, a solo presentation at Gallery 1993, and the Other Places Art Fair (with AWHRHWAR). Haena Yoo works between Los Angeles and Seoul. Recent exhibitions include Maintain Disgust at AWHRHWAR (with Sterling Wells), and Woaman Fantastic Plastic, a solo presentation at u’s, Calgary. She is a 2018 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann emerging artist grant. The exhibition is organized by Makayla Bailey. Open hours Saturday—Sunday 12—6pm and by appointment.