Intimate Things
1718 Albion Street Los Angeles, CA 90031
Saturday, December 3 at 6:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Jan 7, 2023
Phase Gallery is pleased to present Intimate Things, an installation of new works by UC Irvine Alumni: Katherine Aungier, Andy Bennett, Hiroshi Clark, Tarik Garrett, Rahel Levine, Doris Rivera and Gosia Wojas. Balancing between what is close, personal, private, informal, unspoken and dear is where we find ourselves most intimate. Intimate Things is a gentle meditation on those unfolding moments and the objects that fill their void. This show brings together work which contemplates the everyday with its’ ascending and descending arch of actions, moments which can break us apart and then always gesture us forward. Katherine Aungier’s compositions often start with found material and their formal qualities are played against their previous uses. In the work Daisy Chain, several flour sacks and pillowcases comprise a calendar. Multi-layered images open up a space for humor in the artwork as well as sculptural space inside of a flat plane. Andy Bennett’s work explores the blurring of subject and object, human and nonhuman, and living and not living. His objects engage with, through forms of commercial technology, speculative animation of inanimate things destined to outlive us. Bennett’s artwork addresses a shared human/non-human desire to persevere and navigates the strange confrontations which can result from said desires. Hiroshi Clark presents photographic works of crushed energy drink cans captured against the familiar darkness of rough asphalt meditating on the urban space and the everyday material that double as forces of resistance against the quotidian. Part autobiographical, these quiet and tacit images unpack moments from the past manifesting into the future their worth as precious objects. Tarik Garrett's current work centers on the voyage and shipwreck of the frigate Médusé, marooned off the coast of present-day Mauritania on route to take control over the Saint-Louis colony in Senegal. Epoxied clothing sculptures hang in line amplifying the absence of the human body and its productive power transfigured into the commodity form. This work sets out to navigate the tensions between race and class and the contradiction and alignments between a historical event of the 19th century and the events of our present as people from the former colonies now seek refuge in the metropole. Rahel Levine's sculptures and text works build intimate architectures out of private and personal narratives that leak through their containment. The objects, constructed out of ephemeral and solid materials such as performance, repurposed plastic shopping bags and augmented windows at once play with, reveal and complicate the interior spaces of our lives, breaking down the supposed meaning of shame, exposure, containment, leakage, private and public. Doris Rivera uses sculpture and installation inscribed with ambivalence, mutability, and self-reflexivity to rearticulate the encounter with edifices of colonial power and authority. Utilizing an economy of objects that are quasi-religious, hyperbolic, and idiosyncratic, she interrogates issues of envy, surveillance, complicity, and resistance and proposes modes in which western religious dogma and historical narrative can be alienated from the lens of truth and fact. Gosia Wojas' ongoing project with artificial intelligence in female sex dolls probes at the entanglement of agency with systems of power in sex and tech industries. Steel and silicone works play on constructed schemas, modes of replication, simulation, substitution and mimesis to reveal anxieties of the contemporary apparatus where the history of industrialization, notions of a body and dislocated intimacies are compressed into singular objects.