Wienholt Projects is pleased to host Dance of Springtime, an evening party on Saturday, April 27th, 7:00 – 10:00 PM, for Bay Area artist Feldsott. Please join us for music with DJ sets by Captain Planet, dancing, and complimentary drinks. The artist will be in attendance. - Los Angeles, CA – Wienholt Projects is pleased to announce My Responsibility, a solo exhibition of California-based painter Feldsott, showing at The Desmond Tower in Los Angeles. The exhibition will present drawings, paintings and sculptures spanning the 1970s to the present. The title My Responsibility, taken from a 1997 drawing on school paper, reflects Feldsott’s simultaneously irreverent, and gravely sincere, treatment of his subjects. Using the visual language of neo-expressionism, and infusing it with shamanic elements, Feldsott often paints literal and frank depictions of recognizable and violent current events, as in Abu Ghraib and Burning Monk. The works respond to the typically cold and detached treatment of their subjects with unmitigated feeling, conveying a lack of hesitation in their expressionistic brushstrokes. In some works, handmade paints are thickly layered and infused with human hair, plant materials, and medicinal elements, materials which seem chosen for their symbolic capacity for empathy. The exhibition, like Feldsott’s depictions of humanity, is nonlinear. Works from the 1970s and beyond are interspersed with paintings made this year, serving the sense of timelessness suggested by the work, in which ancient spirituality and gestures mimetic of cave paintings converge with images of present-day people, weapons, and events. This broad timeline of Feldsott’s subjects and stylistic influences asserts a throughline between ancient and contemporary beliefs and systems of power. The continued relevance of these topics demonstrates a central theme of Feldsott’s work: these problems are cyclical. My Responsibility includes notably softer subjects, such as the rosy couple in Untitled Portrait, the moonlit angel in Always Forever In The Hands of God, and the crawling figure of Eve in She. The subjects, but not their style, may seem heterogeneous; however, Feldsott’s handling of them is equally sensitive and serious, suggesting that this “responsibility” extends towards both sociopolitical topics and personal ones. Feldsott’s romantic subjects exist not in spite of his darker ones, but alongside them, calling viewers’ cognitive dissonance into question. Although human figures are consistently the preeminent element of these paintings, they are rarely characters that are comfortable to identify with. Feldsott’s work tends to eschew personal narratives in favor of exploring the collective social identity of humanity. In Untitled Painting w/ Accused + Jury + Shadow Men, pointed language describes, but does not clearly pontificate about the trial scene. The accused, the accuser, and the jury are all clearly labeled; the question remaining is who we are in relation to them. My Responsibility prompts viewers to more deeply contemplate not just the subjects depicted, but the ways we read them, and the fear we have around depicting them properly. “To me, it feels healthy and responsible to wake up to the disruptions and disturbances that are going on around the world and to square up to them in any way that feels meaningful to an individual in order to make some kind of contribution to help out, to roll up your sleeves, so to speak.” – Feldsott About Feldsott Feldsott (b. Chicago, IL, 1954) is a painter based in Northern California. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (undergraduate) and the California College of the Arts (graduate). Feldsott’s works have been exhibited at museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1975 and 1979); the Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN (1978); Casa Museo Guayasamín, Quito, Ecuador (2002); the Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA (2003); the Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017); and the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2020); and galleries including Michael Wyman Gallery, Chicago, IL (1974); Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago, IL (1978); Paul Mahder Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2008 and 2011); Vendome Gallery, New York, NY (2013); GAG Projects, Adelaide, Australia (2020); and Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury, New York, NY (2022). Website: www.feldsott.com Instagram: @feldsott About Wienholt Projects Aubrie Wienholt founded Wienholt Projects in 2023, following a 10+ year history of working with artists, galleries, museums, and other institutions. Wienholt Projects is committed to producing nontraditional exhibitions of works that interrogate and forward the field of art. Drawing from the experience of working with artists in an alternative capacity through PR for Artists, Wienholt’s creative agency and art house founded in 2015, Wienholt Projects is grounded in a unique understanding of artists’ holistic roles in society. Website: www.wienholtprojects.com Instagram: @wienholtprojects