HVW8 Gallery Los Angeles is proud to continue its nearly 20-year exploration of the relationship between art and music with a debut solo exhibition by acclaimed artist and illustrator McKay Felt. Now based in Los Angeles, McKay’s career has led him to collaborate with Grammy Award-winning artists such as Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Knxwledge, Anderson .Paak, and Gorillaz.

This exhibition marks a decade of McKay creating art with musicians, beginning with his first collaboration with Flying Lotus in 2014. Since then, he has worked with Little Simz, DOMi and JD BECK, Kari Faux, and contributed to Donald Glover’s Atlanta.

McKay follows in the tradition of legendary artists such as Egon Schiele, Hieronymus Bosch, Taiyo Matsumoto, Gustav Doré, Alphonse Mucha, Suehiro Maruo, Pedro Bell, Mati Klarwein, Moebius, and Guido Crepax, speaking his own graphic language. His work spans multiple media, including film, animation, television, jewelry, stage design, and art direction.

The exhibition will showcase works created over the past decade, highlighting McKay’s exploration and expression through line drawings inspired by the music of his collaborators. Though many of these pieces feature vibrant colors, they originate from hand-drawn ink or graphite, offering a tactile experience whether viewed on screen or in person.

BIO
McKay Felt graduated from London’s Camberwell College of Arts (UAL) in 2016. Now based in Los Angeles, his illustration career has led to collaborations with Grammy Award-winning artists such as Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Knxwledge, Anderson .Paak, and Gorillaz. McKay’s work was featured in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s landmark 2021 exhibition, and his artwork created for Little Simz will continue its international circuit as part of the immersive show “Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser” through 2027.

Opening: Thursday, October 3rd, 7–10 pm
Exhibition Runs: Until November 7th
RSVP: rsvp@hvw8.com
Special surprise performance to follow.

HVW8 Gallery Los Angeles
661 N. Spaulding Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036
Open Wed–Sun, 1–6 pm
info@hvw8.com

mckayfelt.site

McKay Felt: In the Blink of an Eye

HVW8

Pissed ‘N Blissed
New multimedia artwork by Leigh Salgado

Gallery hours:
Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 4pm and by appointment.

LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present the fifth solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Leigh Salgado. In her current series, Pissed ‘N Blissed, Leigh continues her intricate, meditative process of cutting, painting and collaging paper to create objects of depth and beauty. Salgado continues to investigate ideas of the feminine as an act of female empowerment and strength. Unfortunately, fundamental human rights of women so long ago fought for and won, are currently under siege. Through these creations, Leigh hopes to inspire her sisters and brothers in creativity and humanity to stand up to the dark oppressors and fight, in whatever way we can, to spread truth, light and dignity.

"I am pissed n’ blissed. Life in 2024 is a swing set - a wild tumble between angst and ecstasy mark my days and weeks. Sometimes the hours. On one side, technology kills my spirit with its incessant drip-drip delivery of news. On the other, tech keeps my great friendships current and present. The swing down tells me the role of women is headed back to the middle ages while the swing up helps me connect to doing my part to see that regression is thwarted.

My paintings defy institutional insistence on narrow political labels but I maintain a girly preciousness all the same. I am a fine art painter yet I cover and cut up my paintings. There is a bliss in painting that defies the darkness and my anger dissolves as I sculpt their surfaces with my blade, pissed off at an imperfect world offering too many perfect possibilities to despise."

Leigh Salgado is a Los Angeles based painter known for complex hand-cut paper artworks that overindulge in themes of pleasure and identity. She earned a Bachelors in Fine Art from UCLA and a Masters from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Yet it was at the experimental Santa Monica College of Design, Art &amp; Architecture where her breakthrough into piercing the physical space of the picture plane happened. In a quarter century of exhibiting she has had numerous solo shows

Leigh Salgado: Pissed 'N Blissed

LAUNCH LA

Albert Reyes (b. 1971) is the artist Los Angeles longs for whose work embodies the raw energy and emotional complexity of the city. With a bold, unapologetic style and a unique ability to turn everyday objects into deeply personal narratives, Reyes steps back into the gallery spotlight with Family Therapy Techniques. 

This exhibition showcases his use of art as personal therapy, where his artistic techniques seamlessly combine movie art, found materials, and cultural commentary. It offers a fresh perspective on the social landscape, capturing the grit of our human experience.

In his solo exhibition at Face Guts, Reyes transforms repurposed materials like found wood and book covers into bold, thought-provoking pieces. His floor-to-ceiling constructions and subtle interventions highlight the potential of up-cycling, turning discarded objects into art that promotes creativity and environmental awareness.

Family Therapy Techniques is curated and presented by art photographer / impresario Joshua White and artist / gallerist Tim Biskup.

Albert Reyes: Family Therapy Techniques.

Whitebox.LA

Tears of Venus is thrilled to present, “Richard Kurtz: The 1040 & Other Works”, our inaugural show and the artist’s first exhibition in LA. The event will take place at Tears of Venus, 7527 W Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA. Opening receptions, Friday, September 13th 6 - 9 pm and Saturday, September 14th 6 - 9 pm and runs till October 6th.

The exhibition showcases artwork by Kurtz spanning his prolific 40+ year career and includes paintings on stretched canvas and board, mixed media artworks, works on paper, one-of-a-kind artist's books, and painted vintage dictionaries containing 1000+ individual paintings. Together, these artworks weave the story of the artist’s life by creating a unique “library”, and invite the curious to step beyond the role of gallery viewer/voyeur and enter and engage with Kurtz’s world and mythology.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is “The 1040”, an installation of 1,040 individual miniature mixed-media paintings created on post-consumer expired credit cards, gift cards, and hotel key cards. Unified as one large-scale work, the tidal wave of imagery is composed of themes that echo throughout his work and tell his life story; Resilience, Survival, Magic, Repetition, and Transmutation. In 2008, Kurtz was forced to turn away from creating larger work when he lost his housing and faced displacement. He painted on small credit cards and found objects, which were more practical, portable, and less costly than traditional canvas. The small works became his calling card, and like a run of baseball cards, Kurtz created, sold, and traded the small paintings for years. The cards made their way around the world, forming a legacy beyond the artist. Even after Kurtz’s circumstances changed, he continued painting on credit cards and over time amassed a prolific amount of these paintings. Small-scale on their own, each card measures around 3.375” x 2.125”. The impressive installation of 1,040 paintings hangs at 87.75”
x 85” or approximately 7’ x 7’.

Kurtz’s relationship to storytelling and text is notable and the combined use of image and text appears throughout his work. Kurtz employs methods like the “cut-up technique”, collage, and “blackout poetry” which story the artworks non-linearly, like pages ripped from a book. He paints in vintage Golden Books and dictionaries, layering his characters and text on top of the original illustrations. For the artist, this type of painting is more than changing the story; it’s an alchemical attempt to shift reality and shift power structures. Including text as a part of his story-telling also acts as a doorway for the viewer to enter the piece beyond the visuals - it invites people to explore their inner worlds and create portals to new realities, dimensions, and possibilities.

Kurtz paints prize fighters, superheroes, seductresses, and other-worldly beings, archetypal characters that build his visual world and help him explore themes of power and power dynamics. Many of the heroes in his stories are survivors of a brutal and unforgiving culture of hierarchy, violence, and economic inequality. Kurtz paints these figures obsessively and in the repetitive action, patterns emerge. The resulting lines and forms can be seen as essential mark-making. This repetition is one of the defining components of his work, a compulsive act and meditation.

Richard Kurtz (b. 1955 in Newark, NJ) is a self-taught painter and mixed media artist whose work is featured in the private collections of Sophie Calle, Lester Marks, Audrey Heckler, and Monty Blanchard. Kurtz’s work is housed in institutions like the de Young Museum, The Museum of Everything in London, and The University of Miami Rare Book Collection. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Please come celebrate with us. Tears of Venus is a new art space and gallery featuring curated contemporary art and textiles. Owned and curated by Jennifer Esperanza

Richard Kurtz: The 1040 & Other Works

Tears of Venus

Nonaka-Hill is pleased to announce the gallery’s second exhibition of works by Japanese artist Miho Dohi. The exhibition is on view from September 28 until November 9, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 28th from 5 to 9 pm.

Miho Dohi’s art is wonderful. In her small studio in the outskirts of Tokyo, she clips, cuts, crunches and crimps diverse material which she contemplates, coalesces and choreographs into concentrated forms. Though generally composed of the most humble materials, Dohi creates works that are outwardly flamboyant, resolute culminations of her exploratory and tactile curiosity.

For the exhibition, Dohi continues her serial production of numbered Buttai (物体) works which she began more than a decade ago - a sustained exploration of familiar, harmonious and discordant materials; wood, copper, textiles, vinyl tape, and plaster, among others. Using materials originally produced for other purposes, Dohi draws in space, mark making without a clear destination; pushing forward, retreating, doubling back in contemplation, she carefully manipulates the materials to eventually manifest her intuitive and idiosyncratic logic. Presented as sculptures in the round, or wall-bound, or occasionally hanging as mobiles, the resultant works initially register as discreetly abstract, though upon further examination, are often imbued with an underlying anthropomorphic frequency.

Also included in the exhibition are four new (2024) wall mounted assemblage works combining ad hoc sign-like bits of text; painted, merged and layered into a visual cacophony, in their simple and direct language, these sculptures become almost perceptibly audible to the viewer (if you think in Japanese).


Miho Dohi

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

We invite you to join us at Speedy Gallery for Bergamot Station’s 30th Anniversary Celebration! Performances, art exhibitions, food, drinks, and a full day of arts and culture will be featured throughout September 7th, 2024.

Concept:
Soul and Digital, Individual and Global Systems, Life and Death, Nature and Culture, Holy and Secular.

The concept revolves around the animism energy that has existed within humanity, Earth, and the universe for tens of thousands of years, juxtaposed with the minimal digital energy of "0" and "1," which humanity has only recently discovered. We live in a time when the analog nature of our bodies and souls contrasts sharply with an increasingly digital world, creating a dangerous imbalance between the individual and global systems—a time on the edge of madness.

Moreover, the dynamism of Japanese aesthetics is rooted in nature. The white in Japanese culture symbolizes life, death, sacredness, and hope. This white energy is expressed through an Eastern spirituality in my work.

Shinichi Hara’s Bio:
Shinichi Hara began his career as a contemporary artist in 1985 when he held his first exhibition in Los Angeles, an artist whose work captured the attention of David Hockney. Following this, while continuing to create paintings, Hara also worked as an art director for 35 years, producing key visuals for music graphics that reached millions of copies across Japan and Asia. In 2009, he dedicated his life to his long-held dream of being an artist, expanding his artistic activities globally, with exhibitions in New York, Italy, Hong Kong, and beyond.

Hara's work is influenced by world art movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art, as well as by Ukiyo-e and the Rinpa school in Japanese art history. Ukiyo-e is known for its woodblock prints that capture the fleeting beauty of the "floating world," while the Rinpa school is celebrated for its decorative, nature-inspired compositions. These influences helped Hara establish his unique style.

Hara's concept revolves around the animism energy within humanity, Earth, and the universe, juxtaposed with the minimal digital energy of "0 and 1" recently discovered by humankind. He explores the precarious balance between the analog (body and soul) and the digital (modern societal systems) in this mad world, expressing the dynamism of Japanese aesthetics through the energy of white. In his work, Hara uses the color white to convey all its meanings in Japanese culture—life, death, sacredness, and hope—depicting contrasts such as "soul and digital, individual and global systems, life and death, sacred and profane, nature and culture" through an Eastern spiritual lens.

Shinichi Hara: DIGITAL SEA

Speedy Gallery 

Babst Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Peter Krasnow (1886-1979). Peter Krasnow (born Feivish Reisberg) was born in 1886 in Novohrad-Volynskyi, Ukraine. He emigrated the United States in 1907 at age 20 to escape the pogroms. He moved to Los Angeles in 1922, integrating into the artistic and intellectual and circles of the time, which included Edward Weston, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, Lorser Feitelson, and Helen Lundeberg. Although Krasnow achieved critical success with exhibitions at early iterations of what eventually became the Whitney Museum of American Art (1922) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1922 & 1928), he largely avoided the commercial art world during his lifetime.

The exhibition spans three rooms of the gallery and includes early portraits, never-before-seen ink drawings made in response of to the horrors of World War II, and a series of colorful abstract paintings he embarked upon immediately after Pearl Harbor. Inspired by Jewish mysticism and the Southern California landscape, Krasnow's paintings, as he wrote, ''breathed joy and light—color structures instead of battles scenes, symmetry to repair broken worlds. A means of protest to ease the pain. When despair reached its highest-zero point—it can hurt no more, and life persists.''

Peter Krasnow

Babst Gallery 

Perrotin Los Angeles opens its fall 2024 season on September 21 with Pacific Abstractions. Curated by Perrotin Senior Director Jennifer King, and featuring works by Naotaka Hiro, Kazuo Kadonaga, Lee Bae, Yunhee Min, Keisho Okayama, Park Seo-Bo, and Shim Moon-Seup, Pacific Abstractions proposes a fresh art historical view on modern and contemporary abstract art, focusing on the transpacific artistic dialogues between Asia and the West Coast.  By bringing together artworks by Asian and Asian-American artists practicing on both sides of the Pacific, the exhibition celebrates the local and global artistic connections occasioned by Perrotin’s recent expansion to Los Angeles.

Though the seven artists in Pacific Abstractions cannot be defined by a single artistic movement or school, they share a thoughtful exploration of materials, process, and form. Attention to the properties and possibilities of media such as paint, graphite, charcoal ink, canvas, paper, wood, and glass are on breathtaking display.

In almost every artwork, the inscription of time—the durational aspect of making—is subtly perceptible. Unlike the industrial logic of some abstract practices, an organic and tactile sensibility infuses every work in the exhibition.

Notably, the artworks in Pacific Abstractions were all made outside the geographic locations that have long centered critical discourses about postwar abstract art. Until recently, major figures of postwar Korean and Japanese art were almost completely absent from English language scholarship, with textbooks of contemporary art heavily weighted towards developments in New York and Europe. Perhaps for this reason, there is a freshness to these works that feels both challenging and decisive—a creativeness with materials, leading to unique formal vocabularies. Using the most basic tenets of abstraction (color, gesture, shape, line), the works speak to each other about the uncharted possibilities of abstraction—conversations one can imagine crossing back and forth across the Pacific.

About the artists

Naotaka Hiro was born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan. The foundation of his work is rooted in the concept of the unknown as it relates to his body. By using artmaking as a process to map the body’s physical and conceptual terrain, Hiro charts the encounter between himself and his materials, whether canvas, wood, paint, graphite, or other media. With his wood paintings, the artist arranges a plywood panel horizontally, a foot off the floor, alternately working on the surface from above and below, the painting incorporating his movements (sitting, standing, crawling) during its making. His work has been acquired by museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and is currently on view in What it Becomes at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hiro received his BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kazuo Kadonaga was born in 1946 in Ishikawa, Japan. His work is informed by his family’s forestry background; early in his career, Kadonaga began experimenting with wood in his father’s sawmill. To make Wood No. 5 CI, 1984, the artist used a veneer slicer to cut a cedar log into paper-thin layers, allowing the slices to dry before gluing them back together. For his large-scale Glass No. 4 J, 1999, he directed a carefully controlled stream of molten glass into a custom-built, temperature controlled kiln to create a monumental yet organic form that required cooling for four months before being moved. Kadonaga’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Japan. His work is in museum collections including the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. After spending time in Los Angeles earlier in his career, he now lives and works in Ishikawa, Japan.

Lee Bae was born in 1956 in Cheongdo, Korea. In all his work, Lee pays homage to the remarkable transformation of wood into charcoal—a process he likens to the cyclical nature of life and death. After utilizing charcoal as his exclusive material for decades, in recent years Lee has adopted charcoal ink to make his masterful Brushstroke series, using large calligraphy brushes to track the movements of his body. Though spontaneous in appearance, the works are the result of numerous sketches to find the perfect tempo and movements, and require intense focus given the irrevocability of each ink stroke. Lee received both his BFA and MFA from Hongik University in Seoul. In addition to being represented in museum collections worldwide, he is a recipient of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. His solo exhibition La Maison de La Lune Brûlée is currently on view at the Wilmotte Foundation in Venice, Italy, in conjunction with the 60th Venice Biennale. He lives and works between Paris and Seoul.

Yunhee Min was born in 1962 in Seoul, Korea. Her work exists at the intersection of color, material, space, and support. Early in her career, Min interrogated the conceptual possibilities of abstraction; her “mistints” series, for example, utilized rejected custom-mixed house paints from the returns section of stores such as Home Depot, bringing a chance structure and readymade logic to her color selections. For Pacific Abstractions, Min is exhibiting her Small paintings for the first time. These study-like canvases—her painted equivalent to sketches— carry the lightness and freedom of an artist exploring the behavior of paint and the interaction of color using a range of tools and modes of application. Min has undertaken large-scale installations including the Hammer Projects lobby at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and she is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Fine Art. She received her BFA from Art Center of College and Design in Pasadena, and her MA from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. A faculty member in the Department of Art at the University of California Riverside, Min lives and works in Los Angeles.

Keisho Okayama was born in 1934 in Osaka, Japan. The son of a Buddhist abbot, he moved with his family to Northern California in 1936. During World War II, Okayama’s family was incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, and Topaz Relocation Center in Central Utah as a result of Executive Order 9066 authorizing the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. After the war, Okayama served in the US Army and studied art at UCLA and Los Angeles City College. His late abstract paintings, a selection of which are featured in Pacific Abstractions, are executed on unstretched and machine-washed canvas, a process resulting in the works’ unique surface textures. Though little-exhibited during his lifetime, Okayama’s abstract paintings possess a sophisticated and sensitive layering of color, and his work is now the subject of renewed attention by curators and art historians. In 2025 his paintings will be featured in the exhibition Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century at the University of Texas at Arlington. Okayama died in 2018 in Los Angeles.

Park Seo-Bo was born in 1931 in Yé-Cheon, Gyeongsangbuk-Do, Korea. A seminal figure of Korean art, Park is known as one of the founders of Dansaekhwa—loosely translated as “monochrome painting”—an art movement that emerged in Korea during the mid 1970s. Park is celebrated for his sensitive and ethereal use of materials such as pencil, oil, and hanji paper—a paper handmade from mulberry bark that carries cultural significance in Korea due to its extensive use in contexts ranging from ancient Korean manuscripts to wall and door coverings. To make Écriture No. 160902, 2016, and Écriture No. 990401, 1999, Park applied pulp from hanji paper mixed with pigment to the surface of his canvases, building delicate yet durable ridges that reflect color and light in subtle and unexpected ways. One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Park’s work is represented in museum collections worldwide. He died in Seoul in 2023.

Shim Moon-Seup was born in 1943 in Tongyeong, Korea. He rose to acclaim as a sculptor known for his unconventional use of materials such as rocks, wood, iron, and concrete. As an active participant in the Korean avant-garde art movements of the 1970s, Shim’s work challenged traditional sculptural norms by eschewing the use of pedestals and exploring the direct relationship between art and the natural world. In recent years the artist has adopted painting to continue exploring ideas long central to his practice. In paintings such as The Presentation, 2015, the wide blue brushstrokes evoke the vitality of the ocean and its breaking waves at the visual intersection of sea and sky. Shim studied sculpture at Seoul National University and is a recipient of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. He lives and works between Tongyeong, Korea and Paris.


Pacific Abstractions: Featuring Naotaka Hiro, Kazuo Kadonaga, Lee Bae, Yunhee Min, Keisho Okayama, Park Seo-Bo, and Shim Moon-Seup

Perrotin

Vielmetter Los Angeles is delighted to announce Thinking Out Loud, Genevieve Gaignard’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 21 to November 9, 2024.

Genevieve Gaignard is haunted. We all are. Hauntings can take on many forms: memories from childhood; the trauma that manifests from centuries of systemic racism; or the echoes of friends and lovers, come-and-gone. In what might be Gaignard’s most intimate body of work to date, Thinking Out Loud overlaps her practice with her most recent lived experience, set against the backdrop of her newly situated life in New York.

Thinking Out Loud signifies an evolution in Gaignard’s practice as she excavates concepts of identity and reflects on the intersections of life’s journey. Her symbol-laden, cryptic work speaks to larger truths: the building and breaking down of walls, the rupture of domesticity as wallpaper tears, and the detritus of everyday life that we must all work our way through. Gaignard explores the veil as armor, representing protection while moving through growth. Her art transcends the personal, becoming public through the artist’s intent, and challenges us to consider the significance of our own stories within the larger context of humanity. 

Thinking Out Loud invites viewers to closely consider open-ended questions that haunt the intricacies of personal relationships. Dreamscapes, depicted in the collages and the exhibition environment, become fertile ground for exploring the emotional landscapes of love and self-perception. Gaignard has described her working process as a “lived playlist, a diaristic processing of my life, a creative vibe set against the backdrop of mix tapes and personal soundtracks that transcends, romanticizes, and provides an escape from the everyday.”

In Lucid Girl (I’m Letting You Go), Gaignard casts herself as a ghostly figure, levitating in front of a swath of vintage wallpaper. The title materialized during the creative process when she found unexpected visual-sonic synchronicity in the lyrics of Thee Sacred Souls. Another “song” in this playlist, the collage Players Only Love You When They're Playin', is from Fleetwood Mac’s song Dreams. A young Gaignard wields a wiffleball bat while navigating a sea of wallpapered baseball “players.” An arched text above her reads “ballbuster,” reclaiming and embracing the misogynistic insult as a badge of honor. She deconstructs her often methodical working process, revealing layers of wallpaper that show the disorienting multiplicity of spaces.

In Angel and Muse, titled after a song by Radamiz, Gaignard ruminates on the passage of time and creates a narrative about perception, memory, and desire. The work is a window into the artist’s interior life represented as a surreal street scene from her newly adopted borough of The Bronx. Gaignard herself is an observer within the microcosm of activity that surrounds her. An unexpected, sexy selfie of the artist can be found looking out through a stained glass window, gazing at a disembodied arm orchestrating a flutter of butterflies.

In Tits for Tats, the artist offers a defiantly unadorned self-portrait, leading viewers to wonder for whom the glistening image was originally intended. She emerges through two torn layers of wallpaper, conjuring herself into spiritual relief. The tattoos that cover her body denote signifiers such as the biblical, the occult, and symbols of power. Gaignard’s “third eye” suggests that enlightenment is possible through self-acceptance and awareness, while three anatomical hearts mystically orbit her crown.

True to the essence of Gaignard’s signature style, this body of work engages viewers with a poetic and nuanced dialogue that challenges them to see beyond the obvious. Thinking Out Loud lifts the curtain on the complexities and struggles of everyday life, highlighting the uncomfortable spaces in between awareness and the mysteries of our existence.

About the artist

Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981) lives and works in The Bronx, NY. Her work was recently included in the touring exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which debuted at The Frist Museum in Nashville, TN and traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX and The Phillips Collection, DC. Recent solo exhibitions include To Whom it May Concern, Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ; Genevieve Gaignard, This is America: The Unsettling Contradictions in American Identity, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; Bloom Projects: Genevieve Gaignard, Outside Looking In, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA (2020); I'm Sorry I Never Told You That You’re Beautiful, Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA (2019); Counterfeit Currency, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2018); Smell the Roses, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at The ICA San Francisco, CA; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Riverside Museum, Riverside, CA; The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Prospect.4, New Orleans. Genevieve Gaignard received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, and her MFA in Photography from Yale University, New Haven, CT.

The gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 freeway. Parking is available on the south parking lot adjacent to the building. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and by appointment. For further information and press inquiries, please contact Olivia Gauthier at Olivia@vielmetter.com.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce abstraction of truth, Samuel Levi Jones’s third exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 21 to November 9, 2024. 

Samuel Levi Jones’s exhibition abstraction of truth presents a profound and timely critique of the structures that shape our understanding of authority and history. Jones’s method of deconstructing books, and now flags, serves as a powerful metaphor for the dismantling of the colonial and imperial narratives that continue to influence our legal and societal systems. By physically tearing apart these symbols of power and reassembling them into abstract compositions, Jones not only challenges the authority of these texts but also invites viewers to question the origins and implications of the knowledge they represent.

The introduction of American and British flags as raw materials in Jones’s latest works underscores the pervasive influence of colonialism on modern governance and law. By obscuring and layering these flags over legal texts, Jones illustrates how deeply entrenched these colonial legacies are within contemporary legal frameworks, highlighting the ongoing impact of imperialist histories on present-day systems of power.

Jones’s art is a call to action, urging viewers to reconsider the narratives that have been accepted as truth and to recognize the systemic inequalities that persist as a result of these constructed histories. His work not only redefines the boundaries of abstraction but also reimagines the role of art as a tool for social critique and transformation. abstraction of truth is a powerful reminder of the importance of questioning the structures that shape our world and the necessity of rethinking the balance between exclusion and equality in our society.

About the artist

Samuel Levi Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana, and he lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana. Trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, he earned a B.A. in Communication Studies from Taylor University and a B.F.A from Herron School of Art and Design in 2009. He received his MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in 2012.

Museum exhibitions include When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Empire is Falling at The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indiana; 
Infinite Blue at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Guiffrida Collection at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Illinois; and Unbound, Studio Museum in Harlem. His work can be found in museum and public collections such as the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Wisconsin; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is the recipient of the 2014 Joyce Alexander Wein artist prize awarded by the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Genevieve Gaignard: Thinking Out Loud | Samuel Levi Jones: abstraction of truth

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Rusha & Co. is proud to present LA TINTA NEGRA Y ROJA FORJANDO LAS PALABRAS CON HIERRO, the first solo exhibition by Jimmy Centeno, a South Central native who is an artist, welder, and scholar. Drawing from his local environment, Centeno uses materials sourced from the streets of his neighborhood, as well as the areas surrounding the gallery, to create works that reflect his deep connection to the community and its history.

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Rusha & Co. is excited to present Chispa, a solo exhibition of editioned collage works by Los Angeles artist, curator, and spiritual worker Ever Velasquez. Velasquez appropriates the language of advertising, pulling photographic images from her vast personal archive of magazines and recombining them in vibrant, energetic compositions that speak to the visual and attentional onslaught of modern life. The works offer a positivity and gentleness that is often at odds with contemporary motives. She proposes a kinder, more connected way of being through celebrations of beauty and sisterhood, life and community. The world she creates is inherently spiritual, its currency blessings and care, its existence an acknowledgement of the divine in all of us.

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Rusha & Co is pleased to present Sierra Love in her debut solo exhibition, Gestures. Drawing inspiration from Josef Albers’ observation that color is always in flux, continuously shifting in relation to its surroundings, Love explores the fluidity of color as well as the broader dynamics of process and form. Rather than working toward a predetermined image or structure, she begins each piece with an open-ended “What if…” which allows the work to develop organically.

Central to Love’s process is a sense of tension and risk.  The risk is essential, as it serves to juxtapose the slow, deliberate techniques of crocheting and tufting. These time-intensive methods enable Love to form a deep connection with each piece, continually pushing the boundaries of color, composition, and form.

Jimmy Centeno: LA TINTA NEGRA Y ROJA FORJANDO LAS PALABRAS CON HIERRO | Ever Velasquez: Chispa | Sierra Love: Gestures

Rusha & Co

“Refraction Abstraction”
Curated by Sigourney Schultz
September 28–November 9, 2024

Helen J Gallery is thrilled to present “Refraction Abstraction,” a group exhibition featuring works by Yoon Jongju, Candice Joo, Minku Kim, Hyemin Lee, Alex Paik, and Park YoungHa.

“Refraction Abstraction” showcases a dynamic selection of works by leading Korean abstract artists, offering a new perspective on the legacy of the 1970s Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement. These artists responded to the troubled period following the Korean War (1950–53) by condensing the formal qualities of their post-industrial reality. The artists on view present varied responses to abstraction that reflect this legacy across the Korean American diaspora, engaging themes of community, the natural world, and collective memory.

Yoon Jongju’s meditative surfaces, arranged in sequential grids, abstract the linearity of time. Candice Joo’s artificial landscape paintings contend with the natural world while creating space between the real and the virtual. Minku Kim’s explorations into pictorial space compress space and time while referencing the rich colored panels of Korean hanbok. Hyemin Lee uses fragments of discarded, traditional Korean garments to evoke forgotten memories through her works. Alex Paik’s modular, paper-based wall installations explore perception, interdependence, and improvisation while engaging with the complexities of social dynamics. Park YoungHa activates the surface of his paintings using a mixture of fine sand, gold dust, and stone powders, calling back to the traditional mud-plastered walls of rural Korean houses. 

Refraction Abstraction

Helen J Gallery

Block Gallery is pleased to present our newest exhibition:

“I Think I Can Be Seen Now” by Booboo Stewart & Kim Cruz

Why do we bend and shape ourselves into what we think others want or need? Maybe falling further from yourself can alleviate the pressures of your own being?

"I Think I Can Be Seen Now" encourages us to share the thoughts, questions, and feelings we have when no one's looking. When no-one's listening.

Wearing these hidden emotions can give strength to the past "you" who's been bent into everyone else's shapes, closing the distance of being solely yourself one thought at a time.

Booboo Stewart, born in Los Angeles, is a prolific artist known for his experimental ballpoint pen drawings and multimedia sculptures. Raised in a creatively charged environment—his father being a prominent figure in the film industry and his mother a dedicated artist—Booboo's artistic journey seemed destined from the start.

"Drawing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It brings balance and allows me to explore emotions that are otherwise difficult to confront. We all harbor thoughts we might prefer to avoid; drawing is my method of facing them head-on," says Booboo.

In addition to his artistic pursuits, Booboo is a familiar face on screen, having appeared in "The Twilight Saga" franchise, "X-Men: Days of Future Past," Disney's "Descendants," "Good Trouble," and numerous independent films. He is also the lead vocalist and guitarist for the band THAT BAND HONEY.

Kim Cruz is a visual artist who finds her muse in the female figure and through abstract landscapes. Opting to depict her works and the female figure in dainty, careful strokes in acrylic, pastel, charcoal and oil, Kim veers away from erotic depictions of the nude figure, rendering the soft vulnerability of forms instead.
Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Kim is a 25-year old self-taught artist, art writer and curator. Based in three different continents, Kim spends her time traveling around the world, studying different art styles and art history.

Through her travels, Cruz produces her works of art by sketching her muses and painting landscapes. As Kim’s figures revel in their own sense of fleetingness, they leave the viewer with what is but an impression of figurative forms, graceful even as they fade into the soft light of paint.

Kim also runs KALMA ART FOUNDATION, a non-profit organization dedicated to education and art. She is a fine arts instructor for art therapy and painting, conducting workshops and courses in universities and for orphanages. She works closely with foundations to provide Art Therapy for children and women who are victims of trafficking.

“What emerges on canvas is a dream-like and ethereal abstraction of figures — a gossamer of fleeting bodies embracing it’s own ephemerality instead of holding on to any solid sense of permanence.”

Booboo Stewart & Kim Cruz: I Think I Can Be Seen Now

Block Gallery

Opening in person Saturday, 26 October 2024, 6 pm - 9 pm with a live performance by V. Torres and special guest Megg at The Studio at 8 pm. The show will end on Sunday, 10 November.

Shockboxx Gallery, known for pushing the boundaries, presents the group art show "WOMAN'S WORK." Situated in the Cypress Arts District of Hermosa Beach, California, ShockBoxx Gallery serves as a pivotal center in the South Bay for artists, curators, collectors, and art aficionados to unite and promote the arts. Established in March 2017 by Mike Collins and Laura Schuler, ShockBoxx is celebrated for its monthly group and solo exhibitions that showcase a variety of emerging and established artists, offering a continuous flow of fresh artistic influence.

By the curator Kymm Swank:

"I have a print hanging in my studio depicting a stiletto pump with the phrase “Make the shackles pretty enough, and they will wear them gladly.” And yet, I absolutely adore 5” heels. I find it fascinating how women see or feel our identities and experiences with all the inherent ambivalence, contradictions, and nuance.

The representation of women is everywhere. We are constantly inundated with images of female bodies. Yet so much of the visual language depicting women is still centered around the commodification of our bodies, claiming to promote freedom and empowerment while still triggering the insecurity that creates better customers. How can you shatter the glass ceiling when it has been made into a mirror that distracts us with our reflections?

For this show, I reached out to female artists and asked them for work that spoke to something integral to feminity or their experience of being a woman. I was curious about how women depict women and create visual narratives that express our ideas about femininity and what we value beyond our reflection in the insatiable mirror.

The work in the show is materially diverse and includes pieces that convey unconventional representation, such as the jute and pine needle sculpture Burial by Bianca Gabrielle Goyette. Or the sea is another story, a web of white fabric, plaster, and paint tightly stretched and wrapped like gauze bandaging around wood by Joy Ray. The title WOMAN'S WORK came from a lyric from Woman, one of the songs on the album V. Torres will be playing in The Studio at the opening on October 26th. WOMAN'S WORK also references the limitations forced upon us and the historical marginalization of feminized spheres. The obvious example is female artists who chronically had their work excluded, devalued, or erased.

But ultimately, WOMAN'S WORK is a celebration of how far those spheres have expanded with everything we still create and accomplish. And I am hopeful that in November, we will finally be able to burst those spheres wide open."

Kymm Swank is a self-taught artist living in Los Angeles, CA. She works primarily in oils and acrylics. The bold work she creates explores abstract forms, urban texture, and structure through line and color. She currently lives in downtown Los Angeles, where the transforming skyline and city streets offer constant inspiration. She has shown her work throughout Southern California over the past 25 years, most recently at WallspaceLA, Shockboxx, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Sonia & Co. in Laguna Beach. Her paintings can also be seen on the sets of numerous TV shows, including Insecure, Grace and Frankie, Newsroom, American Horror Story, and MadMen.

V TORRES writes and sings songs of empowerment, which blend distinct guitar tones with soulfully truthful vocals and lyrics. Her sound has been coined as “where the desert meets the sea” and is a unique mix of her indie-rock, pop, and americana influences. She is currently putting the finishing touches on her upcoming sophomore record, which will include seven new original songs.

WOMAN'S WORK

Shockboxx Gallery

Pershing Art Space invites you to our 2-year anniversary show. Our upcoming exhibition features local and emerging artists in a uniquely curated art space. We offer artists a sophisticated platform to showcase their work in an elegant space alongside other talented artists with diverse mediums and styles. Come join us on November 12, 13, & 14.

Pershing Art Space: 2-year anniversary show

Pershing Art Space

Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present 'signifying the impossible song,' an expansive group exhibition curated by Lindsey Raymond and Jana Terblanche bringing together work across diverse media by 17 artists.

Featured artists include Sanford Biggers (USA), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa), Patrick Bongoy (DRC), Ange Dakouo (Mali), Bonolo Kavula (South Africa), Nthabiseng Kekana (South Africa), Roméo Mivekannin (Ivory Coast/France), Turiya Magadlela (South Africa), Nandipha Mntambo (Eswatini/South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada), Zohra Opoku (Germany/Ghana), Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), Usha Seejarim (South Africa), Inga Somdyala (South Africa), Moffat Takadiwa (Zimbabwe) and Lulama Wolf (South Africa).

signifying the impossible song explores the material culture of objects and the protected knowledges they hold. Encompassing mixed-media artworks, found objects, assemblage, photography, sculpture and painting, the exhibition points to the collective unravelling and structural failings of political systems. There are multiple forces in effect – integration and disintegration, defiance and displacement – the cyclical rhythm suggesting the human project as an ongoing process of fabrication and refabrication.

Raymond and Terblanche ask:

“How do you signify an impossible song? What does it mean for choral harmony to be discordant, laboured, flailing? As Carl Adamshick writes in his poem Our Flag, from which the exhibition’s title is drawn, ‘Our flag should be a veil’. How else does one speak to war, famine, inequality, ecological ruin, gender and race injustice, and othering? This is the real – unfathomable, incomplete, endless. Artists and cultural workers graciously assume the perpetual task of representation within an increasingly divisive and violent world. No history, anthology, or census is complete. Similarly, no artistic mission is either.”

Representation in art is a form of order, of “organising the world and reality through the act of naming its elements[1]”. An artist’s intuition – the impulse to weave thread into fabric, to extract clay or flora from the ground to shape anew, or to collect and alter materials found across space and time – touches a fundamental human urge to transmute our immediate surroundings to make sense of both present and past.

Conceptual artist Sanford Biggers investigates the conventions of representation, interrupting historical narratives by juxtaposing recognisable cultural symbols. The exhibition includes works from his Chimera and Codex series, which although distinct in their visual, formal and conceptual languages, both probe the physical and symbolic origins of myth. Biggers reimagines remnants from the past – Classical marble sculptures, traditional African masks and antique American quilts – to call into question their attendant meanings, metaphors and associations.

While Biggers conceptualises through vast media exploration, Bonolo Kavula hones in on a singular, culturally resonant material: traditional shweshwe cloth, inspired by a dress of her mother’s, now a family heirloom. Kavula’s near-translucent tapestries are built from tiny cloth discs connected by thread at mathematical intervals into ghostly geometric grids. These abstract meditations, shaped by repeated gestures of care and preservation, are embedded with collective histories of culture and ancestry.

Within the material worlds that each artist in signifying the impossible song experiences, there are invented worlds that emerge. These are based on real events – personal and collective memories of democracy, nationalism, civil protest, social movements, socio-cultural norms, material cultures, language and writing systems – as well as on fictional scenarios, drawing on and reimagining folklore, mythologies, dreams and utopias.

In Inga Somdyala’s re-interpretation of a failed political covenant, two contending South African flags representing the old and new political orders are resurrected, yet they curve (or slump, wounded) onto the floor. Together, their colours make up South Africa’s post-1994 national flag – a hopeful, albeit fraught symbol of a unified ‘rainbow nation’ – speaking to what Somdyala describes as the “whimpering conclusion to the Apartheid struggle, where a negotiated peace among the political and economic elite fails to dismantle the fundamentally racist structures within South African society”.

In Oluseye’s Hot Commodity series, totems of vertically stacked vending machines containing perceived signifiers of Blackness interrogate the facile engagement with Black culture as mere commodity. The work brings together a range of items and ideas associated with Black people – hair, black-eyed peas, music, cotton and a fictional ‘Black Magic’ detergent – to confront the appropriation and commercialisation of Blackness and Black people in popular culture and the industrial complex.

The human need to collect items of spiritual, sentimental and cultural resonance, and surround ourselves with these for comfort and identity-assurance, arises in the materiality of Patrick Bongoy, Ange Dakouo, Turiya Magadlela, Usha Seejarim and Moffat Takadiwa.

Assembled materials and objects come into being through the collation of many disparate elements; they remind us that the whole is made up of what was once fragmented. In this way, signifying the impossible song is interested in substrates, the under-layers, what lies beneath and between our perceptions and interactions. Seejarim’s Receptible is one such example of this: grass brooms are layered in circular rows to create the form of a pot, conflating the modes of basket-weaving and clay coiling. Abundant and hut-like, her vessel simultaneously evokes African and African-American customs of ‘jumping over the broom’: a marital ritual implementing the new wife’s role to perform service through household labour. The mundane broom transforms into a signifier of projected femininity, domesticity and subservience.

The bitter irony of Africa’s natural wealth is engrained in the repurposed materials of Bongoy, Dakouo and Takadiwa. Employed en masse, the detritus of daily life is recirculated into a commentary on the complexities of post-colonial economies forced to put subsistence over ecological preservation. Rubber scraps, toothbrushes, pens, newsprint – their wall reliefs are made from the hangover of past injustices, yet the skillful intervention of the hand exemplifies the ongoing process of rearticulating and rebuilding across the Global South.

Towards the end of Adamshick’s poem, the utopian ideal of a unanimous flag has deteriorated. Instead of being an overarching emblem, this flag has been eclipsed by the process of consensus-building itself – open-ended, imperfect, ongoing:

“Let it be the eloquence

of the process shining

on the page, a beacon

on the edge of a continent.

Let its warnings be dismissed.

Let it be insignificant

and let its insignificance shine.”

___________________________________________

[1] Mitchell, W. 1995, Representation, F Lentricchia & T McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.




signifying the impossible song

Southern Guild 

Marking South African artist Alexandra Karakashian’s first solo in Los Angeles, Beneath the broken sun encompasses immense, monochromatic abstract paintings. Using engine oil, black pigment, charcoal, salt and oil paint on canvas and linen, Karakashian employs non-conventional materials and process-led making to meditate on concepts of loss, exile, and individual and collective grief.

While painting is the major vehicle for this meditation, Karakashian’s works expand beyond this given designation. Her canvases are active explorations, coming into being with a sustained aliveness that feels at odds with traditional perceptions of the medium’s capacity. These vast, dichotomous canvases explore the possibilities of how paintings can move and operate in space. Relinquishing representational form or narrative justification, the intensity and simplicity of each work compels in its viewer an abundant interiorised experience, shifting between sensations both vivid and subtle, tranquil and vexing.

Some of Karakashian’s gestures appear as scars, swathes of dense black, or monolithic columns of light-absorbent depth. Others are the formal inverse: blackened paint and oil mask the plane almost entirely as minimal strobes of canvas remain, appearing as luminous blasts of light. Karakashian’s black is potent. It is a colour bountifully signifying resistance, death, fear, mourning, solace, restraint and the mythic magic of what happens in the dark. The engine oil seeps into the fine warp and weft of the canvas material, forming soft auras around each gesture. This entropic movement cannot be contained; its field of expansion is left to the consequence of fate long after the artist’s physical engagement with the work has ended.

The aesthetic purity of Karakashian’s practice has been likened to the scale and density of the Colour Field paintings of Abstract Expressionism. A lesser-known – yet potentially more apt –comparison can be made with the meditative style of Dansaekhwa or Korean monochrome painting. Dansaekhwa’s approach to abstraction emphasized the physicality of the artist’s engagement with the painting’s surface, intensifying the value of improvisation and experimentation, dilating the sphere of creative contact from two dimensions to three.

Karakashian’s choice of materials prompts further examination. Engine oil is viscous in its associations. We think of oil as something ‘crude’, ubiquitous in its functional usage and complicit in macro-processes of extraction that have grave consequences to human and natural life. This material is heavy – upon the painting’s surfaces, and upon the world. Writing in 2015, theorist Jane Bennett penned a new perspective on the perceived estrangement between inert, inanimate materials and the vital matter of human beings. Bennett and Karakashian similarly advocate for the notion of ‘vibrant matter’ – the idea that all ‘things’ hold an energetic current and power. Through this lens, the hubris of man’s fantasies of ‘consumption and conquest’ are illuminated as the line drawn between self and object becomes less opaque.

It is here, in the expansive space of abstraction, experimentation and vibrant materiality that the artist’s practice lives. Resisting the demand to theorise or panegyrise her work, Karakashian’s practice surrenders itself to the discomfort – and unbounded possibility – of the unknown and indefinable. This dissolution of binaries rejects the value judgements we attach to polarities of light and dark, emptiness and fullness, subject and object, life and death. In the abstracted fields of Karakashian’s work, this disintegration holds the philosophical knowing that these binaries are the circular sensation of the same experience.


Alexandra Karakashian: Beneath the broken sun 

Steve Turner is pleased to present True Colors, a two-part solo exhibition consisting of new paintings by Dublin-based Jingze Du. The first part features forty-three mostly small-scale paintings that depict animals precisely painted in black, white and shades of gray. These works are composed of thin layers of paint meticulously applied with an array of brushes. Viewers often assume that Du uses an airbrush and are always astonished to learn that he does not. Instead, he only uses age-old techniques that he learned as a child prodigy in Yantai, China. These sweet images of cats, dogs, pigs, goats, rabbits, monkeys, ducks and other animals are installed throughout the main gallery, each one vying for our attention, love and possible adoption. However, True Colors has a second room of paintings which completely changes the mood. They are loose adaptations of famous paintings from the past and include Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian; David’s The Death of Marat; Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Vermeer’s Woman Holding A Balance. They are also painted in shades of gray, black and white, however in contrast to the animals, they are composed of loose gestural brush strokes which obscure most of the source image. With one exception, Du chose paintings that depict historical events notable for their violence, with one outlier: the Vermeer, wherein science and reason are highlighted. Through Du’s juxtaposition of animal and human, precise and loose and adorable and horrible, he suggests a world view that is more than black and white.

Jingze Du (born 1995, Yantai, China) moved to Dublin when he was thirteen years old. He later earned his BA at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin (2017) and his MA from the Royal College of Art, London (2019). He has had solo exhibitions at Sifang Museum, Shanghai (2022); Steve Turner, Los Angeles (May & October, 2020, 2021 & 2023); Steve Turner, New York (2023) and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing / Shanghai (2021 & 2023).

____

Steve Turner is pleased to present bodyfountain, a solo exhibition by New York-based Tiger Rocha, featuring four large-scale abstract paintings that are emotional explorations of the artist’s desires. They are composed of layers of thinned and sculptural oil paint that Rocha slashed and dripped across the canvas over a period of several months. He describes the paintings as expansive erotic environments, landscapes strewn with the energy and traces of his body, desires, and emotions. The paint, like blood or other bodily fluid, fountains in all directions conveying Rocha’s sense of ecstasy.

Tiger Rocha (b. 1998, Pleasanton, California) earned a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (2021) before moving to New York where he now lives. He has had a solo exhibition at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2023); two-person exhibitions alongside Drew Dodge at 1969 Gallery, New York (2023) and KIAF, Seoul (2023) and has had work included in group exhibitions at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2022) and Untitled, Miami Beach with Steve Turner (2022).

____

Steve Turner is pleased to present Acts of Service, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based Shingo Yamazaki that features nostalgic paintings depicting scenes from his family’s restaurant in Honolulu. He draws upon childhood memories to present a behind the scenes look at the restaurant showing taped up notes and business cards, cluttered shelves, and the careful placement of images that are specific to Hawai’i. To Yamazaki, the restaurant was a second home rather than just a place of work. He conveys the rhythm of work and play shared by many immigrant families as they share their culture with the communities in which they settle.

Shingo Yamazaki (born 1985, Honolulu) earned a BA from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His work combines Hawai’i’s multicultural iconography with his personal history as a mixed Korean and Japanese American. His work has been exhibited at Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles. This is his first exhibition at Steve Turner.

Jingze Du: True Colors | Tiger Rocha: bodyfountain | Shingo Yamazaki: Acts of Service

Steve Turner 

Control is Jibade-Khalil Huffman's third solo exhibition with the gallery and first solo presentation in Los Angeles in nearly five years. The exhibition presents new film installations, inkjet collages, and for the first time screen printed works

The exhibition continues Huffman’s long fascination with ‘the double,’ with doppelgängers, changing identities and “the second act of American lives.” This paraphrasing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, comes from the writer’s notes on his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon and refers to the idea of a reset or fresh start and the limitations of second chances. In this exhibition Huffman explores reinvention and ideas about what a change could possibly mean in the face of trauma via the construct of his video installation.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman: Control

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

Baekcho百草 – meaning “one hundred plants”– is the inspiration for Yoo Keun Young’s The Odd Nature, which emerged from an encounter with his friend in the late seventies. This shared moment later sowed the seeds for one of Yoo’s most iconic series, which reimagines the natural world.

Gana Art Los Angeles welcomes you to step into a peculiar forest where otherworldly trees, flowers, and foliage weave an entrancing landscape. As Yoo would start his days gazing at the Chrysanthemums that decorated the outer walls of his home, we invite you to be mesmerized by scenes of warped blossoms and misshapen branches.

Yoo Keun Young is an artist born and based in Daejun. His work is deeply devoted to themes of odd or strange nature. A person of humble and reserved character, he rarely leaves his home, spending much of his time filling his large studio with art. Despite his quiet nature, his artistic world is full of vitality. Strong contrasting colors and strokes capture the eyes of the viewers.

His diverse body of work reflects a gradual evolution in expression, showcasing his constant experimentation with new techniques and materials. Each piece reveals a moment in time, expressing his ever-changing emotions. A key aspect of his art is how, behind the vibrant forms and primary colors, he subtly and intricately reveals the complexities and mental state of modern people as we have shifted to an urban-centered existence, leaving behind nature’s splendor. Above all, his use of intense colors and dynamic strokes highlights his extraordinary aesthetic insight.

Let your subconscious respond to Yoo’s surreal garden as you find yourself suspended between harmony and dissonance, calm and chaos.


Keun Young Yoo: The Odd Nature

Gana Art Los Angeles

Date: Saturday, October 26, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Location: The New Yard, 1453 Rio Vista Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90023
RSVP Link: https://public-opening-kevin-douillez.eventbrite.com
Free Secured Parking Available
21+ Event

Join us for the public opening of L'Instant Sublime, an exhibition by Kevin Douillez, an emerging Belgian abstract artist known for his captivating use of acrylic, spray paint, pastel, and oilstick. Douillez’s pieces, ranging from large canvases to intimate works on paper, draw viewers into a world of vibrant abstraction and emotional depth.

The artist will be present at the event, traveling specially from Europe to California. This is a rare opportunity to meet Kevin Douillez in person and discuss his work.

The evening will also feature a live piano performance, complimentary drinks, and the chance to meet fellow art enthusiasts in a relaxed and creative atmosphere.

This event is 21+ and free to attend with RSVP. Free secured parking is available.

Link to RSVP via Eventbrite :
https://public-opening-kevin-douillez.eventbrite.com

Kevin Douillez: L'Instant Sublime

The New Yard

In fall 2024, in conjunction with the forthcoming United States presidential election, Los Angeles-based artist Kathryn Andrews will premiere a site-specific outdoor project on ICA LA’s 7th Street facade. With a conceptual practice grounded in gender theory, Andrews creates work that engages the aesthetics and technologies of Hollywood cinema, political propaganda, and art history to unearth the complex relationships between people, culture, and power that structure the violent fictions of our everyday lives.

Titled Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway […] (2020-Ongoing), Andrews’ work at ICA LA addresses gender disparity in the presidential electoral process. Featured within the work are the names of women who have run for U.S. president such as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress; Patsy Mink, the author of the nation’s Title IX civil rights law; and Gloria La Riva, the first Latinx woman to run for President in 1992. While honoring these historical figures who have challenged a political system designed for their failure, within Andrews’ artwork, this long list of women is overlaid atop the faces of widely recognizable men who have served as president—ranging from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama to Joe Biden—a glaring juxtaposition that further underscores the extreme gender bias in American politics.

Chronicling the nearly 150 years of women vying for the presidential seat—beginning with Victoria Woodhull in 1872 before women had the right to vote—Kathryn Andrews’s work serves as an active record of the persistent and systemic sexism in American politics and a call for the urgent need for change. The project began in 2020 and reoccurs every four years with updated names and faces, displayed publicly until a woman is elected President. With the recent endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, such a reality feels that much closer.

Kathryn Andrews

ICA LA

The Ontario Museum of History & Art (OMHA) and Chaffey Community Museum of Art (CCMA) are pleased to present The Art of Healing, the fourth collaboration between the two museums. All four exhibits have been organized in the same way: presenting a single theme, interpreted in two distinct ways.  

The Art of Healing: Holistic Expressions explores the connection between the healing process and artistic practices. The process of creating art can promote mindfulness and relaxation, often reducing stress and anxiety that can allow individuals to gain insights into their inner selves and process complex feelings or traumas. Engaging in this artistic practice can foster a sense of empowerment. By creating, these artists center themselves as active agents who determine how their stories of healing are told, rather than letting pain, grief, or victimization dominate their narratives. 

The works in this exhibition demonstrate how artists approach healing through their creative practice to focus on their restorative health and well-being. Through painting, drawing, sculpting, writing, and other forms of expression, the featured artists in the exhibition, Amabelle Aguiluz, Flora Kao, Denise Silva, Melissa Ellyn Watkins, and Caylin Yorba-Ruiz, use these techniques as a powerful avenue for healing and self-discovery. 

The Art of Healing

Ontario Museum of History & Art

limina, lumina,,. October 19 – November 23, 2024. 

Lindsey Harald-Wong, Narong Tintamusik, Catherine Menard, Daniel Schubert, October Anderson, Mayolo Figueroa, Kento Saisho. Group exhibition. 4478.

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 19, 6pm - 9pm.
_ _

Limina, plural of ‘limen,’ a crossing of a limit—a threshold of a crossing. At least doubled: a multiplied borderland, a multiple border….
	
A word from anatomy: lumina, (plural of ‘lumen’): “the central cavity of a tubular or other hollow structure in an organism or cell.” From the late-19th century: from Latin, literally ‘opening.’ Or, a word from physics, from Latin, ‘light.’ So a hollow, a light, or an opening. But not an absence—but maybe a pathway or passage. A connection between different parts or places (of a body). A medium: a movement between limits, between thresholds, between limina,
	
a word from psychology: limina, (plural of ‘limen’): “a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another.” From mid-17th century: from Latin, ‘threshold.’ A repeat horizon, a litmus test.

An anatomy, a psychology, a physicality(, and a test): some opposed limits of (the study of) a body and its circulations or disturbances. Interstitial, in-between forms whose lacks form the limits of the other. A non-orientable tubular twisting, whirling, whorling, spiraling of one along the lacks and limits another, until it becomes the next one. Annihilated, illuminated. Se elimina, se ilumina. A heteroglossia (spoken like a spell). 
	(“ limina, lumina,,”)
				 
A complex communication, between
	limina, 								                lumina,,

….


Already at the threshold of this exhibition is the place of an artwork (and the gallery itself) as a record, cipher, seam, or portal between op/positions of a body: between inside and outside, subject and object, self and other, surface and void, sense and nonsense, delirium and lucidity, hunger and satiation, life and death, night and day, (past,) present and future…. But these continual pairings tend to be sleepy, soporific sequences (recurring like dog bites (bad) dreams) that rest on inherited dualities, hypnotic habits, and regulated orders. On alreadies and over-and-overs.
	
This is probably at least part of the reason why, in (global) contemporary contexts of cultural (art)work, social practices, and academic research, a between often appears in the place of a disinheritance or disidentification—a break—with conventional, traditional, or already-operational positions (or professions): inter-disciplinary, inter-sectionality, cross-cultural, trans-corporeality…. (Even the “post-,” “non-,” and “multi-” versions suggest something of a betweenness since they all still function to displace a practice beyond prior positions or singular borders.) Historically, habitually, these breaks (or bridges?) have produced hopefully critical perspectives and practices organized around hybrid identities and split positions, a kind of borderlands realized through a re-focusing on relations and complex connections between bodies staked at their limits and the linguistic, social, political, and economic systems they inhabit. Though, of course, turns of phrase won’t necessarily pull us from the rift they are pointing-to. (Especially when they remain locked-into the same master dialect(ic) of binary structures.) But maybe this work is symptomatic of a between as a power forming in the place of a resistance or insurgency, of a place on the verge of transformation or transition—of somewhere that refuses to stay-still. Somewhere elsewhere and otherwise. Something different and distant (while remaining…  
							…right at the center, nearby).
	
Sometime between altæred states and changes of phase. Something at its limits, on the brink. A passing or passage. (An eclipse.) An interval between or beyond event horizons: at the edge of energy and information (or apparitions). A hole with its brim as the abyss.
	Something liminal, luminal. Some limina, lumina,,

Remaining at the limen, at the perforated threshold of these precarious, shifting states, how might we work with relations between more than one border, more than one (being-in-a-) body, multiple divisions and disorientations, more than one inside or outside (all while remaining between)….?
	
Or, what would it be to account for a betweenness without only defining its equalized limits, without reducing asymmetrical doubles and (two)folds to the symmetry of binaries and dichotomies? (After all, there’s always already a 3 in a 2: a third part that parts, partitions.) Or, better yet, what would it be to work with both at the same time, with its limits (its lines) and its lacks? What would it be to work with betweenness as this interstitial, primordial process of producing distance and difference without reducing it to a null, blinking instant of forgetting? (And without reducing it to some kind of mystical fluid—without falling with its vertigo.) To work with a betweenness as a medium and material—a substrate or substance—as well as a moment and a movement.	
	
Initially (and ultimately), the exhibition keeps asking about the status of a between as a paradoxical place that structures a variety of relations: physical, psychical, structural, social, (al)chemical, political, spatial, temporal, historical.... Basically, what does it mean for something or someone to be “between” (rather than decidedly occurring on any particular ‘side’)? Where is between? What takes-place in-between (and what’s out-between)?

Built with works that gather as they form, as they cross, the exhibition installs these questions and problems of betweenness by working-through the uniquely ranging im/materialities and bodies of each piece and their interrelations with others. While most of the artists are based here in Los Angeles, there are two artists from elsewhere: Harald-Wong is based in Malaysia, and Tintamusik is based in Texas. So, on a certain level this question of borders, crossings, customs, and distances is a practical dimension of the works’ realities and the exhibition’s position between heres and theres. And, in general, the pieces tend toward a performance of liminal, luminal—interstitial—states along every dimension of their production: materially, conceptually, technically…. 
	
Ranging between sculptural metalwork, terrestrial painting, frenetic drawing, resinous condensations (or plasticky indigestions), suspended (Thai) foods, nighttime photography, and clairvoyant durational (video and sound) work, the array of media supplies variable entryways to the paths of the exhibition (both within and beyond the scope addressed by this text—there’s always some light that escapes!). Folding onto themselves, many of the materials are reflective of their techniques and (conceptual) processes (and vice-versa): a sculptural painting with food that seems to present a suspended moment of digestion (a stuffed lumen, a full void, something in-the-middle of being processed); little balls of steel-shot hotly sutured into pointillistic contours that never really decide whether they are made of points or lines; still-sticky pieces of tape tiling themselves into a trace of its double displayed on the ground; a photograph of (the San Gabriel River at) night (that is, a light capturing the limits of what’s illuminated (and remember: a river is as in-between as the night, especially when in it (either one)); some landlike paintings hanging like a signpost at a crossroads; a yonic, cloven monolith that splits its visions between activity and an aftermath—an after/life; and works on paper that hold the imprints and traces of contact and crossings—papers that are the mediums as much as the marks made upon them, that are lifeforms as much as those who made them. Together, the works might demonstrate ways of presenting—not representing—interstitialities of limina and lumina without reducing them to any particular state, or any particular instance, of betweenness. They show limits becoming pathways, and viscera becoming husks. (And then they do it all again in the opposite direction, moving back-and-forth like a typewriter’s ribbon (like this text).)

Eventually, working-through this middled place of in-betweens may also lead toward the contours of power and the borders of regulatory systems. By the fact of being a process of transition and communication (of difference), an in-between is a place of vulnerability—and opening-up—where ‘one thing’ often leads to ‘another.’ It is a place of action and exchange between instances, between bodies, between informations. And therefore it is a place of potential violation and violence, as well as a place of necessary change (of moving from one point to another…). It is based on what happens ‘in-between’ that lines of power are drawn (written)—and along these borderlines the organizations of systems are rendered and redistributed. As an economy. Or, hopefully, as an ethics (self-constructed (with others)). Or, maybe, as an aesthetics in the place of an ethics. Or as a site of becoming—of radical embodiments. As Maria Lugones says in her essay “On Complex Communication,”

	That is, to place ourselves in the limen, in a borderland, is to conceive of “ourselves” as not exhausted by 		domination. […] Indeed, as liminal we need to engage in a poiesis, a self-construction, an arduous and 			dangerous process.

But to conceive of such “a poiesis, a self-construction” in terms of a non-dual or de-doubled betweenness would be to reconsider a borderlands as a non-binary mutilplicity or interstitiality, more than a hybridity or a mere split (of identity or position (nationality)). An undecidability that produces a series of differences and distances across or between dis/connected spaces and times. Between limits and hollows.  Between limina, lumina,,

	Limina, plural of ‘limen,’ a multiplied borderland, a multiple border. A crossing, a limit—a threshold of a crossing,
	a word from psychology: limen, a repeat horizon, a litmus test. Where something begins its presencing.
	Lumina, a word from anatomy: lumina, a hollow, a light, or an opening. But not an absence—but maybe a pathway or passage. A connection between different parts or places (of a body). A medium: a movement between limits, between thresholds, between limina,
						  lumina,,

….


An indifference between a definition and a delirium—or, some snowdrifts and scarecrows


With all this circling around what is being said, there’s still something difficult to define about an “in-between.” Despite its frequency and apparent necessity for saying and situating split or middled states, something seems to disappear in its place as soon as everything around it assumes position—like the distance between each of these letters, the difference between each of these words. But sometimes it seems like a between might be more immediately recognized. As the exposed framing of the gallery walls and ceilings: the spaces between beams, the gaps between 2 x 4s. Like the geometry of points, lines, and voids (or faces): a boundary, a line | as a writing or drawing between each side that gathers along its signing, its seaming. 
	
Or maybe the void (or the face) is an in-between. Or maybe the line was a hollow tunnel to begin with, a cut. Or maybe the points at the intersections are the in-betweens, only appearing at the crossings as punctures of perspective. Or, maybe, this indecisive turning from one place to another is a symptom of the slippery relativity of this liminal, luminal,, place. A limit or a horizon, a hollow or a pathway. A bounded burrowing. Dilating, doubling.

In any case, to repeat and reiterate: as much as a in-between seems to defy categorization or containment, it is also precisely the position that makes categorization and containment (of something, somewhere, someone, or sometime else) possible. A way of accounting for in/distinction, change, movement (between limits); or, lapses, lacks, and gaps. It is a necessary act of documentation or recording—a record. And a process: a processing materializes as an in-between: a latent, unseen, or forgotten transformation. A productive negation, a negative magnitude (maybe).
	
…But as I am already back to circling, there’s obviously some kind of vertigo creeping-in here, between a definition and the delirium it sets-off. At a first glance, or if only handed-over textually, these flashes are still stuck in narrative definitions and spatial imaginations (and metaphors) of an in-between; and an “in-between” is also a necessary structure of time and movement, a practice or process of material phases and shifts. But without an object at hand, without the act or performance of actually passing-through the exhibition, it’s likely impossible to overcome an imagination of an in-between—it’s likely not possible to work with this timing or temporality of a between as an interval. 
	
Without an object or some kind of bodily entanglement with the works, it’s all just snowdrifts and scarecrows, baby! (Dangerously gathered-up like unsown seeds by the winds, or deceitfully made to scare you away like a peckish bird.) And this work with limina, lumina,, requires an activation or activism (like keeping-track of these commas,,,), a direct working-along the object: the exhibition (and its populations). It requires the time to actually play-out: an interval of necessary distance or difference (between events) inflicted by time—but also by the gaze, or at the least an act of observation. (An act of going-to the gallery.)

Image:
Narong Tintamusik. "Digestate 6." Acrylic, aniline wood dye, Thai food ingredients, wastewater on wood panel. 2024.


limina, lumina,,.

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

Baldwin Avenue Gallery in Sierra Madre celebrates the long, rich career of Thom Cooney Crawford with an exhibition of his paintings and sculpture from October 19 through November 23. Meet the artist at the opening night reception at 7-9 PM Saturday, October 19 at 12 North Baldwin Ave., Sierra Madre.

Cooney Crawford’s 40+ year career began in New York City with two solo shows back to back at Tibor De Nagy Gallery. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since then, including an early solo show at The Sculpture Center, NYC. Winner of an NEA Grant, his sculpture, scaled for public art, was exhibited at St Peter's, Citicorp, NYC among other venues. His Homage to Georgia O’Keefe is installed on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.
Art historian and critic Robert Mattison writes of this artist, “…it takes an act of faith to believe in universal values. There are few contemporary artists even willing to search for the common forms that connect us as members of the human race. Thom Cooney Crawford seeks such archetypal symbols.”

Worlds Within Worlds shows the artist in his maturity. In the early 2000s Cooney Crawford left the art world, college teaching, and the US to “clear the bramble” from his head to further develop his art. He lived in Bavaria then spent four years living in a remote cottage on the Ring of Beara, Ireland’s wild west coast. In that landscape shaped by wind and water, standing stones and old oaks, he found the synthesis he’d been seeking. On his return to the US in 2010, he went into his loft and worked in isolation for a decade. This new body of work includes paintings that express the nature of the cosmos, while his sculptures have a mythic presence that initially haunts the viewer, but opens to a deep connection.

In 2023, Cooney Crawford published Eclipse Illumined, a collection of poems and images. A collaboration with poet Cathie Sandstrom, the book is a dialog between two lyric poets and a series of Cooney Crawford’s paintings.
See more information on the gallery and gallery hours at www.baldwinavenuegallery.com. Learn more about this painter/sculptor/poet at www.thomcooneycrawford.com
 

Thom Cooney Crawford: Worlds within Worlds

Baldwin Avenue Gallery

Gallery Luisotti is thrilled announce its fall Pacific Standard Time exhibition, Mark Ruwedel: Los Angeles, Landscapes of Four Ecologies. September 20 – November 23, 2024. This exhibition will celebrate Ruwedel’s decade long project, which has never before been shown in all four parts.

Mark Ruwedel’s Los Angeles, Landscapes of Four Ecologies includes photographs and handdrawn maps, capturing the Los Angeles Basin’s distinct natural environments. Ruwedel’s photographs find evidence of fires, floods, landslides, and coastal erosion, all entangled within the city’s urban infrastructure. Landscapes of Four Ecologies takes its name from Reyner Banham’s 1971 publication, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, yet surveys those interstitial spaces Banham downplayed: the river, the coast, the hills and canyons, and that which is“haunted by the desert” (in Joan Didion’s words.)

In this Pacific Standard Time exhibit of nearly three dozen carefully crafted pictures, one will find many scenes containing fragments of long-forgotten endeavors. Like an archaeologist, Ruwedel does his best to tread lightly so that others might have the experience of uncovering for themselves faint traces of that which precedes and may still survive us. If we look intently, we might be struck by how brief and small – though still consequential – is our time on earth. The ultimate beauty in these pictures may be the way they, like the writings of Carey Mc Williams, Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Jared Farmer etc., leave us with a deeper and less settled sense of our complex habitat.  

Image: Mark Ruwedel, Pacific Palisades #5, 2015 

Mark Ruwedel: Los Angeles, Landscapes of Four Ecologies

Gallery Luisotti

SHED is an artist conceived and funded gallery space storing individual works (mostly on paper) by Fern Vargas. SHED itself is the encompassing work. sic! is the exhibition’s title. SHED falls under this title sic! and sic! falls under SHED. One follows the other. The gallery is on Clinton Street at Western Avenue here in the City of Los Angeles, State of California 90004.

Fern Vargas is an artist working in Los Angeles.

Fern Vargas: sic!

SHED

‎Duncan Hannah was a painter who loved escapism in all its forms. He was also devoted to books, music and art, but it was only with film that he was able to express his love of flesh and fantasy on canvas. Born in Minneapolis in 1952, as the golden age of Hollywood was entering its sunset years, Duncan’s parents took him to see movies of their own choice to avoid hiring a babysitter. Thus, at the age of eight he watched Psycho on the big screen, with his mother attempting to shield his eyes when Janet Leigh stepped into the shower. At fourteen, the battle of the hands continued when Jane Birken stripped off for David Hemmings in Blow Up. This, perhaps, began a pattern of cinematic voyeurism in Duncan’s art that was to continue throughout his career.

Moving to New York in 1973, Duncan’s exposure to old cinema expanded way beyond late-night television reruns. With the range of art movie houses in Manhattan his tastes grew more eclectic, and he became immersed in foreign films, particularly French ones. He adopted the fedora hat and trench coat of Alain Delon in Le Samouraï and the floppy-haired preppy look of François Truffaut’s muse, Jean-Pierre Léaud. In 1976 he starred in Unmade Beds, Amos Poe’s homage to A bout de souffle, substituting Paris with the streets and rooftops of downtown Manhattan. He went on to make several more films in New York over the decades.

Duncan loved watching moving pictures, but what he really loved were actors, and more specifically actresses. He watched the best and he watched the very worst films in pursuit of actresses who caught his eye. He was not particular about genre, format or era: a pretty girl was a pretty girl, regardless of costume, and if he found an image of her minus her costume then so much the better. But Duncan also loved the glamour and mystery of mainstream Hollywood movies: the Cold War spies of his youth were inspiration for his paintings of escape across Europe via train, steam ship or Citroën. And beneath the veneer, the seediness of Hollywood was hugely fascinating to Duncan—among his many books on the subject were at least five copies of Kenneth’s Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, all seemingly well read.


Duncan watched at least one film a day but more often two—film was the fuel that fired his art.


—Megan Wilson, September 2024

Flesh and Fantasy

The Journal Gallery

 The Artists Gallery is pleased to present new visions of contemporary art from Eran Barnea, Robert Zent Chew, Shirley Asano Guldimann and Sunhee Joo, on view November 6-29, 2024. 

On Saturday, November 9, from 6-9 pm, The Artists Gallery invites the community and media to attend the opening reception for these new exhibitions. Each solo show presents unique themes and subjects. Exhibition titles range from Miracle Mile (Barnea), Mixed Impressions (Chew), Love of Nature (Joo) & Visions (Guldimann). Artists will be in attendance to meet guests and discuss their collections. The reception is free to attend. 

Miracle Mile, a collection from artist Eran Barnea optically takes viewers on a journey through the historic Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. Barnea was born in Israel and trained in fine art, architecture, code breaking, and digital visual effects for movies. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at TAG. 

Robert Zent Chew is best known for his abstracted landscapes and florals. Mixed Impressions, Chew’s latest exhibition at TAG remains true to this stylistic disposition with themes ranging from the American West to Tropical to the French countryside.

Sunhee Joo’s Love of Nature exhibition visually presents the mild & gentle themes of nature. The collection combines traditional painting methods with manipulation tools like Photoshop. Sunhee Joo considers art to be “visual poetry.” The showcase aims to communicate tranquility and the artist’s love for God through creative imagery. 

Shirley Asano Guldimann’s exhibition, titled Visions, will present paintings and drawings that combine stream of consciousness line drawing, classical and modern painting, and traditional Japanese elements. This range of techniques adds an element of surprise, keeping viewers engaged and intrigued. 




Visions in Novembe

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Simchowitz is pleased to present When There’s Nothing Left, our second solo exhibition of the Los Angeles-based artist Shaina McCoy, at Hill House in Pasadena, California. Please join us for an opening reception on Sunday, October 20th from 11am-3pm – please RSVP for address: info@simchowitz.com

In this new body of work, McCoy (b. 1993, Minneapolis MN) delves into the root system of her family’s archival photographs. A project stewarded by an inter-generational investment in preserving and celebrating family history, of monumental moments and mundane beauty of the everyday, a heart-felt series that holds literal & metaphorical relevance of togetherness.

Inspired by her grandfather, the family photographer, McCoy expounds on the art of archiving what her family is able to capture so well—being together. This series, When There’s Nothing Left, channels a re-envisioned take on her family’s most sincere candids with a perspective mirroring her grandfather’s photography. Taking many of her own photographs now as well, McCoy distinguishes both contributor and time period by her use of color. The poignancy of the quotidian experience of life is treated with the same care and attention to detail, and McCoy’s featureless faces allude to the possibility that the figures might serve as archetypes of a more universal human experience, one where the viewer can imagine how they might place themselves within the work. 

Using familial source imagery as reference allows McCoy to explore the personal accessibly, a central characteristic of her practice. The paintings on view in When There’s Nothing Left depict a series of embraces, between adults and children alike, that could be interpreted in a number of ways–some celebratory, others consoling, each an active gesture made static, further memorializing the importance of human connectivity. Fleeting moments, particularly as they pertain to loss, reverberate in this work–the potency of contact between figures, and how they hold each other up, celebrate the relationships we have with those we love, reminding us to honor the time we have and to prioritize the important bonds we share.

Image: Shaina McCoy – Her First Love, 2021. Oil on canvas. 60h x 40w x 1.50d in / 152.40h x 101.60w x 3.81d cm

Shaina McCoy: When There’s Nothing Left

Simchowitz Hill House

Helia Pouyanfar: Breathing House

FOYER-LA

In Audrey Kawasaki’s newest exhibition “Visceral,” the artist delves into the connection between the mind, body, and soul, paying homage to our miraculous inner physiology as a mirror to our emotions and external being. This triadic connection becomes profound with a deeper understanding of our own impermanence, encouraging us to more fully embrace the precious fragility of life and its beauty. The series of paintings, created after the artist’s move to the UK, unveils the intricacy of the human experience through depictions of the feminine form, diaphanously connected to nature.
 
In Kawasaki’s paintings, mushrooms and insects flourish upon the figures, intertwining with human anatomy in a mesmerizing dance that explores the ephemeral nature of life. Sinuous forms and an earthy palette create an ethereal atmosphere as the female figures shed their skin and transform into something new. There is a rawness and vulnerability in the way they open themselves up, revealing the visceral complexities of the body that are usually kept hidden away. Every organ, every cell, works in harmony to not only keep us alive but to allow a soulful depth of existence. They form an intricate system where each affects the other—mental states impact physical health, bodily experiences influence emotions, and the soul guides a sense of purpose and ultimate transcendence.
 
In ‘Visceral’ the internal truths of our bodies are not separate from our higher selves—they are the gateway, the tangible bridge, that allows us to see the beauty of the natural world, with profound awareness.
 
“This body of work has become a deeply personal journey - a raw, vulnerable attempt to find my voice, to shed the layers that no longer serve me, and to uncover the authentic self that lies beneath, even in the face of uncertainty.
 
Delving into the shadowy recesses of the psyche, “Visceral” unveils the complex tapestry of the human experience through haunting and striking depictions of the feminine form, interwoven with the primal essence of nature with reverence for the inevitable cycle of life.” – Audrey Kawasaki--


//



In Chie Yoshi’s inaugural exhibition with KP Projects titled “Sanctuary,” the artist creates a visual refuge dedicated to sheer and unapologetic beauty as a counterpoint to the cynicism, noise, and divisiveness of the contemporary world. Through her paintings, the artist creates a place where the psyche can rest, re-imagine, and restore.
 
“When I leave reason behind and free-fall into the depth of the psyche, I encounter innate images which become my inspiration. In the same way that the human body carries a long evolutionary history within, the mind also inherits patterns of instinctive behavior. Jung called them archetypes. Freud called them archaic remains. Mythologists call them motifs. Other scholars call them primordial thoughts. I try to capture these ancient yet timely motifs as collective dreams in my paintings. It gives me a sense of selflessness, groundedness and unity to paint our collective psyche that exists beyond time and space.” – Chie Yoshii
 
Chie’s answer to chaos in the form of refuge and beauty is not passive. The subjects of Yoshi’s paintings explore a profound interplay between femininity, power, and symbolic archetypes of the feminine. Examining themes of vulnerability, strength, and the complex duality that exists within the female experience, the artist creates a visual language that celebrates both the soft and fierce aspects of her heroines, juxtaposing fragility with raw power. There is a gentleness and knowing in her work, as well as a sense that great lengths will be taken to protect and defend this inner sanctuary which holds a sense of natural balance much needed in the world right now. 


Audrey Kawasaki: Visceral | Chie Yoshii: Sanctuary

KP Projects

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present our second solo exhibition by Upstate New York-based artist Carrie Mae Smith. The exhibition, titled Blue Roses, features a series of still life paintings depicting a particular set of flow blue china in W.H. Grindley's Rose pattern (c. 1893). This series represents a progression in Smith's artistic practice, showcasing her evolving formal techniques while continuing her exploration of the history and significance of domestic utilitarian objects, especially culinary items.

A favorite of Smith’s because of its imperfect patterns and soft painterly designs, she set up various arrangements of the flow blue china for her painting compositions. Atop tables in her light-filled studio, the arrangements appear almost as if the china pieces had just been placed out in preparation for setting the table for a special dinner. Serving vessels are nestled between stacks of plates and cups and saucers, forks and knives are cradled in dishes or placed as a pair on dinner plates. Most of the works are painted looking down upon the china, or at an angle from above, allowing Smith to capture the delicate patterns both on top of the plates and on the sides of the pitchers and cups. The rich blue patterns on cool white china are set against the beige tones of a warm linen tablecloth, the light from the window casting soft shadows between the dining and serving ware.

“With my still-life paintings, I aim to highlight the inherent beauty of these items, viewing the arrangements of stacked china as contemplative spaces,” Smith explains. “As I arranged the compositions and painted this series, I found myself reflecting on the family who once owned these pieces, the meals lovingly prepared and served on these dishes, the care taken to clean and store them, and the cabinet where they waited patiently for the next special occasion. My thoughts also wandered to the cultural weight these items carry and how changing lifestyles have diminished the significance of formal traditions over time.” 

While Smith’s artistic practice touches on various social and political concepts and ideas, the works in Blue Roses enable the viewer to relish in the beauty of both her painterly style and her ability to further extend the lifecycle of these elegant items. 

Carrie Mae Smith (b. 1974, Derby, CT) lives and works in Upstate New York. Inspired by antiques and food culture, Smith often paints her personal collections of vintage china, historic objects, and culinary delicacies. The daughter of a butcher, she supported her artistic practice early on working as a private chef on Martha’s Vineyard. Smith’s works serve as symbols of class, labor, friendship, tradition, love, and utility. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Delaware (2013). Smith has received numerous awards and grants, including the Clowes Fellowship Full Scholarship, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc. Artist Grant; and the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation, Artist Grant. She has exhibited her work internationally and nationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles, CA; the Locust Grove Estate, Poughkeepsie, NY; and The Berman Museum, Collegeville, PA, and her works are included in numerous private and public collections. Carrie Mae Smith currently lives and works in Gilbertsville, New York, where she serves on the faculty at SUNY Oneonta.

Carrie Mae Smith: Blue Roses

Lowell Ryan Projects 

Over 50 artists fill the walls and floors of the gallery with fun and unusual works. Our curation aimed to stretch the public’s understanding of collage as something beyond busy compositions that look like conspiracy boards that are only missing red string. The artists exhibiting approach collage with the same finesse and intention all pop surrealists do.

Measure Twice Cut Once: Lowbrow Group Collage Exhibition

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

Sebastian Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present Gothic Electronica. A concurrent exhibition of work by the artist will be on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art at 9953 S Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Together, both exhibitions survey fifty years of the artist’s work.

Leavitt has spent his career as an artist in Southern California, drawing endless inspiration from the architecture and mass media culture of Hollywood. By the time Leavitt began his artistic practice, Pop Art and Minimalism had begun to run their course. As an important figure in the first generation of California conceptual art, Leavitt was able to use these prior movements to synthesize his personal experiences and impressions of the California landscape. A writer and filmmaker himself, Leavitt’s works have always been rooted in narrative storytelling and intrinsically linked to theater, film, and the media culture of Los Angeles.

Gothic Electornica provides a comprehensive look through Leavitt’s career, beginning with photographs from the 1970s and running up to a series of recent science fiction-inspired cyborg paintings which seem to foreshadow the rapid merging of human beings, robotics, and high-tech intelligence. Since many of his paintings and photographs were initially utilized as stage props and settings, Leavitt’s formal gallery shows have often conflated fine art and theatrical installations. Uncanny science fiction narratives, melodrama, and cinematic moments that seem familiar, yet out of place, run through Leavitt’s entire oeuvre.

Film and the intrigue and mystery of Hollywood storytelling seep through Leavitt’s early work. Utilizing photographic montage, Are You Sure She Said That? Yes, Absolutely, The Consequences Can Be Real, and Study for the “Lure of Silk,” all conjure up the theatricality of film. His installation piece, Gothic Curtain, is heavily influenced by Hammer Film’s 1958 Dracula, evoking the dark, melodramatic tone and thrilling, ominous aesthetic that characterized the romantic horror genre.

While not all of Leavitt’s works present a detailed narrative, they set up contexts within which the viewer is invited to construct personal associations with Leavitt’s references.

As the artist describes it, “Because my work tends toward narrative, I sometimes imagine a setting for paintings - the theme restaurant at LAX would look right in the boardroom of an aerospace firm, or the painting of the Manta ray might fit the wood-paneled hallway of a seafood restaurant. The photos I did in the 1970’s might act as film stills, with installations functioning as a kind of stage set. Recently I’ve done portraits of cyborgs who could operate in a more theatrical realm, perhaps as characters in a sci-fi movie. My work is about things of the world as props for narratives, sequences of objects, places, persons, their combinations evoking random choice, or a mood, a kind of blank absurdity, or the suggestion of a story.”

Since the late 1960s, Leavitt’s work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including an extensive survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2011, curated by Ann Goldstein and Bennett Simpson. His work has been featured in thematic exhibitions around the world and is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Getty, Los Angeles; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and many others.

William Leavitt: Gothic Electronica

Sebastian Gladstone

Wonzimer Gallery 341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031/ wonzimerinfo@gmail.com
Opening: 5-10 pm, Friday, November 1st, 2024

Exhibiting Artists: David McDonald, Khang Nguyen, and Jennifer Sirey

The vision and philosophy of interconnectedness in the Flower Ornament Sutra serve as the basis for this exhibition. The central principle of this text is the fourfold Dharmadhatu (realm of reality).

Of the four aspects of the Dharmadhatu, the first two are the universal and the particular.  One can determine their meaning by referring to other terms used to describe them, such as the ultimate and phenomenal, absolute and relative, identity and difference, ontological and ontic, nondual and dual, one and many, etc.

This text does not consider the realization of the nonduality of Being to be the utmost and final objective.  This is due to the emphasis on integrating that realization into everyday activities—that is, into the particular, the second aspect of the Dharmadhatu.

That leads to the third aspect of the Dharmadhatu, the interconnection of the universal and the particular.  The nonduality of the universal can give rise to particular differences without itself becoming differentiated.  Conversely, the individual can find common ground in the universal without itself becoming common.  This suggests that these two dimensions are inseparable without being conflated.

The interconnectedness of particular beings constitutes the fourth aspect.  From this vantage point, phenomena can be understood as a field of congruous beings rather than adversarial ones.

The audience is invited to view the artwork of David McDonald, Khang Nguyen, and Jennifer Sirey through the prism of the fourfold Dharmadhatu.



The Universal and the Particular

Wonzimer

Angels Gate Cultural Center (AGCC) is pleased to present METHOD, a new group exhibition featuring twenty-five contemporary artists who experiment across interdisciplinary fields. 

METHOD opens with a public reception on Saturday, September 14th from 2pm to 4pm in the gallery during OPaf, Other Places art fair, at AGCC. OPaf is an alternative art fair dedicated to supporting unconventional and underrepresented artists, art project spaces, and art programming. OPaf takes place September 14th from 11am to 9pm in the Battery Leary-Merriam at AGCC (visit https://opaf.info to learn more). 

METHOD is about technology, ecology, and embodiment. It layers the history of analog and digital processes that shape images and imaginaries, exploring transcultural aspects of language, its role in technoscience and the coloniality embedded in cartographic forms. The artists’ explorations connect seemingly divergent ecosystems, expanding their meaning. Reflections on ecology reimagine the evolution of Earth in conjunction with technological processes, as visualized in digital art, while critically examining the settler logic of taxonomizing species and dividing land to separate lifeworlds. The artworks on technology are informed by the development of artificial intelligence and their ideological roots, such as transhumanism (the techno evolution of the human race) and singularitarianism (when machines hypothetically surpass human intelligence). Through cyberpunk aesthetics that critique technofetishism and explore machine memory, technology could be seen as both an echo of the body and a medium for collective subversion. Finally, embodiment explores through queer, Indigenous, and speculatively more-than-human knowledge systems, recognizing the value of differences in configuring a life-centric approach to design. Various methods are employed to understand strategic entanglements and their cyclical feedback loops.

METHOD includes works by Lauren Bedal, Jenna Caravello, CHẾ, Chris Combs, Ismael de Anda III & Eugene Ahn, Tielin Ding, Richelle Ellis, Ksti Hu, Kim Kei, Elizabeth Leister, Lineadeluz, Edua Mercedes, Reuben Merringer, Ashton Phillips, Koi Ren & Joey Verbeke, Dylan Ricards, Miller Robinson, Kayla Tange, Ambrose Trataris & Lucy Black, Ayzay Ukwuoma, Erika Weitz, and Devin Wilson. METHOD is guest juried and curated by Kira Xonorika, SUPERCOLLIDER SciArt Ambassador. 

The exhibition will be on view in the gallery through December 6th, 2024 with free public visiting hours Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, from 10am to 4:30pm.

Visit angelsgateart.org to learn more. 

Image: Koi Ren & Joey Verbeke, T.A.E.L., 2024.

METHOD • Technology, ecology, embodiment

Angels Gate Cultural Center

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Luke Butler: Color Pictures, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. San Francisco-based Butler draws inspiration from pop culture and the history of film and television in luscious, evocative paintings that invite the viewer into imagined cinematic worlds. By transforming images from his lived experience – natural and urban landscapes, objects saved or remembered – into paintings heavy with narrative potential, Butler plays with the tension between reality and artifice that is inherent to film. These invented bits of pop cultural history feel as if they have always existed, as if we should know what comes next. But however potently Butler’s Color Pictures suggest action, they never reveal it, standing continually on the precipice of narrative. 

The Color Pictures series takes its form from the openings of 1960s movies and TV, which triumphantly declared their evolution from black and white into color. Butler consumed these in syndication as a child, long after color became the norm, rendering this declaration as something outside of time and therefore ripe for examination. Butler treats the text almost as a figure in the landscape, existing object-like amid the drama about to unfold. These works build upon a previous series of paintings that played with the tragicomic existential tension of end cards, endlessly proclaiming The End. The Color Picture series instead offers a beginning, or many beginnings. Set against images of the great American landscape or the architectural jumble of urban life, these works serve as an invitation to narrative, offering the viewer a feeling of infinite possibility. 

The Location paintings build upon this cinematic theme, each declaring its time and place like so many title cards or script directions. Enigmatic Los Angeles alleyways and the humbler New York City skylines serve as containers for Butler’s atmospheric scene-setting, bounded within painted borders that emphasize their cinematic quality. As with the Color Pictures, these works come from photographs taken by the artist but trade in the crispness of photography for much a looser hand. The softness of Butler’s landscapes recalls the vast painted worlds of classic Hollywood backdrops or the hazy glow of memory. 

The source images Butler is drawn to often embody a sense of drama – low sun hitting a towering cliffside, restless sea meeting a rocky coastline – that is in keeping with the cinematic overtones of the paintings. He expands his sensual scope in two symphony paintings, which introduce the idea of music into the work, conjuring movie scores and concert halls via crashing waves and floating flowers. Butler’s confident hand captures a distinct sense of arrested motion, his musical references emphasizing the feeling of catching just a single frame of a film strip speeding by or a dance frozen mid-step. 

The exhibition also includes a suite of watercolors of Star Wars action figure packaging, painted to scale. A lover of genre film and television from childhood, the roots of Butler’s artistic consciousness lie in the graphics of pop culture. He lovingly captures not only the iconic Star Wars design, but the wear and tear that comes with enthusiastic use. Each crinkled corner and torn edge speaks to life lived. A rectangle of solid color, framed by exposed cardboard, emphasizes the absence of the figure itself. As with the paintings, these works suggest grand narratives unfolding just off-screen, so to speak, whether in a film about to begin or an action figure reenactment playing out nearby.

Luke Butler (b.1971, San Francisco, CA) has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from The Cooper Union. His work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AK; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The FLAG Art Foundation, NY; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; and Crystal Bridges Museum, among others. His next solo show, "Color Pictures," will be at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, November 2nd- December 7th, 2024. Butler lives and works in San Francisco. He is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. 
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“One might prudently reconsider attending Alexander Reben's latest foray into algorithmic aesthetics at the Charlie James Gallery, where the incessant cacophony of synthetic semiotics risks diluting the very essence of avant-garde ingenuity. Reben's ostensibly groundbreaking AI constructs, while pushing the boundaries of post-human expressionism, inadvertently succumb to a labyrinthine opacity that obfuscates any semblance of genuine emotional resonance. The exhibition, rather than serving as a palimpsest of innovative discourse, devolves into a simulacrum of mechanized profundity, rendering the spectator's engagement a Sisyphean endeavor. In an era where authenticity in artistic praxis is paramount, Reben's digital reveries may ultimately leave the connoisseur yearning for a more substantively corporeal dialogue.” – ChatGPT

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben's show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery, an exhibition of works by the conceptual artist and MIT-trained roboticist Alexander Reben, who utilizes artificial intelligence to create artworks that spring from the interface between human and machine. Reben’s open-hearted approach to technology allows space for both wonder and humor. His works take a wide array of forms, ranging from large, machine-made metal sculptures to an ongoing series of ChatGPT-generated self-critical texts that playfully skewer the language of stereotypical artspeak. Elsewhere, Reben incorporates viewer input into continually evolving artworks that represent a collaboration between artist, viewer, and algorithm.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the large wall-based sculpture AI and the Anvil, in which small, intricate waves ripple across a vast metal surface. With this work, Reben explores the realm of directly converting language into tangible sculpture. Using the giant metal-forming robots of Machina Labs, Reben iteratively collaborates with an AI that autonomously generates code that creates generative 3D sculptures as instructions for massive robotic systems. This enables the robots to sculpt sheet metal into artworks with remarkable precision in a way impossible with other fabrication methods. Reben describes the performative nature of the sculpture’s making as akin to a high-pressure tango, where each machine must move in precisely the opposite direction of the other to balance the immense forces required to manipulate metal. This poetic movement not only reflects the intricacies of their physical interaction but also embodies the delicate dance of creation itself.

Other works incorporate prompts in real time, transforming input from exhibition visitors into AI-generated images and text. Speak Art Into Life invites viewers to suggest ideas to a microphone, which AI converts into visual outputs that become exquisite corpse-style collaborative images. The images evolve over the course of the exhibition, growing and expanding in unpredictable ways. The use of four classic analog flap displays emphasizes the near-uncanny newness of the cutting edge tech that powers the work. By operating on the leading edge of what technology allows, Reben invites us to imagine possible futures for our relationship to machines, making room for a sense of play and even beauty in the boundaries between language and code.

Alexander Reben is an artist who has spent over a decade creating work that probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. With his start at MIT Media Lab, Reben has long studied human-robot symbiosis and art, using experimentation and prototyping to delve into our intricate relationships with algorithms, automation, and amplification. Through the lenses of absurdity, humor, and mischief, his artwork highlights our inseparable evolutionary entanglement with the technology that shapes our existence.
 
Reben has become a leading figure at the intersection of art and technology. He was OpenAI’s first Artist in Residence, and his first solo museum retrospective, “AI Am I?”, which included an exhibition of over 120 artworks,  recently concluded at the Crocker Art Museum. His work has been exhibited globally at institutions including Ars Electronica, MAK Contemporary Art Museum, Vitra Design Museum, Design Museum Ghent, and the Vienna Biennale. As an expert in his field, he has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT, and Harvard. Reben’s work has been covered by CNN, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting, MIT Technology Review and WIRED, among others.

Luke Butler: Color Pictures |Alexander Reben: Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben's show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery

Charlie James Gallery

NOON Projects is honored to present “Made in My Bedroom” a group exhibition featuring John Bertle, David Gilbert, Jim Isermann, and Daniel Arthur Mendoza.

In 2020, John Bertle, David Gilbert, Jim Isermann, and Daniel Arthur Mendoza started a book club to read Queer Theory. Having met through the University of California - Riverside’s MFA Art program, the group was comprised of one alum, two current students, and one professor. An informal education began. They met weekly over Zoom during the first dark year of the pandemic, reading works by José Esteban Munõz, Olivia Laing, and Jack Halberstam. And, the group stuck together, flourished, yet was fluid: they read a gay detective novel, watched movies (by Pedro Almodovar, Derek Jarman, Marlon Riggs, Ang Lee). Four years later, the group still meets: sometimes to discuss books they've read, sometimes to catch up and spill the tea. 

This exhibition is composed of artworks each artist has made over the last four years. An overlapping section of a Venn diagram of their practices and interests would include textiles, queer joy, flowers, gay aesthetics, and craft. In the bigger front room of the gallery, each artist exhibits a large work whose subject is fabric or textiles, while in the smaller second gallery, the mode is of collaborative installation. In the smaller gallery, drawings and studies by each artist hang alongside and on top of larger gestures such as photo murals, vinyl cutouts, and stamps which decorate the walls.

The first book they read, Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, can be read as a guidebook for the group's ethos. It clearly and repeatedly discusses how to learn from the past while striving for a utopian (yet ultimately unattainable) future. It lays the groundwork for this in the present by rejecting norms of the day. As an intergenerational group of queers, this meant slightly different things to each member; discussing those differences expanded each person’s understanding and appreciation of the text.

While the group started as an academic pursuit, it quickly became more than that. It was a reliable once-a-week check-in that provided sustenance, especially during the isolating lockdown of 2020. It has become a way of building unexpected community and friendship that feels contemporary: they mostly meet virtually. But it has been a source of true connection, allowing each member to get to know one another well and to remain close.

“Made in My Bedroom”
Featuring: John Bertle, David Gilbert, Jim Isermann, and Daniel Arthur Mendoza

October 26 – December 7, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 26, 2024 6–9 PM

951 Chung King Road, Los Angeles CA 90012

For more information email info@noon-projects.com

Made in My Bedroom

NOON Projects

Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to premier the first West Coast solo exhibition by London-based artist Matthew Krishanu.

“In Matthew Krishanu’s ‘Immerse’, we are slowly submerged in dripping, fluid memories. Images, like they were forming in a dream, or becoming visible through a haze, lead us to fleeting protagonists, and sites in a state of temporariness. Immersion then means many things – the lushness of a grove of imposing trees or a mesh of branches, the depth of a cave, the eyes of a protagonist or even the states of learning, leisure and rest. It is also darkness and light, metaphor and corporeality. As his protagonists watch us, or look away in contemplation or resolve, Krishanu’s backgrounds continue to blur, leading us to an intimacy and focus on person, place, event and time.”

– Mario D’Souza

Matthew Krishanu: Immerse

Tanya Leighton Los Angeles

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Patrick Quinn (born 1988 in Virginia; lives and works in New York) gained his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. From 2011 to 2018, the artist lived in Detroit, where he was a founding members of the ceramics collective Hamtramck Ceramck. Notable collaborations within popular culture include the album cover for Lil Ugly Mane’s rap album “Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern” (2021) as well the painted lightning backdrop for rapper Bad Bunny’s recent photoshoot for the July 2023 issue of Rolling Stone. “No Problem! Here’s the information about the Mercedes CLR GTR...” is the artist’s first West Coast solo exhibition and his debut with Cheremoya.

Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat, 12-6pm
Website: www.cheremoya.la
Instagram: @cheremoya_la

Image: Patrick Quinn, Poodle with AR in cat condo, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 in / 152,4 x 127 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Cheremoya, Los Angeles.

Patrick Quinn: No Problem! Here’s the information about the Mercedes CLR GTR...

Cheremoya

If it’s true that attention is the highest form of prayer, in the words of Simone Weil, then the luminous textiles comprising CARO’s debut solo exhibition, “Lap of the Gods,” are devotional objects. One doesn’t need to know that the show represents more than a thousand hours of labor or that the creation of one of the tapestries spans five years to see the cumulative effect of such durational attention: a sometimes contemplative, other times ecstatic, interiority. Using silk filament, sequins, and beads, bullion knots, picot stitches, and surface couching bind color to light, the workings of hands to the vision behind closed eyes. 


CARO’s consonant interests in jewelry and embroidery—they received their BA in Metalsmithing from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and continued onto Embroidery School at École Lesage in Paris, France—produce the dynamic tension between the tangible and intangible at the heart of their practice. Diaphanous organza trimmed with iridescent beads is stretched taut across obdurate metal frames. Here, with each pass and pull of needle and thread, that which is mysterious and ethereal threatens to escape the staid ore to which it’s bound. In Is it the same for you?, the frothy night sky is fixed within a hand-fabricated brass and silver frame covered in radiating tines that emphasizes the dissonance but also the interdependence of the materials: the fabric would fall slack without the structural tension; the frame would lose its context, its meaning.  

CARO: Lap of the Gods

Sarah Brook Gallery

parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Teresa Tolliver: Sitting on the Edge of Reality, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery following her powerful and prominent inclusion in the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living in which the artist presented a wall installation of a dozen sculptures from her ongoing “Wild Things” series, begun in the 1980s. The works in Teresa Tolliver: Sitting On The Edge Of Reality date from 1994-2024 and are an exploration of her practice in a variety of media and series.
Teresa Tolliver (b. 1945, Los Angeles, CA) has worked across a variety of mediums, from ceramics to painting to sculpture, throughout her more than four-decade-long career, exhibiting with Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles, early in her practice. Through assemblage, Tolliver draws on histories of the Black diaspora in Los Angeles, particularly South-Central L.A., where the artist was born and where she still lives.

Tolliver creates hand-built ceramics and utilizes found objects that emerge from her everyday life, as well as craft materials, mass-produced items, and elements she picks up at swap meets. She gathers these objects to construct deeply personal figurative sculptures and wall works that range in scale from hand-held and doll-like, to life-size freestanding figures evocative of the Watts Towers not far from her home, and a locus in her artistic life. As Tolliver contends with identity, place, and history both personal and cultural, she refers to the faces in her figurative work as self-portraiture where she embodies and reconceptualizes her mood, state of being, and biography at the time of creation.

“Tolliver’s object-based work and her work as an educator—she has taught for more than two decades in museums, schools, and nonprofit settings—exemplify her commitment to this ethos of world-building,” curator Essence Harden wrote in an essay about the artist’s participation in the Made in L.A. biennial. “Tolliver’s expressive mastery is exhibited in her overall works, her pedagogy, and her ability to morph the mundane into an expansive visual iconography.”

Image: Teresa Tolliver. Photographer: Ed Mumford. Courtesy of parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles, CA.

Teresa Tolliver: Sitting on the Edge of Reality

parrasch heijnen

Exploring intersections of art and activism, Against Monoculture offers a creative lens through which to examine the structural causes and consequences of food inequality. Bringing together artists whose practices foreground the role of food in community, struggle, and survival, the exhibition considers the ways food is a direct link to land, culture, and identity, and how cultivating, preparing, and sharing food are fundamental creative acts.

Exhibiting artists:
Jackie Amézquita, Paola de la Calle, Beatriz Cortez, gloria galvez, Emily Marchand, Narsiso Martinez, Lina Puerta, Emma Robbins, Hana Ward, Kate Pincus-Whitney, Rosa Huerta-Williamson

-

In los pobres comen tan rico (the poor eat so richly) artist and activist Dulce Soledad Ibarra draws connections between access to affordable, culturally appropriate foods and food vending culture in Southern California. Using Mexican market bags, or bolsotes, Ibarra creates embroidered wearable aprons featuring beans, tomatoes, corn, and nopales. One bolsote features a multicolored umbrella, or sombra, signifying the enduring but threatened presence of this cultural icon within the Southern California landscape.  

A portion of this exhibition is presented in the Museum’s front vestibule, which the artist has temporarily transformed into a greenhouse for growing the plants featured in the apron paintings: beans, tomatoes, corn, and nopales. 

Against Monoculture | Dulce Soledad Ibarra: los pobres comen tan rico 

Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum

The California Light and Space movement, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, represents a singular convergence of art, science, and perception. Visionary artists within this movement sought to push the boundaries of traditional forms and mediums. By embracing unconventional materials such as glass, resin, and industrial plastics, they redefined light, volume, and color, treating these not as mere compositional elements but as essential materials that shaped their work.

In Luminaries of Light: Pioneers of the California Light and Space Movement, The Honarkar Foundation presents an exhibition featuring iconic works by the movement’s foremost figures: Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Laddie John Dill, Fred Eversley, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, De Wain Valentine, and Doug Wheeler. Collectively, these pioneers transcended conventional two-dimensionality and figuration, focusing instead on how light interacts with space and surface to evoke profound sensory experiences.

Through their innovative manipulation of light, space, and materials, each artist transforms the viewer’s perception, creating works that shift and evolve with their surroundings. Artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Doug Wheeler used light as their medium, creating immersive environments where time and perception become fluid. Others, like Mary Corse and Helen Pashgian, crafted objects that seem to transform as viewers move, encouraging an active engagement with the work.

This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to experience firsthand how these groundbreaking artists redefined minimalism and abstraction, not only as visual concepts but as immersive experiences. By encouraging heightened awareness of light, space, and time, Luminaries of Light pays tribute to the profound impact this movement has had on contemporary art while underscoring the enduring relevance of these works in today’s visual and experiential culture.

Curated by Genevieve Williams

Exhibition Hours: 10am - 3pm, Tues-Sat
Inquiries: hello@thehonarkarfoundation.org

Luminaries of Light: Pioneers of the California Light and Space Movement

The Honarkar Foundation

In her paintings, Eleanor Swordy untethers figuration from its historically constrictive role of subject matter and instead imaginatively repurposes it as a formal device. Round and sculptural, her bodies exist in dynamic space; uninhibited by conventional anatomy, perspective, and scale, they ground each composition and conform to each paintings’ inner architecture, cutting a path for the viewers’ eye to travel across the picture plane. Figures often move toward the outer edges of the frame as if by magnetic push, repeated reminders of her medium’s essential finitude.


Eleanor Swordy: Message Received 

Moskowitz Bayse

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to welcome Japanese artist Wakana Kimura in her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability.

The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’en, is a tale of pilgrimage, hardship, and loss. It tells the story of the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, who travels West to gather sacred texts, encountering many challenges and enduring great suffering throughout their passage. Tang Sanzang is not alone on this pilgrimage; he has guardians to protect as well as demons to obstruct. This legendary tale parallels the 7th-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, whose travels to the Western regions (India) took 17 years, resulting in a collection of original Sanskrit texts conveyed to China on the backs of scores of mules.

The title of Wakana Kimura’s exhibition Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability offers homage to this extraordinary tale. Kimura presents a personal story, in pictorial majesty, of her journey West, but for her story, West is Los Angeles, California. In Kimura’s chronicling, her odyssey is of a young Japanese woman who leaves her culture and home, moves to Los Angeles, goes to school, works, lives, and learns the language and culture of a country and region unfamiliar to her. She receives a visa, then a green card, identifying her as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” Metaphorically retracing the rewards and hardships of the Journey to the West, she blazes her future. Her demons and guardians are front and center in this exquisite body of paintings, not as a threat or regret but as a powerful reimagining of retaining and transcending identity.

Kimura’s unique studio practice is a symbolic mash-up of East and West, graffiti, and Japanese Buddhist Mandala painting. She employs hybrid Buddhist iconography and mythological characters from many cultures, mixing them in her loose, brushy drawings and paintings of mixed metaphors. Her contemporized figures are cloaked in hot colors, genderless, and exaggerated with distorted time lines and mismatched cultures. Her work also speaks of the migration of culture, as people sought safety from India to China, to Korea, and Japan; how cultural accommodation was shaped by the impact of multiple wars, dominated by warring patriarchies. Understanding the recondite paintings of Kimura is its own journey through symbolic language.

Wakana Kimura | Sonzo | acrylic and vinyl paint, markers on Udagami paper, mounted on silk and gold brocade, backing papers, stored in a paulownia wood box, signed

On view in the exhibition will be Wakana Kimura’s Guardian portraits mounted on scrolls by the Master Hyogushi and Japanese National Treasure, Shosaku Yoshimura. Mr. Yoshimura is a third-generation hyogushi (master scroll and screen mounter), one of only a handful of hyogushi who are allowed to repair and restore Japanese national treasures. The collaboration between Mr. Yoshimura and Kimura is unique; an octogenarian, he agreed to come out of retirement to design and mount her paintings because he valued her vision and relished the challenge of melding a centuries-old tradition with a contemporary artist’s vision of Buddhist iconography. The paintings are on Udagami paper, traditionally produced in Yoshino, Nara Prefecture, a type of pure mulberry paper containing white clay derived from crushed limestone found in the region. The white clay serves multiple purposes, including preventing transparency, repelling insects, acting as an antioxidant (protection against burning), and maintaining elasticity. Uda paper is recognized as the finest Japanese paper, often used for the restoration of cultural properties.

Wakana Kimura | LA Mandala | 2023 | watercolor, sumi ink, marker, acrylic & vinyl color on paper | 314 x 102 inches (four panels, 102 x 79 inches each

Along with the stunning scrolls will be a large mural, LA Mandala, exhibited during the 2023 City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Independent Master Artist Project (COLA) exhibition. We expect the 314-inch-wide painting, comprising four panels, to span the length of the gallery’s first room.

We're also pleased to announce that Wakana Kimura's select scroll paintings will be on view in our booth at Untitled Art Fair in December 2024.

Wakana Kimura was born in 1978 in Izu, Shizuika, Japan. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Japan. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2011 and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2002. Kimura is the recipient of the 2023 COLA Independent Artist Project, Los Angeles; the 2017-2020 Robertson Recreation Center mural from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles; and in 2013, she received a commission from the Los Angeles Metro, Through the Eyes of the Artist. Museum exhibitions include RSVP Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; IMA, Hinokisoken, Museum Meiji-Mura, Aichi, Japan; and Invoke, Udatsu no Kogei Kan Museum, Fukui.

____

We are pleased to announce the late, but very welcome addition to the current exhibition, Nobuhito Nishigawara. On view are thirteen extraordinary ceramic sculptures from his current series, Qualia.

Drawing from his immigrant experience, Nobuhito Nishigawara hand-builds ceramic sculpture to release sensorial and emotional aspects of experience. The current series, Qualia, explores the dual cultural forces of Japan and North America that shape his relationship to identity. From his childhood in Japan to moving to North America to attend school as a young man, he recalls “suppressing emotions to fit in.” Through the complex gestural forms of his sculpture, Nishigawara offers himself a refined elegant conduit for all that is withheld.

Nobuhito Nishigawara was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1974. He currently holds the position of Professor and Head of Ceramics, Visual Arts Department, California State University, Fullerton. Recent exhibitions include Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, and the Trophy Room, Los Angeles.

Wakana Kimura: Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability | Nobuhito Nishigawara: Recent Ceramic Sculpture

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

Please join us this Saturday for the opening reception of ‘SOUVENIRS’ 

Refreshments will accompany the event.
Rideshare is encouraged.

la BEAST gallery is thrilled to present 'SOUVENIRS,' a solo presentation of oil paintings by celebrated muralist Abel Macias. Unlike traditional landscape painting, this body of work delves into the sensory experience of what it’s like to absorb nature through synesthetic eyes. Macias emphasize’s space not through the use of light and shadow but through the simplification of pigment and pattern. He suggests that the act of gazing upon the world is much like flattening an image into a visual quilt. The ensuing blanket is succinct yet fascinating; a true deconstruction of texture, color compatibility, and inner-reflection. “Too much information is never a good thing.”

About the Exhibition
What is particularly striking about Macias’s approach, is his philosophy on ‘seeing’. “When I am out in nature, my instinct is to scan the landscape and summarize it quickly.” Pushing through his optical bias’s, Macias entertains the notion that his paintings are not merely meant to be examined from his point of view but to be experienced from a more universal lens. He actively zooms in and out of focus, capturing both the grandeur and the minutiae of his subject matter. The result is as a complex overlay, where background and foreground disappear and the space between objects no longer exists.
 
Characterized by rough, gestural brushwork, each painting starts with the creation of a textured ground, reminiscent of the stucco walls often seen in his larger works. This preparation feels important, demonstrating a keen connection between his well known mural practice and his explorations in the realm of fine art painting. The works on canvas feel different; somehow exuding an aura. Unencumbered but also quite contained, these compositions fracture natural forms, reassemble the constituents, and present enchanting kaleidoscopic gifts.

The bridge between realism and memory is a tremulous and strange place. Oftentimes, the world behind our eyelids, though a reflection of our surroundings, only shares the compressed truth; filled-out yet beautifully distorted. Source reality, it seems, is just a starting point, a beginning, on a long road of rendered experiences. "These landscapes are my souvenirs. I make paintings of magical places—that smell of being there—the swirl of senses that encapsulate being somewhere extraordinary."

Please email info@labeastgallery.com to learn more about this artist.



Abel Macias: SOUVENIRS

la BEAST Gallery

Stroll Garden is pleased to announce "Cartes Postales," ceramicist Raina Lee’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Inspired by the artist’s recent residency in Paris, “Cartes Postales” features a new series of ceramic works inspired by the sights, tastes, and rich artistic legacies of the City of Light. The exhibition marks two new directions in Lee’s practice, representing the debut of her first paintings and her first figurative works.

Over the course of a month, Lee walked through the city as a flâneur, observing the nuances of urban Parisian life in the era of late capitalism. She recorded her observations through sketches and watercolors captured in between visits to museums and studios of Paris-based sculptors and painters, from the Giacometti Institute to Monet’s Giverny. Drawing from Jean Arp, Auguste Rodin, Vincent Van Gogh, Leonard Foujita, and Ellsworth Kelly, she noted the pivotal role that time spent in France played in many artist’s lives and trajectories. “Cartes Postales” is a continuation of her personal dialogue with the rich history of art and artists in Paris and the everyday pleasures of urban life in the storied city.

“Cartes Postales” showcases sixty delicately rendered relief-style ceramic postcards depicting Parisian landscapes, objects, and artworks—from the iconic to the mundane. Each postcard is a complete small-scale painting, with drawings first etched into the clay, then painted with the artist’s signature textured glazes.

The wall mounted series will be accompanied by sculptural objects the artist crafted based on the iconography of her paintings. These sculptural works include a large slab of butter with a removable knife, a Bernard Palissy snake platter, a Sevres Breast Cup made for Marie Antoinette, and a Giacometti figure. The largest work, Giverny, is a life-size installation based on Monet’s pond, reinterpreted with ceramic water lilies arranged on a mirrored table in the center of the gallery space. The “pond” simulation will reflect a sky scene projected on the ceiling above, the very same reflection Monet so often depicted in his most famous series.

Raina Lee is a second generation Taiwanese-American artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She received her BA in Sociology from UC Davis followed by an MA in Media and Film Studies from The New School. Working primarily in ceramic glaze and clay, her practice is in conversation with classical ceramics as well as painting. She creates painterly compositions with extreme colors, volcanic textures, crackly finishes only possible through her custom ceramic glazes. She works on a range of forms— classical Chinese and Greek vessels, extruded 3D printed ceramic reliefs, and slab glaze paintings. Her work is influenced by video games, science fiction futurism, and a Southern California immigrant upbringing. She grew up between Taiwan and her parent’s pizzeria in Torrance, California.


Raina Lee: Cartes Postales

Stroll Garden

Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts
and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are honored to present the LA-based artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, featuring recent wall works, sculptures and moving images, including Jafa’s latest film, BG, his deft remix of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in which Jafa performs an exorcism on the film (and by extension the American unconsciousness) to foreground the Spook that Haunts the American Psyche.

One way into Arthur Jafa’s creative process is to understand he loves Michael Jackson – performer, visionary, iconoclast; jokester whose laughing sleights-of-hand have been submerged beneath tales of heartache, abuse, exploitation, untimely death… that wholly true grim narrative that’s not the whole truth. He (correctly) thinks Off the Wall is Jackson’s masterwork, that the spirit (and Spirit) captured through that album’s peerless pop are a kaleidoscope capture of Blackness that distills, redefines and catapults-intothe-stratosphere Black creativity. The Afros (surrealists, futurists, pessimists ) are all correct in seeing themselves in Jafa’s work, but what we all forget sometimes when we engage his films, photos, sculptures, and installations is there’s a wicked sense of play in play, and beneath the exhumation and presentation of Black pain struggle and genocide is a boundless love of Black people & culture that cannot disentangle the flawless spin / crotch grab / moonwalk / laughing eyes / child prodigy / adult genius / hee HEE from the strange fruit / bombed churches / stolen land / rapes & castrations / forced labor & unacknowledged creativity / geniuses driven mad by the endless repetition of it all. It’s the falling in love with Blackness that makes Jafa high; it’s the being in love that makes him cry, cry, cry…
—Ernest Hardy

Arthur Jafa (*1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) lives and works in Los Angeles. Jafa’s films have been presented at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals, and recent solo exhibitions of his artwork include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2024), LUMA Foundation, Arles (2023), Louisiana Museum, Humblebæk and Glenstone, Potomac, MD (both 2021), Fundação Serralves, Lisbon and Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (both 2020), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (both 2018), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main (all 2024), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Baltimore Museum of Art and 14th Gwangju Biennale (all 2023), Musée national des beaux-arts, Québec, Aspen Art Museum and Bangkok Art Bienniale (all 2022), and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, New Museum, New York and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (all 2021). In 2019, he received the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale.

 Arthur Jafa: nativemanson

Sprüth Magers

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from October 19th through December 14th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 19th, from 4-6pm.

Ahmadi masterfully uses her formal skills to invigorate challenging subject matter, blending free-flowing strokes with vibrant bursts of color to captivate viewers through unexpected contrasts—whether in sculpture, painting, or animation. Painting serves as her vehicle for truth-telling, where luminous colors and mystical figures intertwine with violent imagery to illuminate pressing global issues such as migration, war, and the brutal treatment of marginalized people. Tangle features her new works, which focus on female figures immersed in fantastical landscapes of land and water." Ahmadi's technical mastery of watercolor—a medium celebrated for its unpredictability—allows her to explore themes of covering and uncovering. By incorporating screenprints into her paintings, she adds temporal and physical layers, creating a dynamic dialogue between the real and the imagined. Through her inclusion of ruins or clues to a deeper story, Ahmadi encourages viewers to probe beneath the surface of the narratives we inherit, from ancient myths to childhood memories to the modern news cycle.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Ahmadi grew up in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The roles imposed on women in Iranian society, including the mandate to wear the hijab, were formative influences on her development as both a woman and an artist. Drawing from mythological figures such as Medusa and Artemis—who symbolize the enduring strength of women despite societal oppression—Ahmadi portrays women in her paintings in positions of physical struggle, contending with vicious animals, walking through fire, and being weighed down by the weight of their own hair, bodies, and surroundings. Her paintings examine the history of patriarchy's surveillance and control over women's bodies, from the mandatory hijab in her homeland to the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights in her adopted country, the United States.

In her Pressure Cooker series, Ahmadi explores the transformation of domestic objects into instruments of violence. Traditionally seen as a symbol of nourishment and care, the pressure cooker has been repurposed in terrorist attacks as a bomb, recontextualizing it as a tool of brutality. Her commentary on women's autonomy extends into this series, where intricate intaglio hand-etching celebrates the domestic role of this everyday object. By aesthetically enhancing the pressure cooker, she invites viewers to confront the unsettling juxtaposition of war and violence against the mundane comfort of its domestic function.

Ahmadi's latest animation, Marooned, delves into the destabilizing effects of politics and war on ordinary people, with a particular focus on the struggles of immigrants and refugees. Composed of 5,172 hand-painted frames, the animation tells the story of people working tirelessly to build a pathway of large rocks leading to a stranded oil tanker in the ocean. As they near completion, ominous figures emerge and seize the tanker, leaving them with nothing.

Ahmadi has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Manetti Shrem Museum in CA (2024), The Rubin Museum in New York City (2021), the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, CA (2017), the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2014), and the College of Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, OH (2012). In addition to holding regular solo exhibitions at galleries in NYC, LA, London and San Francisco, her works have been included in many curated museum group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Notable shows include the "Rising Sun" at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, (2023) "Being and Belonging" at the Ontario Museum of Arts in Toronto, Canada (2023) “Epic Iran” in  Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2023); “A Boundless Drop in A Boundless Ocean” Orlando Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida (2021), Catastrophe and the Power of Art”, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019), “Revolution Generations”, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2019) among others.

Ahmadi’s work is part of permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Arts; the Crocker Art Museum; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Asia Society Museum in New York; the Manetti Shrem Museum in California; the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; the Grey Art Museum in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University; The Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the Farjam Collection in Dubai; the TDIC Corporate Collection in Abu Dhabi; and the private collection of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Rachael Browning’s practice, sliding between photography, sculpture, and drawing, uses humor, tension, and hardware to compose and effect solutions to self-devised problems. In 'This Way Up', photographs and corresponding drawings consider the constancies and discrepancies of form across directly; each photograph, a pseudo-document of a temporary sculptural intervention that the artist makes expressly for the image, positions industrial materials in tension–principally hardware, rope, PVC piping, and plywood–in her studio. The drawings fully abstract each composition, suggesting that materials, rich with potential meaning, may simply be means to an end.

Rachael Browning: This Way Up

A group show exercise for the gallery’s program to illustrate a unique take on the idea of a landscape painting. The goal is to illuminate unique processes and the varying perception each artist has within the genre. Rather than limiting landscapes to just picturesque depictions of natural scenery, we explore a broader conceptual framework. 

Over 20 new works by: 

Logan Adair
Marcus Bernardes
Jaqueline Cedar
Sasha Court 
Ingrid Daniell
Aryo Toh Djojo
Jesse Edwards
Hely Gonzalez
Adam Hedley
Gwen Hollingsworth
Lynda Keeler
Carol Leyba
Matthew Miller
Taishi Nishi
Rick Osaka 
Future Retrieval 
Jessica Swaffer
Laura Vahlberg


Blurry Pastures

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

Night Gallery is pleased to announce the beautiful, an exhibition of new work by Elise Rasmussen, presented in conjunction with PST Art: Art & Science Collide and made possible in part by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Puffin Foundation. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Night Gallery and follows the gallery’s screening of the artist’s 2020 film, The Year Without a Summer, and her participation in Blue State, a formative group exhibition in 2018.

Grief permeates Elise Rasmussen’s solo show the beautiful. Her photographs, shot on medium- format film in and around national parks of the American West, respond both to climate change and to the narrative of stolen land that cannot be uncoupled from the origin stories of our national parks. Rasmussen captures sites of creativity, preservation, climate emergency, and imperialist violence. How to reconcile the undeniable beauty of the landscapes, evidenced in Rasmussen’s photographs, with America’s fraught past—and present? In this suite, Rasmussen offers an elegy both cultural and ecological, macro and micro, as she depicts a changing western landscape.

Many of the photographs include images of fire, an apt visual metaphor for this series, with its evocations of cremation and funeral pyres. Rasmussen traveled by car throughout the West with her terrier Clementine, making regular stops to shoot at national parks and adjacent BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land. She camped just outside the parks’ limits so that she could light unrestricted campfires before bedding down; two photographs shown here capture flames dwarfed by twilit desert skies. Fire also figures in works like last breaths (Sequoias) (2024), which depicts the struggling gasps of a tree in the aftermath of the 2021 KNP Complex Fire, which decimated California’s Sequoia National Forest.

During her road trip, Rasmussen hit iconic “photo-ops” such as the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park and Robert Smithson’s famed land artwork Spiral Jetty on the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. These sites are so frequently photographed that they are seared into the “American” consciousness, but Rasmussen expertly presents them from new vantages, in some instances using collage to create continuous landscapes.

Although Rasmussen's work advocates for preservation, it also acknowledges another truth: We constantly lose what we once believed to be constant. We can never fully protect or restore it, only acknowledge its fleeting gorgeousness.

—Cat Kron

____

Night Gallery is pleased to announce The Lemon, an exhibition of new paintings by Cynthia Daignault. This is Daignault’s second solo show with the gallery, following Elegy (2019).

Daignault is a painter of life. She depicts the natural world around her, but also the photographs, documents, and screens that permeate everyday life. On November 23, concurrently with The Lemon, she will debut a new commission of paintings in the group show Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles, organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant. For that show, Daignault presents a monumental 486-panel artwork, Twenty-Six Seconds, that reconsiders each frame of the Zapruder film, the home-movie that captured the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Both exhibitions continue and deepen Daignault’s interest in history painting, exploring how images and media shape our shared consciousness.

##########

The Lemon takes its name from Le Citron, a still-life of a lemon on a dark plate, painted by Édouard Manet in 1880. I’ve come to feel that the act of painting is like walking in a heavy snow. At times I am by myself. The path is so quiet, cumbersome and lonely. But at other times, I find a line of footprints in the snow and walk for a while inside the indentations of someone else’s shoes. Like this, I accidentally run into other painters when I’m working. I see traces of them in a brushstroke, a color, or an idea. Or I purposefully go after them in copies and allusions, trying to commune with them. In truth, I am rarely alone. Collective consciousness exists outside of time.

The only poster in my bedroom as a young child was Monet’s The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil (1881). I bought the print myself at The National Gallery, and I remember telling people that it was my favorite painting. I was always drawn to French painting, and why years later I took my first painting classes in Paris. As a student, teachers often told me that I shared certain innate sensibilities with Manet—in brushwork and color mixing—and I used to imagine an unbroken thread connecting us. It’s moving to remember that painting is a vocation stretching back to very start of human history. In many ways, this show is an attempt to understand the weight of influence. Of history. Of love. Where does one person ends and another begin? After all, just as ideas and works repeat over time and space, so too with people. Aren’t people all just versions and copies as well?

And what are the boundaries of an artwork—where one begins and another ends? In this age of screens and social media, we often think of a painting as its digital image alone, but the nature of any one work stretches far beyond its four sides. Viewership. Historical context. Scholarship. Provenance. A poster on a bedroom wall. Think about music. When does a song end? Does it end when the track stops, and the needle drags across the diameter of a record label? But what of the echo in your mind? Long after the last note has sounded, the melody carries on for hours, like a wave crossing the ocean toward the shore. And what if you teach it to someone else? Does a song end when the last person on earth who ever heard it dies and passes away? But isn’t it still there in the air itself? A desert wind, blowing across the tops of a few bottles could pick out the melody again, even if there was no one there to hear it. Does a song ever end? Or does it just hover unseen in the air, where it always was and always will be, just waiting to play again one more time before the universe explodes?

—Cynthia Daignault, 2024 

Image: Elise Rasmussen, Montana, 2024, archival pigment prints mounted on velvet in walnut frame, 27 1/4 x 36 3/4 in (69.2 x 93.3 cm)

Elise Rasmussen: the beautiful | Cynthia Daignault: The Lemon

Night Gallery North

Chase Hall has developed an expansive vocabulary for documenting the ever-shifting line between personal and generational narratives. His alchemical approach to his materials, which include the coffee-based pigments and cotton supports that have characterized his work of the last few years, both reflects and critiques the ways in which systemic forces of oppression have divided people, territory, and the physical substance of the planet itself. As its title suggests, each painting in Halfrican poses a series of questions about how identities are constituted, often along lines that are not as clear as they might seem. This show includes paintings in a wide variety of scales, from a twenty-four-foot painting—one of the largest and most ambitious works of the artist’s career—to more intimate portraits in the style of yearbook headshots. It finds him exploring stories of freedom and friendship, as well as archetypal cycles of human development. Group portraits of young men wearing overalls and other work gear, for instance, point to the virtues of collaboration as well as an interest in creating revisionist takes on the American mythos. In many of these paintings, Hall delicately traces the line between self-reliance and participation in supportive community. He identifies how systems throughout the human and natural worlds balance competing needs for self-determination and unity, and reflects on ways in which these themes contribute to the ever-unfolding history of the United States.

____

Ruby Neri takes the full range of human interaction as her subject, producing works in which she depicts relationships as alternately mythological, mundane, ecstatic, inscrutable, hilarious, and tragic. Staircase provides a window onto the expansive nature of her project, which includes many different kinds of making that overlap and inform one another. A large-scale bronze sculpture—one of the most complex and intricate forms the artist has made to date—provides a dramatic center of gravity, setting a tone of experimentation not only in terms of physical form and material, but also in terms of drawing and expressive gesture. These qualities are mirrored in the large paintings that find Neri revisiting this important facet of her project for the first time in several years, as well as the pastels and ceramics in which the tactility of color is a primary concern.

Chase Hall: Halfrican | Ruby Neri: Staircase

David Kordansky Gallery

noé olivas: la jornada is a multimedia exhibition that explores the intersections between labor and liberation through collective spiritual work. The exhibition centers the implements and aesthetics of the toolshed, bringing together shears, clippers, buckets, and shovels in tender constructions that bridge the gap between this world and the next. 

noé olivas: la jornada

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

Tears of Venus is pleased to present our second show, Retold Desires: Works in Fiber by Tien of The World and Kay Khan. This exhibition brings together the work of two textile artists who utilize storytelling via fabrics, thread, and fibers to work and rework their narratives and transform their life stories.

“The Heaviness of Healing” is a collection of eight weavings by L.A.-based artist Tien of The World. This work was done over the span of a year and made from the artist's own intimate apparel, clothing she received as gifts from ex-relationships, other personal garments, and her artist tools like paintbrushes and knitting needles. Not simply materials these objects each hold a very personal meaning for the artist and carry the history of projections, persona, illness, attachment, sorrow, heartbreak, and fantasy. Through the process of weaving these elements are reworked into wall hangings that both transform the physical shape of the objects but also transmute their emotional meaning. The work becomes a blueprint for the artist, a map to consider the realities of the past, the effects they have taken, and the path to move forward into the future. Two polaroid portraits of the artist wearing the garments before they were deconstructed accompa- ny each piece. These photographs help to transport the viewer to the artist's past personas.

"The Resilience of Roses Project" is a body of work by New Mexico-based artist Kay Khan consisting of 3 wearable armored bodices. The artist uses the metaphor of the complex qualities of roses - sweetness, delicateness, and the strength of their thorns - to express her experience living with MS. The corsets contain, protect, and shape the artist’s mind and the wearer’s body. As wearable sculptures, these works symbolize personal strength, beauty, balance, and structure in equal measure, in the face of life's chal- lenges. A total of 5 wearable artworks by Khan are included in Retold Desires, alongside a selection of fiber sculptures from past collections.

In a time of cultural distractions, Tears of Venus is inspired by artists who spend time contemplating and focusing deeply on their process. Please join us for two opening parties celebrating the artist's work.

Tears of Venus is a creative space and gallery in Hollywood that values artful style, self-expression, recy- cling/upcycling, storytelling, and process. We have a curated selection of vintage clothing, jewelry, and historic textiles, for the discerning and inspired.

Come as you are - we enjoy all the many ways people express themselves through clothing and style.

Tien of The World is a Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist specializing in upcycled and reclaimed textile work. She is a hairstylist as well and is known for her gender-affirming haircuts and colors. Originally from the bible belt, she carved her own lane into Los Angeles. Tien is an anti-capitalist, abolitionist and an advocate for marginalized communities, specifically queer artists, sex workers, and people of color. This is the second showing of this body of work.

Kay Khan's textile sculpture explores a variety of forms including vessels, armor, jewelry, and figures. She sees her work as a “mosaic of fragments, collected experiences, information, and images." Her sculptural work is in numerous collections including those of de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Art and Design, New York City, NY; The New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ; and the Albuquerque Museum, Albuquer- que, NM.

@tearsofvenuscurated	
@kaykhanart	
@tienoftheworld
www.tearsofvenuscurated.com
www.kaykhanart.com	
www.tienoftheworld.com

Tien of The World and Kay Khan: Retold Desires

Xela Institute of Art is pleased to present The Subtleties of Levitated Things, a solo exhibition of the work of chris velez. Opening on October 5, 2024, the exhibition will be on view until December 15, 2024. 

velez is, in the first place, a shapeshifter: his interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, performance art, video-work, photography, and new genres. The breadth of his material and embodied practice reflects velez’ many encyclopedic and varied interests. Many of his thematic concerns address the interface between the bodily, the technological, and the natural worlds, but the representational vehicles that most often appear in his work are avatars — stand-ins for a kind of composite awareness or chimeric body.  

What is, for most people, a clear distinction between the body and the larger natural world dissolves into a colorful jumble of cartoonish pictographs and tripped-out digital mediations through velez’ playful escapades.There is both a surreal and intensely graphic quality to some of velez’ compositional decisions: fleshy earth- and skin-toned material dialects come into uneasy contact with bright exclamations of plastic and super-saturated oil pastel markings, and high culture constantly confronts pop culture in a see-saw of competing perspectives. In his assemblage and tableau works especially, there is the sense that velez has curated a selection of ersatz specimens and put them on view so that the public may reconsider the core nature of each: an iPhone may appear as a tiny, hairy creature in one instance and in another, as a semi- viscous blob dripping off of a table — a clever nod to Dali’s famous clock painting.

For velez, creative practice is seamlessly integrated into everyday life and its amoeba strip of observations. Sometimes, the art is as simple and as incidental as documenting a bright yellow fire hydrant nestled among daisies, or as complex as re-staging an entire office cubicle with all its low-vibrational bureaucratic fixings. velez aims to hybridize and complicate binaristic distinctions between nature and technology, opting for a more rhizomatic referential approach. Pseudo- and actual digital distortions feature heavily in his sculptural and painterly gestures: a basketball hoop may bend impossibly towards the ground, as if a sad cartoon character, a disembodied hand may sprout fungal growths, or an emoticon may float above a drop shadow or within a hyperflat vacuum. TV screens operate, almost archaeologically, as rote stone objects and scenes-within-scenes. They might also reappear as flickering screen-portals displaying jumbles of text and pixelated masses, recalling glitch-art, data-moshing and early internet DIY aesthetics. A viewer is just as likely to encounter a bottled oak tree as an open desk drawer blocked off by a mysterious printed waterscape. Somehow, through it all, velez manages to create uneasy alliances between dimensional material and photographic fragments.

Much of velez’ work unfolds like a retro-futurist vision, a post-human landscape where rogue digital, spectral, and spiritual energies run rampant. The artist is technologically and technically savvy, bouncing between televisual special effects, 3D models, cropped jpegs, and painterly anamorphisms. He animates and resamples ideas by using the visual language of mashups and mixtapes, psychedelics and non-Western spirituality, uncanny valley and humor. His work feels like a new millennium TikTok philosophy, working to connect people’s aesthetic experiences with more simultaneity and immediacy than ever before — but his ultimate ambition lies in expanding collective human consciousness.

Chris Velez: The Subtleties of Levitated Things

Xela Institute of Art

Make Room is pleased to present Office Illusions, Belgium-based Italian artist Jacopo Pagin’s second solo show with the gallery.

In Office Illusions, Jacopo Pagin weaves together temporal layers and symbolic landscapes, investigating the intersections between nostalgia, power, and the illusory promises of recent history. The exhibition engages with a specific cultural moment—the post-Cold War era—when the U.S.-led West proclaimed the "end of history." Marked by globalization, unipolarity, neoliberalism, and faith in technology, this period once represented the belief in a future of endless progress and control.

The exploration of office forms and spaces—those generic, impersonal environments where the narratives of order, management, and power were constructed—lies at the heart of the exhibition. For Pagin, these mythologized spaces and their desks, computers, and sterile interiors point to fragmented utopian aspirations throughout the 1990s and 2000s when the world was believed to be controllable from behind a screen. But the spaces are also deeply ironic, their promises hollowed out by the realities of the challenges, confusions, and conflicts of the present.

Through Pagin's large-format paintings, viewers are immersed in surreal, hyper-anthropized scenes bursting with fragments of the past that oscillate between comfort and disorientation. The depicted objects—desks, chairs, computers—are drawn from aesthetics of vintage design magazines, fashion, and advertising that once embodied success, stability, and the allure of corporate life. Now, Pagin’s distorted, dreamlike compositions reimagine the objects as portals to psychic dimensions where the boundaries between time, memory, and reality dissolve. The symbolic office chair in Technophobic Office particularly takes center stage, embodying the contradictions of the era. More than just a practical object, the chair serves as a totem of administrative power and a vehicle for exploring abstracted layers of work, finance, and control.

The exhibition also features an installation of standardized black office chairs with wheels, deliberately generic and corporate in appearance. Visitors are invited to sit in the chairs and move through the space by playfully navigating the paintings. While rolling from painting to painting, visitors engage with the exhibition as both participants and observers, their movement reflecting the mobility and detachment characterized by the very systems of power that Pagin investigates.

Pagin’s works employ large acrylic washes and intricate oil details on canvas to create a duality of surrealism and abstraction. Up close, the brushstrokes become looser, emphasizing the materiality of the paintings. Yet from a distance, the compositions reveal recognizable objects that feel both familiar and strange. In paintings such as Synchronized and Emolliated, the artist’s use of transparency and collage further distorts the linear perception of time by layering moments of the past and present in surreal forms that embody the contradictions of memory and perception. The imagery exposes the fragility beneath the polished surface. Through this interplay of rigid, man-made elements and more fluid, organic forms, Pagin visually communicates the tension between the cold, calculated structures of neoliberal progress and the unpredictable, natural flow of life.

Office Illusions ultimately presents a critical reading of Western ideals—a glimpse into the seductive aesthetics of power and their enshrined contradictions while reflecting on collective perceptions of time and different cultural and historical reflections. Pagin's practice, particularly in this show, emphasizes not only individual, idiosyncratic memory but also the collective memory that shapes our understanding of history. The impersonal aesthetics—familiar and nostalgic—evoke a collective remembrance of foreseeing a bright future that we now recognize as inconsistent, rhetorical, and speculative, favoring one-sided power. By traversing the ghostly remnants of recent cultural history, Pagin urges us to confront the illusory nature of progress and the limits of our constructed narratives. 

Jacopo Pagin: Office Illusions

Make Room

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce The river returns nothing of what it takes an exhibition of new works by London-based, Chinese artist Shiwen Wang. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the United States, Wang presents a series of 10 new abstract compositions that piece together the artist’s recurring explorations of natural life and its impermanence. The exhibition will be on view from October 26 through December 20, 2024.

In The river returns nothing of what it takes, Wang engages with the relationship between humanity and the natural world, or as she describes it: “the unity of cosmic life.” The river functions as a metaphor for loss, fleeting time, and collapse intertwined with creation. There is a vanitas quality to the paintings; a subtle rot of human interference lurking beneath the iridescence. In the diptych Belakang Mati, an expansive blue is continued into a narrow rectangular panel below where the belly of a fish unseams open in putrefaction– the viewer bearing witness to its decay.

Wang’s dynamic picture planes emerge from her acute understanding of the fundamental fluidity between artificial and natural light. Her earth-toned and aquatic palettes summon an intuitive command of color, while layers of impastoed oils, powder pigment, beeswax, and fragile egg tempera approximate an aged patina. Her subject matter appropriates the familiar – fish, decaying leaves, a boat wreckage – and translates it into the unfamiliar. These recognizable, repetitive relics visualize the compression of time and create complex ecosystems which toggle between the natural and synthetic.

In spatial harmony, Wang’s work fuses together the relationship between the past and the present, and organic cycles of decay and rebirth. The artist explains the exhibition title references a line found in a novel, written by French author Sylvain Tesson, titled “A Life to Sleep Outside”《츱흼트퇀》: “The river returns nothing, not even the echoes of a cry.” Wang writes, “The violence and suffocating helplessness in the face of life’s impermanence aligns perfectly with the emotional landscape I aim to evoke in my paintings. The river is not just a natural element, but a container—both a tangible material and a symbol.”

Shiwen Wang: The river returns nothing of what it takes

Kohn Gallery

In the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, the act of lighting a candle represents a challenge to the dichotomy of moral absolutes, revealing the complexities within truth and falsehood. The artistic creations of Lorenzi, Hou, and Shmuluvitz beckon viewers to engage in a profound inquiry into the established narratives that shape our understanding of reality. Their works encourage a courageous embrace of the shadows that inevitably accompany every moment of illumination, urging us to delve deeper into the complexities and contradictions that lie beneath the surface of perception. In this exploration, we are invited to confront the nuanced interplay between light and dark, reality and illusion, ultimately enriching our appreciation of the multifaceted nature of existence.

Angelica Lorenzi explores the intersection of function and form, engaging with both utilitarian and decorative objects through materials such as ceramics, papier-mâché, and fabric. By employing traditional materials like ceramics to craft unconventional forms, she actively dismantles traditional structures and conceptions of functional objects. Her sculptures, characterized by intricate adornments, undulating glazes, and tactile textures that often replicate surfaces found in nature, blur the lines between the familiar and the surreal.

Lorenzi frequently incorporates animal-like characters with human features, their innocent appearance in sharp contrast with the more suggestive or mature scenarios they inhabit. These anthropomorphic figures, detailed with human attributes, provoke questions about the dualities of purity and corruption. Through this interplay, her works embody a multifaceted exploration of identity and existence, existing as domestic objects, rituals, and surreal worlds that resist simple categorization. This aesthetics culminate in pieces that subvert everyday perceptions of domestic spaces, presenting them as environments that hover between the magical and the real. In her practice, there is a deliberate tension between innocence and desire, reality and fantasy, truth and deception.

Hou Zhuowu's ink paintings are infused with a sense of spirituality—sensitive and layered—while incorporating elements of collage and AI-generated imagery to create a visual composition that feels both unfamiliar and absurd. The fragmented, multilingual components in his work hint at the plurality and juxtaposition of postmodern civilization, while also reflecting the disorder, anxiety, and ambiguity that define contemporary life. His art is rich with historical and political metaphors, subtly addressing the complexity of modern existence.

Hou navigates the cultural shifts and individual transformations that occur within different social environments. Unlike the harmonious cultural logic of the East or the textualized political identity narratives in the West, his focus lies in the intertextuality of these two civilizations, exploring personal experiences and genuine expressions during periods of "transition" or "movement." He views ink as a highly sensitive and holographic medium, capable of recording traces that are both timeless and immediate. Through a Zen-like process of refinement and spontaneous psychological expression, Hou seeks to reach a form of simplicity and elevated abstraction. His rich cultural background and broad social experiences continuously shape his evolving thoughts and the distilled clarity that defines his artistic practice. Ultimately, Hou’s art serves as a testament to the evolving nature of cultural expression, where history and reality intertwine, provoking reflection and dialogue.

Rebecca Shmuluvitz engages in a world-building exercise through her drawings, focusing on familial female characters within a prehistoric/post-apocalyptic landscape. Drawing inspiration from her lineage of strong women, she seeks to honor ancestral culture, traditions, and struggles. 

This series to be showcased at Unveil Gallery, explores themes of female strength and solitude, as her figures inhabit barren landscapes reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, where the absence of male presence parallels the solitary female experience. The work does not depict a matriarchal society but rather highlights women coping with their own burdens and the passage of time. The figures in the series evoke the likeness of the artist’s grandmothers and great grandmothers, women who endured hardship and were forced to mature early. Often illuminated by one or multiple candlelight sources, the figures are cast in deep shadows that highlight the duality of light and darkness on their faces. This interplay of illumination and shadow creates a striking contrast, imbuing the works with an eerie, haunting atmosphere, where the tension between fragility and resilience is palpable.

Lorenzi, Hou, and Shmuluvitz collectively engage in a nuanced exploration of the complexities surrounding creation, identity, and the shadows that accompany them. Their works invite us to confront the delicate balance between light and dark, reality and illusion, prompting introspection about our own experiences and the societal structures that influence them. Through their distinct yet interwoven narratives, they encourage a deeper understanding of the intricate tapestry of existence, revealing how individual stories are shaped by collective histories and cultural contexts.

Join us for the opening reception on November 9th, and experience this compelling exhibition that illuminates the complexities of creation, memory, and identity. 

For more information, please contact info@unveilgallery.com

To light a candle

Unveil Gallery

5-7pm: Opening reception
4pm: Umar Rashid and Mika Yoshitake in conversation
5:30pm: Gold Amidst Dust, Contemporary Dance related to Kaifan Wang

BLUM is pleased to present SZTUKĄ DIABŁA TŁUKĄ, Warsaw-based artist Agata Słowak’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Alison M. Gingeras, curator and writer based in New York and Warsaw, sits down with Agata Słowak to discuss the influences and themes that have shaped her latest works.

Alison M. Gingeras: 
Last time I was in your studio, right before you sent the paintings to Los Angeles, I was simultaneously impressed by the new elements in your work and the consistent through-line of self-portraiture that you continue to practice. With each canvas, you’re pushing the genre further, which I think will be quite evident in the grouping of eight you will show in LA. One thing that I noticed was your collection of porn magazines you had spread all over the floor. These aren’t just any old porn magazines—they are super specific to Poland’s history and to the radical social changes that took place during the transition from Communism to Capitalism in the early 1990s. Why did you start collecting those? How have those images transpired upon your new works? Why are they compelling for you? So many of your new dynamic narrative compositions are perhaps coming from those magazines?

Agata Słowak: 
These are not randomly selected magazines! These Polish erotic magazines from the 1990s interest me on several levels. What fascinates me is a certain kind of nostalgia (I was a child during this transition period, so obviously, I wasn’t aware of its gravity). These magazines are aesthetically and distinctively pre-internet, so they’re noteworthy. More significantly, they were being published at a moment when people began talking about sexuality in Poland. In the times of the Communist Polish People’s Republic, Poles’ sexuality was suppressed and superficial, an important social trend that was reinforced by the dominance of the Polish Catholic Church. These porno mags are also incredibly interesting visually, due to their naturalism and the limitations of resources at the end of the last century; there is no retouching, no plastic surgery, and virtually no access to professional make-up artists. The photo editorials depict “real” people, paradoxically, somewhat escaping the patriarchal canon of beauty. They’re a wonderful time capsule, bearing imperfections at different ages, social structures, and sexual orientations. And apart from this type of inspiration, these magazines make great reference material for models! We find expressive ready-made body arrangements that are fantastic for dressing up in compositions and painting these photos are not easy to find on the internet today. The images are very niche and have a strong character of time and place, making them unique.

AG: Another striking departure in this work is the appearance of more direct symbolism. Can you talk a bit about the Polish Eagle that appears in one of your self-portrait nudes, Polka / Jaki kraj taka Prometeusza // Pole / Such a Country Such a Prometheusess (2024)? There have always been some sly elements of Polish identity in your works—very codified landscapes, Catholic references, rural settings—but the Polish Eagle is such a monumental and official signifier. I’m wondering what prompted you to insert such a loaded symbol into one of your recent tableaus.

AS: The work with the eagle was created during the holidays, when I was visiting the region where I grew up. I came across the small village of Zalipie, where I discovered wooden houses painted by a women’s guild. One of them had an eagle made of pinecones—it was all based on a strong sense of Polish identity; I felt something native about it, something unique. I also don’t like it when symbols related to patriotism are appropriated by the conservative side, nationalists, and right-wingers. I believe that representatives of minorities also have a civil right to these symbols.

AG: There are so many indelible images that stuck with me during our studio visit. The lady humping a cactus, pictured in Down in Mexico (2024), was one of the most memorable images that haunted me. Can you tell me about this picture? Who is she? I feel this is an allegory, but I would love to hear your narration around this stunning work.

AS: In a way, it’s about the strength of this woman; I wanted to visualize the increasing desire for a certain insatiability and think about the limits of the strongest orgasm. Is there a limit? This cactus can express something seemingly strong, giving strength and security, such as a man with a strong position, a prize in a competition, and such. This painting is actually not quite my style— the Mexican atmosphere is a real departure, but I just wanted to paint this strong motif.

AG: The appearance of “non-finito” is a new element in your forthcoming show. I very much liked these deliberately unfinished, rather gestural paintings. And I particularly liked seeing them hanging side by side with your more “classical” signature style of this renaissance technique, deploying layers of underpainting that you usually utilize. The tension is super interesting, and to me, the images feel a bit like the remnants of dreams...how one remembers strong dream-images without recalling the storyline or only fragments that float in the haze of your memory when you wake up. Is that something you were thinking about at all?

AS: I’ve long been drawn to the unfinished, as a conscious decision. Both in the contrast of the detail, such as a portrait and the background, as well as in a certain type of gestural painting technique. I don’t want to give up on overworked narratives that have many layers and are built slowly on the canvas—but expressive, intentionally unfinished works allow the concept to remain fleeting and have a dreamlike expression. The concept of combining this gesture with sleep is beautiful and seems extremely accurate to me. What remains from intense sleep is essence and fragmentation.

AG: Dream space is a major trope in your work, not only in these hazy, fractured images but also in the sense that certain themes and symbols reoccur frequently. One such theme that is in this new body of work, and also very present in previous works, is the question of reproduction. The possibility of procreation, your internal struggle with potential motherhood, the desire and repulsion of childbirth, the visceral depiction of the body as a potential vehicle for reproduction: the question of having a child seems to haunt you. And like with dreams, the recurrence of childbirth imagery is both consistent and shifting in your work, from painting to painting. It is as if reproductive justice and the maternal compulsion seem to be in conflict in your work—just as they are in our socio-political sphere?

AS: You’re right that painting can emerge from that part of consciousness as dream fantasies. There are people and motifs that come back to us from the subconscious, relationships and themes that seem to organize our lives, hanging over us like ghosts. The topic of reproduction is extremely vivid and topical for me, and I’m not just talking about the current political fight for abortion rights, just personal dilemmas arising from the opportunity my own body potentially gives me. How many life-shaping decisions resulted from the very fact that such a choice is a viable option? We feel the pressure of a ticking clock. Since it doesn’t happen passively, how should one make a decision? When? With whom? And how, so as not to miss out on commitments and work? On the one hand, one can be a mother of art and treat it as one’s relationship and offspring, accepting that perhaps there are other things one is called to do, opposed to most people. On the other, there’s the feeling that one is giving up such an intense experience in life. Freedom and independence have their weak points here. Painting only perpetuates this lack of answers. On the one hand, the atmosphere of the family home is a simple expectation of a physical extension of life. On the other, there’s the devastating fear that accompanies a late period—that despite being sexually driven, the person isn’t ready for parenthood, and that the creative state would be ruined.

Agata Słowak (b. 1994, Busko-Zdrój, Poland) paints audacious pictorial narratives with a disarming, Old Master-stylistic flair. Whether appearing alone or in group tableaus, Słowak’s youthful mien engages the viewer with the same defiant yet serene gaze. The artist is almost always the protagonist of her scenes that surpass conventional self-portraiture and tasteful subject matter with their allegorical density. Perfumed with a radical strain of feminism, her compositions are overloaded with Catholic iconography, Neoclassical art allusions, visceral bodily fluids, and graphic sexual acts. Her canvases manifest a relentless need to probe the intersection of her personal desires and collective political struggles. Słowak has received recognition since her recent arrival on the international art scene. Her work has been presented at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art (2022) and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2021, 2019), among other institutions and galleries.

____


Opening Day Event: Umar Rashid and Mika Yoshitake in Conversation, 4pm

As part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, BLUM is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Umar Rashid’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, The Kingdom of the Two Californias. La Época del Totalitarismo Part 2. This second installment of Rashid’s Epoch of Totalitarianism series rejoins the artist’s fictional Frenglish conquerors in the 1800s as they attempt to maintain a stronghold in the Americas. Bearing an undeniable resemblance to the history of the Spanish Empire in the Californias, the monstrous power of colonialism is emphasized by Rashid as he portrays the Frenglish with otherworldly militant advantages from the science fiction genre.

____


Opening Day Event: Gold Amidst Dust contemporary dance performance by artists Gema Galiana and Emily Meister, 5:30pm

BLUM is pleased to present One Piece, Berlin-based artist Kaifan Wang’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

There is a nomadic underpinning to the way that Wang thinks—this mindset sentimentally unifies the artist’s practice as well as this exhibition. Born in Hohhot, China, an area with a long cultural history that has been buried by rapid urban development, and living in Berlin, Wang is a masterful and worldly storyteller with the unique ability to find overlap between the histories of the Chinese diaspora and the preexisting narratives embedded within the places where he lives or works. For Wang, migration is a means of traversing cultural references across time and space to find meaning in the now. 

The artist draws out disparate references and discursively relates them to one another in surprising ways. Wang nods, for instance, to emigrants from Inner Mongolia through the movement and gestures in his paintings—some strokes moving along the pull of gravity or the natural flow of the composition and others moving against. Bearing in mind the stark contrast between the history of Chinese and Western abstract painting, Wang’s style ruminates on fractured cultural identities and the fluidity of human migration through flowing gestures and plumes of oil, oil stick, and acrylic on canvas—offering conclusions at once intellectual and emotive on a topic that is otherwise quite slippery.

While doing research for One Piece, Wang visited Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–1902), a mural commissioned for the Secession Building in Vienna, Austria in which Klimt depicted Wagner’s literary interpretation of the swelling crescendos and opulence of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as an expression of desire. As though with a gold thread, Wang draws unlikely parallels between the gold of Klimt’s goldleaf, the sandstorms of the artist’s childhood, and the gold rush that drew in the first generation of Chinese migrants to the United States. Here, gold becomes the intersection of desire and personal memories.

Wang’s painting Gum Shan (2024), for instance, takes its title from a Cantonese name given to San Francisco that translates to “gold mountain.” Gum Shan captures Wang’s vivid visions of the glimmer of hope that might motivate nineteenth Chinese prospectors arriving in California to mine gold—encouraged to marry and have children, sometimes just months away from their departure dates, they were meant to work hard and send their profits back home. As Wang puts it, “The inherent contradiction in the relationship between searching and desire is bondage.” The yearning for happiness can be a yoke along the path to autonomy.  

One Piece, a Japanese manga and animation, is a story of risk-taking, adventurous seafarers, each representing different civilizations and spirits. All characters in this tale are driven to find the ultimate treasure of a fabled prize known as the one piece—although its nature is shrouded in mystery, this treasure unifies the characters in a common trajectory. This idea pervades Wang’s practice, apparent in the fusion of his vast array of references as well as each individual story. Reverse Mountain (2024) is a surrealist landscape. Its water flows upward along a golden mountain range toward the important gateway to the New World. Calm Belt (2024) is the impediment posed toward those who want to enter this same world. In this peaceful vignette, there is neither wind nor currents that could propel a ship toward successful passage to the coveted destination. 

One Piece coincides with the release of Kaifan Wang’s first monograph. Eponymously titled, this in-depth exploration of the artist’s practice features essays by Xiaoyu Weng, Martin Herbert and Marta Gnyp.

Kaifan Wang (b. 1996, Hohhot, China) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied in Shanghai and Florence before completing his Fine Arts education at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany in 2022. Wang has exhibited his work in prominent group exhibitions, including Supercrowds/Super community, TANK Shanghai, China (2024); Bordercrossing: Possibilities and Interactions, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); Briefly Gorgeous, Songwon Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Temporary Chapter, Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin, Germany (2022); Caused BY Hair, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); and FLUXUS+Studios, FLUXUS+ Museum, Potsdam, Germany (2019). Wang was featured in Influential 2023: Forbes China Contemporary Young Artists and won the Ivan Juritz Prize 2022, funded by King’s College London and Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy. He also received the HVB KunstCUBEs One-Year Artist Grant. The first monograph of his work will be released in October 2024. 

About BLUM
BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital. The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large-scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others. BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books. Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

Press Inquiries

Nicoletta Beyer
Communications and Editorial Director, New York
nicoletta@blum-gallery.com

Christie Hayden
Communications and Social Media Editor, Los Angeles
christie@blum-gallery.com

Agata Słowak: SZTUKĄ DIABŁA TŁUKĄ | Umar Rashid: The Kingdom of the Two Californias. La Época del Totalitarismo Part 2 | Kaifan Wang: One Piece

BLUM

“Post Human was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human,” wrote the art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum discussing the impact of the exhibition in the October 2004 issue of Artforum.

In 1992, Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, brought together the work of thirty-six young artists interested in technological advancement, social and aesthetic pluralism, and new frontiers of body and identity transformation. Through their art, these artists were exploring the same questioning of traditional notions of gender, sexuality and self-identity that was—and still is—taking place in the world at large. Capturing a developing social and scientific phenomenon, Post Human theorized a new approach to the construction of the self and interpretation of what defines being human. The exhibition set the agenda for the 1990s, and its influence on artists and philosophers led to a new field of academic study.

In her book Posthuman Feminism (2022), the philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti credits Deitch for capturing “the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans.” She adds, “Post Human showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”

The catalogue of the 1992 exhibition, with its visual essay and innovative design by the late Dan Friedman, also proved lasting relevance. Deitch’s influential essay predicted many of the scientific and sociological shifts that have since shaped our cultural and social environment, even the pandemic.

More than thirty years later, Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, revisits the theme of the exhibition, bringing the discourse into the present. The show includes several of the key figures who participated in the 1992 exhibition in dialogue with some of the most interesting artists continuing the exploration of these themes today. In keeping with the social and technological trends that
inspired it, the interest in figuration of the original artists and the younger generations presented in the show is conceptual rather than formal.

Much of the then-new figurative work was descriptive of the “real” world but cannot, in fact, be called “realistic” in the conventional sense. That is because so much of the “real” world the artists were reacting to had become artificial. With the concept of the real disintegrating through an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and the embrace of artificiality, Realism as it was once known was no longer possible. This new figurative art may have actually marked the end of Realism rather than its revival.

Fully integrated into our pop psychology, the term “posthuman” is now used in everyday conversations and has come to primarily identify with the trope of the cyborg. This exhibition, like the 1992 show, however, examines multiple declinations and aspects of the postmodern construction of personality and the engineering and transcendence of the human body. The artists in the exhibition embrace notions of plurality, metamorphosis and multi-beingness. Cyber-futuristic, surgically improved, commodified, stereotyped, and politicized, the “cultured body” lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age.
Several works in the exhibition will embrace the biometrical aestheticization of the human body to address the decay paranoia, the social conflict over genetic engineering and the use of biotechnologies, and the conversation around the limits of “natural” life.” Artists have long engaged with the threats of biometric surveillance, the possibility of virtual reality overtaking our physical one, the accelerating real-time consumption of experience, and the automation of the workforce. As AI’s ability to fulfill our creative and specialized needs has reached mass fruition, artists are confronting the impact of what was once considered speculative science fiction, an everyday reality.

Post Human was first presented at FAE, Musée D’art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne (June 14–September 13, 1992) and traveled to Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli/Turin (October 1–November 22, 1992), Deste Foundation, House of Cyprus, Athens (December 3, 1992–February 14, 1993), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (March 12–May 9, 1993), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (June 23–October 10, 1993). A number of the works shown in 1992-1993 are now in international museum collections. Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991) is now in the collection of LACMA, where it was on view in 2023. Posthumanism has since been the subject of countless books, movies and high-profile exhibitions.

Post Human will be presented as part of the Participating Gallery Program for Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide, joining in a dynamic exploration of the intersection of art and science this fall. The exhibition is curated by Jeffrey Deitch with Viola Angiolini, Senior Director, Research and Curatorial Projects.

Image: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #638, 2010/2023. Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 20 x 15.25 inches (50.8 x 38.7 cm)
Framed: 29.25 x 22.38 x 2 inches (74.3 x 56.8 x 5.1 cm) Edition 1 of 6, 1 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Cindy Sherman

Post Human

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

NOON Projects is honored to present “Emotional Alchemy,” a solo exhibition featuring a selection of abstract landscapes by Gail Factor, drawn from her extensive career spanning over five decades.

Gail Factor (1942–2013) was a pioneering painter whose landscapes were deeply inspired by her surroundings in Carmel, California, the Big Sur Peninsula, and later, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her oeuvre reflects distinct periods shaped by personal experiences, the natural world, and significant historical events.

In the 1960s, Factor studied painting and drawing at the University of Southern California, where her signature artistic style began to emerge. An emotive and introspective artist, she channeled her observations and reflections into her abstract work, using painting and drawing as a medium to process profound personal and societal emotions. Throughout her life, Factor’s practice navigated various phases marked by relationships, wars, her physical location, and internal challenges, translating these experiences into vibrant, transcendent canvases.

“Emotional Alchemy” features a selection of small pastel drawings created in the 1960s during her time at the University of Southern California. Inspired by a burgeoning community of mid-century artists in Los Angeles, these pieces depict her developing artistic style and mark the beginning of her exploration into non-representation.

Factor's unique approach to abstraction draws from a rich tapestry of influences. In 1963, she was awarded a fellowship to study in Europe, absorbing classical painting, Impressionism, and the emerging post-war abstraction movement. Back in California, she worked alongside the artists of the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and '60s, among contemporaries Richard Diebenkorn and Henri Villierme. Upon relocating to Santa Fe, she became part of the artistic lineage of luminaries like Georgia O'Keeffe and members of the Transcendental Painting Group.

"Emotional Alchemy" highlights significant periods in Factor's 50-year career, showcasing her evolution from early pastels in the 1960s to pieces inspired by the Gulf War and her expansive work in Santa Fe. While her paintings primarily focus on landscapes, they were not created en plein air but instead emerged from her inner landscape, reflecting emotional depth and transcendence. Factor's career is defined by distinct periods and styles, yet her distinctive hand and approach to abstraction remains constant. Factor’s paintings transform the splendor and complexity of the human experience into something beautiful and sublime, inviting viewers to explore and immerse themselves in her vision of heaven and earth.

Gail Factor: Emotional Alchemy

October 26 – December 21, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 26, 2025 6–9 PM

508 Chung King Court, Los Angeles CA 90012

For more information email info@noon-projects.com


Gail Factor: Emotional Alchemy

NOON Projects (2nd Location)

Sydney Acosta, Raghvi Bhatia, Molly Bounds, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Anthony Cudahy, Lenz Geerk, Rose Haserodt, Zoe Koke, Becky Kolsrud, Molly Larkey, Audrey Leshay, Kristy Luck, Erica Mahinay, Suchitra Mattai, Chris Oh, AJ Pineda, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, mosie river, Betye Saar, Ian Stanton, Erin Wright and Brenna Youngblood.

Roberts Projects is pleased to present On Alchemy, a group exhibition that engages alchemy’s rich history and visual language to re-evaluate artistic production of the 21st century. Bringing together more than 20 individuals working in painting, sculpture and mixed-media, this exhibition positions artists as the alchemists of our era to generate new perspectives on contemporary art and meaningful insight into the creative process.

With origins dating back to ancient Egypt, the centuries-long pursuit of alchemists can be distilled into a singular objective: to perfect the human mind, body and soul by harnessing the power of forces beyond our understanding. This desire was represented in the form of the Philosopher’s Stone, an unknown, mythical substance with the ability to cure any disease, transmute base metals into gold and produce the elixir of immortality. While alchemy was demoted to a pseudo-science during the 18th century, its lasting impact on human civilization—and countless artists across generations—can still be measured in the multitude of belief systems that emerged in its wake, including astronomy, philosophy, psychology, theosophy and transcendentalism.

Like shining light on a prism, new and recent works by participating artists reveal the vast spectrum of alchemy’s contributions throughout time. The process of chrysopoeia is mirrored in works that transform everyday images, objects and materials into proverbial “gold.” Sculptures of metal and clay—created with methods that can be traced back to the Neolithic Age—convey sentiments that are wholly contemporary. Oil, water and crushed stones are manipulated into representations of (un)reality, indexes of observation and accumulations of gesture.

Together, the artists in On Alchemy embrace and uphold aesthetic innovation, material investigation and conceptual risk-taking as crucial acts of creative self-determination. By preserving the enduring spirit of this ancient tradition, we may yet find the answers that will carry us into a brighter future.

For additional information, please visit robertsprojectsla.com or contact Alexandria Ryahl, Associate Director at alexandria@robertsprojectsla.com or 323-549-0223.

Image: AJ Pineda, Raphael’s Ascent, 2024. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in (121.9 x 152.4 cm).

On Alchemy

Roberts Projects

Murmurs is pleased to present Resurrectura, a solo exhibition of multimodal, kinetic sculptures by Sasha Fishman opening November 9, 2024 from 6-9pm. The works on view––composed largely of moving image, biomaterials, and running water––exemplify Fishman’s sustained engagement with an aesthetics of transcorporeality. Disgust, pleasure, identification, and desire commingle within the interstices of both Fishman’s material structures and the interspecies encounters they speak of.

Sasha Fishman is a NY based sculptor and researcher. She is particularly interested in marine biomaterials, toxicology and energy harvesting as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. She is a recent MFA Sculpture graduate from Columbia University where she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. Sasha is a 2024 Puffins Grant recipient and a current Artist in Residence at Smack Mellon.  

Fishman has exhibited her work at Below Grand (New York), Resort (Maryland), Hesse Flatow (New York), Bozomag (Los Angeles), ILY2 (Portland), The Jewish Museum (New York), and The Indian Ceramics Triennale (New Delhi, India). She has participated in residencies at Smack Mellon (New York), Art Ichol (India), Acre (Wisconsin), NAHR (Italy) and the High Desert Observatory (California). Fishman has presented her work and run workshops at Printed Matter (New York), Genspace (New York), Navel (Los Angeles), UCLA (Los Angeles), UDenver (Colorado), UColorado Boulder (Colorado), Kenyon College (Ohio), MICA (Maryland), Caltech (California), and CSULB (California). 

Sasha Fishman: Resurrectura

Murmurs

We are excited to celebrate the incredible talent within our gallery at our upcoming exhibition, Dazzling Glamor of Creative Pursuit. This exhibition is a testament to the diversity and depth of artistic expression that we have fostered.

We understand that not everyone in the art community has had the chance to attend all our previous exhibitions. This carefully curated selection presents a unique opportunity to engage with the richness of our collective art history while experiencing a fresh and vibrant display. More than just a standalone event, this exhibition celebrates the culmination of past showcases at Mash Gallery, highlighting the enduring beauty and exceptional craftsmanship of each piece. It reflects the dedication and passion of the Mash artists who have poured their hearts into their work, capturing the timeless stories and artistic journeys that have unfolded within our walls.

Art and curation collide in this visionary exhibition. By selecting remarkable pieces from our extensive pool of previously exhibited artwork, we explore how the arrangement and placement of these creations can foster fresh interpretations and ignite new appreciation. Each artwork will be juxtaposed in thoughtfully curated settings that breathe new life into their narratives.

At Mash Gallery, we are deeply passionate about showcasing art for the sake of art, prioritizing creative expression over commercial considerations. Every piece featured in this exhibition has been meticulously handpicked from our artist roster, with many created exclusively for our gallery. This commitment to authenticity is a cornerstone of our mission, allowing us to celebrate the artistry and dedication of our featured creators.

This exhibition will feature a remarkable array of conceptual mixed media pieces, figurative works, along with unique sculptural creation that embodies tactile beauty and complexity of three dimensional art. A vibrant palette will be at the heart of this exhibition, as we explore the drama and intensity of bold, vibrant hues as well as the understated elegance of more muted tones. From the eye-catching and daring to the serene and contemplative, both the seasoned art lover and the general art community will enjoy the diverse variety of styles.

We look forward to welcoming you to Dazzling Glamor of Creative Pursuit and sharing in this extraordinary celebration of creativity.

Participating artists:

Christie Hopkins
Ramona Stelzer
Jon Pannier
Andy Harwood
Didem Yagci
Carrie Fell
Nelly Zagury
Ernesto Guevara
Jose Cacho
Emmanuel Meneses
Marko Gavrilović
Morgane Clavaud
Frank Hyder
Dual
David Jester
Jenny Vinter
Layda Rodriguez
Toni Martin
Jill Daniels
Massimo Damico
Maurizio Battifora
Anthony Liggins
Cabell Melina
Johannes Wessmark
Amanza Smith
Lola Okunola
Ivan Madrigal
Trew Love
Eva Carzul
Alberto Sanchez
Haleh Mashian
Julia Hacker

Dazzling Glamor of Creative Pursuit

Mash Gallery

A simple thematic change in Bagayan's artwork transports the view into alien worlds with big-eyed cosmic children. Bagayan coins this style 'Futurealism'. This series of portraits are painted with an eerie glitch effect. 3D glasses will be provided at the opening for enhanced viewing.

Ana Bagayan: Futurealism

Augmented Reality Exhibition
AR OPEN
At the Venice Public Art Walls

AR Open invites you to immerse yourself in the world of augmented reality artworks blending into the scenic views of Venice Beach – all with your own cell phone. AR OPEN features artworks by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jeewi Lee, Pixelated Realities, Dennis Rudolph, Benedikt Terwiel, Jonas Wendelin, and others.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the piece DIDDLE MY SKITTLE (LA), commissioned by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. This AR sculpture delves into themes of gender, power, and alternative world orders, transporting the world-famous Hollywood sign to Venice Beach. It serves as the backdrop for this unique, interactive, site-specific art experience. Jordan's work confronts traditional male dominance, featuring a flying manta ray-like creature that symbolizes female empowerment and resistance against patriarchal structures. Initially inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the piece has evolved to address broader issues of gender inequity and the male gaze in cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Hollywood, and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE: 
The site-specific installation is only accessible on location at the Venice Public Art Walls. This is a web-based project viewed via an AR-enabled smartphone or tablet (2017 or newer) using mobile data.
Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.
No apps are needed to access the installation.
Upon arrival at the Venice Public Art Walls, open www.ar-open.com on your compatible smartphone or tablet.

The map and the works and further instructions on how to view all installations can only be found on the mobile version of the project: www.ar-open.com
All artworks are part of Augmented Studies, an AR program exploring the potential of augmented reality for contemporary art. Based in Berlin and operating internationally, Augmented Studies has produced numerous public art projects and has been running the exhibition series AR OPEN in Al-Zawraa Park in Baghdad since 2021 and in Berlin's Tiergarten since 2022. 

Tag us if you take screenshots of the Installations: IG @goetheinstitut_losangeles
THANKS!


AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

A solo exhibition of sculpture by Carl D'Alvia (USA, b. 1965), installed in the project rooms.  The Connecticut-based artist will present figurative works in bronze, marble, and limestone, created between 2013-2024.

This is his inaugural exhibition with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. 

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A solo presentation of new paintings by multidisciplinary artist Marty Schnapf. This is the Schnapf's third solo exhibition with Diane Rosenstein Gallery.