Ian L.C. Swordy: Direct Carving | Cameron Spratley: American Portraiture
743 N. La Brea Avenue
Saturday, March 25 at 6:00 PM 8:00 PM
Ends Apr 29, 2023
Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Direct Carving, an exhibition of new sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist Ian L.C. Swordy. The occasion marks the artist’s second solo presentation at the gallery, and will be installed in our Viewing Room from March 25 – April 22, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, March 25 from 6-8pm. Continuing his engagement with the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of revolutionary Modernism, Ian Swordy’s sculptures consider the labor quotient of direct stone carving, positioning that action as a performative, participatory one. The two pillars of his practice, sculptural collages of found urban detritus and carved stone and marble, find the artist advancing an understanding of artistic intention as actualized by making, just as performance and theater are made real through enactment. This idea, standing in opposition to current distillates of Dada thought, returns to an approach to sculpture as a two-headed struggle against self and material, toward the triumph of a clawing, sometimes elusive plastic vision; poetry and meaning realized through action by way of countless reductions and responses to stone. His marble and assembled sculptures posit what the forms of Barbara Hepworth or Kurt Schwitters might have looked like if they were carved in prehistoric times or collaged from junk, or, what the punk apprentices in quattrocento Florence did with their spare marble. Swordy’s stone works exist somewhere between the desire for a pristine, polished finish and a fascination with the visible hand. In Egg Peace, smooth, finely sanded marble sits on top of a smoothed pad of found walnut, itself perched on a hewn and varnished log left over from a construction site. Angular, jutting, craggy, bulbous, Swordy’s broad repertoire of forms and range of materials recalls Brancusi and Arp, and shares those artists’ belief in material and form’s combined ability to reveal the essence of an abstract object. A series of small wood-and-stone works titled Dove II-VII recall that animal in varied states of motion, a continuation of subject matter explored more literally in earlier bodies of work. Positioning DIY-infused atavism as a path forward, the artist considers the liberties taken in the pursuit of some strains of art-as-idea, and the broader implications of those projects. Punching holes in materialist relativity’s closed set of rules and immobile codes, Swordy invites challenge and dialogue. Swordy’s earnest pursuit of form refutes the increasingly contested notion of a linear artistic progress and directionality. The chisel is still the chisel; the hand is still the hand. _____ Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present American Portraiture, an exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based artist Cameron Spratley. The occasion marks the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery and will be on view from March 25 – April 22, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, March 25 from 6-8pm. Combining the languages of surveillance, graffiti, memes, and media, Cameron Spratley’s recent paintings consider the exasperating, totalizing aesthetics of violence in American life. Far-flung allusions to hyper-racialized caricature, vague warnings, and chest-puffed incitements become dense fields of abstracted information. Absurdity predominates, as a dreadlocked Angelina Jolie, screen-dead Ice-T, and the shackled WWF wrestler Junkyard Dog embody cultural grey areas, sites of contested history. Spratley’s portraits survey a schizophrenic social climate where values and terms are being perpetually renegotiated, and received meanings are routinely overturned. Spratley’s all-over, pounding surfaces result from the artist’s layering process, where collaged images and painted passages become entwined with and complicated by one another. In the monumentally scaled Prisoner of Love, among a forest of candles and scattered objects, a lone Spike Lee sits with his face cut in half under a red Malcolm X ballcap. The magnetically small sad-eyed Lee is flanked by bared fangs and the word NOCTURNAL. In Hash Slinging Slasher the word echoes back. “Nocturnal decade of sacrifice - Lust for freedom”. The atmospheric portraits treat subject as symbol, a deliberately inexact vigil of cultural baggage. Spratley’s portraits are expansive, collective endeavors. In Gee Aye Are Bee Eye Tea See Aitch, 2022, for example, Spratley invokes the provocative ‘80s hardcore band MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), the 1994 film Fresh, and the dripping red name of Edgar Allen Poe. Cat Piss, 2022, glibly asks HEAVEN? OR HELL? as it foregrounds images of a confederate monument, an anti-democrat bumper sticker, a 61-star American flag, and an ominously tagged door against a hissing black cat. These images furnish an air of general menace, diffused, again and again, by the durable humor inherent to the works’ insistent status as portraits. Spratley’s portraiture certainly doesn’t flatter, nor does it offer insight into its subjects’ inner lives; instead, it treats them alternately as instruments and products of that pervasive, clownish violence that sustains professional wrestling and sells I ♡ GUN SHOWS t-shirts.
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