3 solo exhibitions opening, open September 23 - October 28 2023 ATHENA LEMANSKA HAGIOGRAPHIES OF WHOREDOM CASSIDY PUTNAM THE HAPPY ORGAN JOHN GARCIA BREEZE PERFORMANCE BY SAMANTHA ROBINSON DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER ADAMS-COHEN 7PM + GUSHY 830PM Carlye Packer is pleased to present Hagiographies Of Whoredom, the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Athena Lemanska, on view September 23rd through October 28th. Hard-faceted and monolithic, a single figure moves between the nine paintings that make up Lemanska’s Hagiographies Of Whoredom. The exhibition traces a penitential heroine loosely inspired by the biblical character Mary of Egypt and diaristic scenes from Lemanska’s own life. Mary Aegyptiaca wielded her sexuality as power, and yet, as repentance, was cast into the wilds to wander the desert, clothed in nothing but long, flowing hair which covered every inch of her naked body. Art historical images of the saint are inherently sexualized, her nipples ever exposed and hardened by a seeming burst of blowing wind. Lemanska subverts the hagiographies of female saints, obsessed as they are with the extremes of chastity and whoredom, by presenting her own body in captured moments from life—a commodity more precious than flesh. Wandering through the dry California brush, her figures appear against dry, shadowy landscapes as symbols of fertility and sexual power, their sainthood springing from a chastity reframed as focus, devotion, and isolation. In Lemanska’s work we find this ancient woman emerging into our contemporary world, rendered with frenzied brushstrokes that seem to recall the glitches at the edge of a video game and awash in voltaic light; she appears restful, contemplative, anything but contrite. The hypersexualized thrust of Lemanska’s work is a simultaneous celebration of pleasure and reclamation of the artists own sexualized body. Her sanctified self-portraits leave nothing to the imagination, as if to proclaim: “Now, you may hear me speak.” ____ Carlye Packer is pleased to present The Happy Organ the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Cassidy Putnam, on view September 23rd through October 28th. In Putnam’s work form evaporates into thick streaming billows of pigment. Fields of color gurgle up with layers of paint below them. Where the material quality of the paint appears to take over from the painting’s internal logic is where the artist’s own unique take on composition, composition not as structure but as lyric, shines with the most intensity. These paintings are narrative in the sense that the viewer can feel as if they are moving through and against them, but they lack duration, everything unfurls in an instant which is to say they have the temporal scope of an explosion. Putnam’s references are clear and various, she borrows indiscriminately from the stylistic propositions of the French academy, the smoggy atmospheric passages of JMW Turner, and the slapdash arabesques of the abstract expressionists. In her work, style, stripped of its historical relevance, becomes a way of talking about restriction and convention, a way in turn of gesturing at the infinite possibilities of paint by attending to and ventriloquizing the various regimes that have attempted to limit what makes an image. In this exhibition, the artist turns directly to Flemish and Dutch hunt paintings from the 17th century, perhaps a perfect example of what is sometimes called derogatorily genre painting. And yet she revels in the visual tropes that constitute the category, and exploits its emotional undercurrents: the feelings of anticipation, surprise, and closure that together from the rhythmic structure of the hunt. Putnam’s refreshing return to the joys of pure abstraction, is marked nonetheless by the struggle of her images to withstand the force and weight of figuration. ____ Carlye Packer is pleased to present Breeze, an outdoor work by Los Angeles-based artist John Garcia. Garcia’s manipulation of the scale of language is intended as an exploratory intervention into its meaning. Enlarging the presence of a word becomes a way for Garcia to interrogate the stability and flexibility with which we understand it. In this work, Garcia has inflated and italicized breeze, also the work’s title, its appearance on the roof of the gallery and its elegant bent suggest and illustrate the word’s connotations even as they threaten the loss of its linguistic clarity. John Garcia (b. 1990, Spain) is an artist, writer, curator, and musician. His work documents nature, space, time, and the body. He has shown at Baba Yaga Gallery, New York, NY (2023; Simian Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2021); The Still House Group, New York, NY (2015); and was the 2021 Artist in Residence at the Rockaway Artists' Alliance, New York, NY. His artwork has been profiled in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Purple Magazine, and other publications. He has also written for publications such as Bomb Magazine and Art Observed. Moreover, he has curated extensively, and runs the Bunker, a project space with events in California, New York, and Paris. He is also a member of the music collective, Gushy. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles and New York.