Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Futurition, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Gabriela Ruiz on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, opening Friday, February 12, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Ruiz’s multimedia artistic practice is concerned with identity, the body, desire, and self-fashioning. Her oeuvre encompasses a variety of mediums from performance and video to sculptured paintings. Ruiz’s familiarity with construction work influences her use of accessible materials found in hardware stores and allows her to think about art structurally. The artist makes use of everyday objects as well as indestructible, industrial, and often toxic materials such as insulating and expandable foam, resin, plastic, and wood, to name a few. As in all of Ruiz’s projects, Futurition is an invitation for viewers to look inside of the artist’s self-described chaotic thought process. As physical manifestations of her consciousness, the sculptural paintings, video projections, and soundscapes are an exercise in reconnecting body and mind. The multi-channel video installations project video collages of self-shot material including fragmented images of the artist’s body. The montage of body parts reflects her feeling of disconnection from the physical form and serves as a tool for Ruiz to see herself from a third-person perspective. Two sculptural paintings feature her signature masses of foam, plastic molds of the artist’s face, and textural designs developed with a three-dimensional pen. While one painting is presented on a typical picture window wood panel, the other takes on an amorphous form. Two disparate sounds at opposite ends of the gallery space provide the soundtrack to Futurition, the centerpiece of which is a sculpture that serves as an incubator. Whether the incubation period is fruitful or results in destruction is up for debate. Preoccupied with phobias, hypochondria, impending doom, and apocalypse for as long as she could remember, Ruiz arrived at the uncomfortable term “futurition” from a place of hopelessness. Futurition, meaning assurance of the future or a future existence, is a concept that Ruiz is uncertain of and wants to believe in. Viewing humankind as precarious and her corporeal self as fragile and decomposing, the artist’s use of industrial and indestructible materials to mold her body is not only an attempt to reconnect with it, but also to ensure its preservation. Gabriela Ruiz (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is a self-taught artist born and raised in the San Fernando Valley to working-class Mexican immigrants. Her practice blends diverse forms of expression and media, including sculpture, video, painting, performance, and design. She has had solo exhibitions at LaPau Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), The Vincent Prize Art Museum, Los Angeles, (2019), and The Little Tokyo Art Complex, Los Angeles (2017). Ruiz has participated in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara (2019); CASTTL and Memm an de Stroom, Antwerp (2019); ONE Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); ltd los angeles, Los Angeles (2019); Centro de las Artes, Monterrey (2018); Centro Cultural Clavijero, Morelia (2018); Museo de Arte, Mexico City (2018); ICA Los Angeles, Los Angeles (2018); and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2018). __ Anat Ebgi is pleased to present A Sun To Come, our third solo exhibition by Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar. The exhibition will be on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, February 12 – March 26, 2021. An opening reception will take place Saturday, February 12 from 4-6 pm. In recent years, Nassar’s embroidery-focused practice has expanded to include furniture, metal, and glasswork drawing from techniques and materials used throughout the Arab world. Though materially varied, these bodies of work are unified by the artist’s depictions of imaginary Palestinian landscapes as well as his painterly approach to specific craft practices. Alongside Nassar’s vibrant embroideries, this exhibition debuts his new series of wall-mounted landscapes made from wood and hand-hammered brass, bedazzled with mother of pearl inlay. The new inlay landscapes collectively titled ‘Third Family’ continue the artist’s interest of incorporating craftwork inspiration from the Levant and Palestine. A triangle, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, and heptagon form a sequence, exploring ideas of geometry, seriality, reconfiguration, and decoration. The specificity of the woods, each one named in the materials, reads like a list of paint colors: Paradox Walnut, Spalted Big Leaf Maple, Purple Heart, Swiss Pear, Avocado, Jatoba, Padouk, Loquat, Olive. Fraught with emotional entanglement and personal longing for place and permanence, the artist considers these landscapes, “versions of Palestine as they exist in the mind of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there. They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination; they are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.” Meticulously fabricated by hand, with hundreds of thousands of individual stitches in each composition, the embroidered skies and atmospheric horizons in A Sun To Come seem especially remote, rural, and dreamlike. Together the pieces in the exhibition extend provocations of his work to the pan-Arab diaspora in general. By incorporating traditional forms with his unique interpretations, Nassar continues the ways in which these traditions have changed over time, bridging geographical, political, and historical expanses. Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Evelyn Yard, London, UK, Exile Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work was included in the group exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Dallas Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.