Night Gallery is thrilled to announce After Limbo, an exhibition of paintings by Clare Woods. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles, and follows her participation in Night Gallery’s group show Shrubs in January 2022. The works in After Limbo originate in the early phases of the 2020 lockdown in the UK. As the outside grew less recognizable, Woods’ experience of her own home shifted and catalyzed a reseeing of the objects inside of it: vases, teacups, and rugs seemed to mirror the strangeness of the world at large. The works on view are anchored by this collapse of recognition. Each painting is graphically intelligible from afar, but their structure breaks down at a closer vantage. Woods’ practice has long been concerned with vulnerability and fragility, and After Limbo captures how these themes manifest in the odd silence of the domestic space. The artist’s distinctive style is informed by her background in sculpture; large, gestural brushstrokes are used to sculpt objects within the pictorial plane. Woods’ still life and figurative paintings are unmistakably rooted in real space and time, but abstracted by bold, fluid marks upon the aluminum surface. It is through the materiality of paint that Woods achieves a simultaneous de/re construction of form, obscuring that which seems immediately discernible. Woods approaches the still life as a uniquely powerful index of physical precrarity, wherein flowers and the human body exist in similar condition of concurrent life and slow death. In the panoramic, eponymous After Limbo, a multicolored bouquet bursts from a near-voided backdrop, proliferating across three panels and evincing the objective beauty of the motif. But petals have fallen—or are falling in midair—and stems are beginning to wilt, magnifying the close proximity between vitality and decay. Elsewhere, Maybe in Another World evokes a distant reality that was predictable, constant. Unmoored from the illusion of stability, the only constant is the sky. Across her newest body of work, the artist asks if there is any true solace to be found in the familiar. Are we engaged in a “return” to the routine, the unchallenging? Or are we living in the same state we always have, where the boundary between sickness and health is inherently shaky? We look through the window for answers. Clare Woods (b. 1972, Southampton, UK) has presented solo shows in 2020-2021 at Simon Lee Gallery, London; Martin Asbæk Gallery, Copenhagen; Cristea Roberts Gallery, London; and Buchmann Galerie, Berlin. In March 2022, Woods will mount a solo exhibition at The Serlachius Museums, Mänttä. She has had recent institutional solo exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Mead Gallery, University of Worcester, UK; Dundee Contemporary Art, UK; Harewood House, Yorkshire; Southampton City Art Gallery, UK; Hepworth Wakefield, UK, and group exhibitions include Fernweh Space, Beijing; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. A monograph on Woods entitled Strange Meetings was published in 2016 by Art / Books, London, and her work has been featured in Front Runner Magazine, Studio International, the Art Newspaper, Frieze Magazine, Independent, and Financial Times Magazine. Her work belongs in permanent collections of The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; National Museum, Cardiff; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, among many others. Woods lives and works in Hereford, UK. __ Night Gallery is thrilled to announce Love You, an exhibition by Cara Benedetto. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, following The Descent of Woman in 2016. “To be a fan is to scream alone together. To go on a collective journey of self-definition,” writes British journalist Hannah Ewen in Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture (2019). The works in Cara Benedetto’s “Love You” series pay homage to fan(girl) art. These recent paintings celebrate the femme icons of Benedetto’s life—including her mother, her dog, Mariah Carey, Zoë Kravitz, the stars of HBO’s Euphoria, Angelina Jolie, and Sahar Tabar. The latter is something of a fan artist herself. An Iranian social media influencer dubbed “Zombie Angelina,” Tabar rose to fame for her dramatic selfies likened to a gaunt, undead Jolie. It remains unclear whether Tabar achieved her look with surgery, cosmetics, digital filters, or some combination thereof. Benedetto similarly draws from various image-making vocabularies: digital and analog, abstraction and text, oil painting and factory-produced décor. For this exhibition, Benedetto has cleverly unmoored the operations of painting, printmaking, and meme-making. The resulting works are a type of fan art. Benedetto produces the grounds of her paintings—collages of text and digital images of her beloved subjects—through the décor website easycanvasprints.com. On top of these canvas prints she adds gestural, atmospheric backdrops in oil. Benedetto’s painted whorls at times resemble halos, articulating the crisp outlines of her subject’s coiffures or profiles. Sometimes these oils bleed directly into the text. Her words range from wry nods to marketing (“Chobani” over an agonized still of Glenn Close from the 1987 film Fatal Attraction) to an almost sloganistic unity (“shift the we to me and me to we several times in your mind.”) Benedetto has long invested in printmaking as a material and conceptual foundation for her practice. Here, she extends the logic of the copy to fandom. An audience, after all, only exists in multiple. Fans prove their devotion by consuming secondary tiers of mass-produced content (branded apparel, behind-the-scenes documentaries, the magazine foldout) as well as producing their own cultural ephemera. This fan art — handmade concert posters, zines, fan fiction, meme accounts, reposts, their own musical covers — functions as pure expressions of love. For fans and by fans, it circulates in a gift economy one step removed from the celebrity objects of their admiration. Fans forge a group identity around the fervent, unrequited love of a public figure. But this is love from a distance, for a carefully crafted persona, an ache without an anchor. Here, Benedetto reclaims the abject identity of the fangirl. The unleashed libidinal energy of a young, feminized fan base has been deemed adolescent silliness at best, pathological at worst. Degraded in the popular imagination for generations—think of the screaming, fainting admirers of Elvis and the Beatles—emotional fans have occupied the vestigial role of the hysteric. They are “enfreaked,” writes fan studies scholar William Proctor. Such neurotic descriptions persist well into the 21st century. In 2015, a GQ contributor called One Direction fans “dark-pink oil slick that howls and moans and undulates.” Benedetto recognizes the pleasure forged in crowds of sweat, tears, and collective erotic longing. As an immersive gesture, Benedetto has produced a wall-length vinyl mural based on a photograph of her high school gymnasium. On top, she has appended a fangirl manifesto and graffiti. “We mourn each moment because fangirls love to live,” she writes. They live to love, together. Text by Wendy Vogel. Cara Benedetto (b. 1979, Wausau, WI) has had solo shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles and Chapter NY, New York. She has presented performances at NAVEL, Los Angeles; Cressman Center for the Visual Arts, Hite Art Institute, Louisville; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Benedetto’s work has been featured in institutional exhibitions at MOCA, Cleveland; Metro Pictures, New York; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Academy of Art, Stuttgart; and the Jewish Museum, New York, among others. Benedetto was a 2014 fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and the 2014 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She is the author of two romance novels, The Coming of Age and Burning Blue, and the editor of Contemporary Print Handbook, published with Halmos. Benedetto is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, and lives and works in Richmond, VA. __ Night Gallery is pleased to announce Phantom Limb, an exhibition of new paintings by Farley Aguilar. This is the artist’s debut presentation with the gallery, and his first solo show in Los Angeles. Phantom Limb investigates the furtive contradictions of the United States in the late 1950s and mid 60s—an era associated with economic prosperity and a rise to international power, yet marred by de jure and de facto racism. The artist’s new paintings put forth a holistic consideration of the material, social, and political conditions of the period. Evocative and haunting, the works on view are unified in scale and perspective, thus equalizing the visual plane and providing a commentary on the linear rhetoric of American progressivism. Aguilar’s aim is not to simply represent past occurrences, but to use the painted form to illuminate the mundane features of the collective environment in which historical narrative is formed. Within this mundanity, we find an impetus to reconsider the relation between past and present. Aguilar’s tableaux begin with found photographs, grounding each work in the lived realities of the archive. Rather than working from iconic images, Aguilar looks to subjects and scenes on the periphery of a given historical event: crowds on a funeral route look on with profound yet mismatched affect; Eisenhower is depicted playing golf as a group of journalists follow his ball with their gaze, transfixed—the same year Autherine Lucy, the first Black student to take classes at the University of Alabama, is attacked on campus and expelled. The artist employs a breadth of application techniques, melding oil paint with frenetic gestures in graphite. With a highly saturated palette, Aguilar captures the interiority of his subjects with such depth it borders on the uncanny: in The Chorus, harsh strokes of red create shadows under a woman’s eyes and around her mouth, which is open in haunting midspeech. A green-tinted boy claps, looking at the viewer with a somber incredulousness. The figures, limned in chroma, evoke the sheer breadth of personal experience in a singular society: hopefulness, despondency, camaraderie, detachment, stoicism. Phantom Limb is an encounter with American subjectivity, as the tensions of a nation are distilled within the psyche of the individual. Farley Aguilar (b. 1980, Managua, Nicaragua) has presented solo exhibitions at SPURS Gallery, Beijing; Lyles & King, New York; Edel Assanti, London; and Spinello Gallery, Miami. He has been featured in group shows at several galleries and institutions, including Opalka Gallery, Albany; Kunstraum Potsdam; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke; Albertz Benda, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, FL. Aguilar’s work belongs in the permanent collections of Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Aurora Museum, Shanghai; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Akron Art Museum, OH; David Winton Bell Gallery Collection, Brown University, Providence; and Orlando Museum of Art, FL. Aguilar lives and works in Miami.