Night Gallery is pleased to announce High Stakes, a presentation of new paintings by Sarah Miska. This exhibition follows Swept, Miska’s 2022 debut at the gallery. Sarah Miska’s paintings investigate mechanisms of control through equestrian motifs. Her unusual, constrained croppings and a masterful ability to capture intricacy expose the less refined dimensions of English riding, as wrinkles pucker on show jackets and loose horse hairs spring from ornately braided manes. The subculture’s aesthetic qualities act as a potent site for social critique; elite status and immense wealth seem as native to equestrianism as, well, horses. But Miska’s magnified contortions of hair and bodies underline the futility of total regimentation, giving way to wider considerations of power relations and their signifiers. In High Stakes, the artist shifts her attention to horse racing in spirited reflections on risk, endurance, and the exhilarating prospect of reward. The show’s title alludes to the myriad risks embedded into horse racing: owners’ and bettors’ chances of losing or gaining money, as well as the very real physical dangers posed to horses and jockeys. More subtly, High Stakes invokes the volatility of the art industry that is inherent to capitalist enterprise and guaranteed for artists, collectors, and gallerists alike. As she captures jockeys lifted high out of the saddle and the tension of the starting gate, Miska posits the racetrack as a stage where these concerns play out. A propulsive, anticipatory sense of movement ripples through High Stakes. Rendered large-scale with the artist’s signature meticulousness, tight compositions and rich textures give each painting a quiet charge. Risk/Reward, 2023 nods to Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th century photographer who first documented a galloping horse with all four limbs off the ground. Miska distills the momentary weightlessness of a horse moving at full speed, legs suspended in air, dirt flying. Elsewhere, Miska expands her examination of affluence and stature with a new series depicting jockey silks. These garish garments are coded to represent horse ownership and lineages in the sport, with patterns and colors specific to influential families and individuals. Devoid of any markers of identity, Miska’s jockeys become pure signifiers, emblems of concentrated wealth, while the dramatic light cast upon torsos against black backgrounds bolster the cinematic quality of each tableaux. High Stakes is a study in proximity, interrogating how far we’ll go in pursuit of something bigger. Miska is here interested in the intoxicating energy of risk, the absurd willingness to lose everything for the possibility of even more. So moves the uneven rhythm of life—some run with their chances, others may never try. — Jayne Pugh ____ Night Gallery is delighted to present Stranger, Korean artist Yooyun Yang’s solo exhibition of recent paintings, which marks the artist’s debut solo show in the United States. The artist paints everyday scenes with a sense of jamais vu, or unfamiliarity. The works in Stranger feature acrylic on jangji, a thick, traditional Korean paper handmade from mulberry bark. Yang works from photographs, taking inspiration from both popular media images and personal snapshots. She crops, enlarges, and otherwise distorts them, focusing on fleeting moments and gestures. Yang’s canny use of light and shadow are integral to her practice. Six years ago, light became a major subject, marking a shift from the veiled dimness of older works. In the late 2000s, Yang made surrealistic pictures that reconstructed her inner world. She relied on her imagination to generate distorted bodies that reflected her emotional state. In the intervening years, the artist has shifted her focus outward. Anonymous faces and mysterious gestures fill her new canvases. They suggest broad, contemporary malaise as well as the specifics of Korean history and culture: The artist also paints aging buildings in marginalized Korean neighborhoods and has referenced issues of censorship linked to a popular uprising in 1980. Yang’s figures are recognizably Asian, yet the artist blurs their specific features; she is less interested in individual identity than in emotions, in depicting what many of us feel and struggle to express. Her intense, cinematic imagery evokes Michaël Borremans’s surreal, photographic paintings. In Stranger, a figure wipes at their face with a white towel, “obscuring” their features. The stark contrast of light and shadow in fabric and fingers suggest a momentary, photographic flash. Labor focuses on a white tee shirt and the veins of a figure’s neck. The spare monochrome background is deceptively simple: To create it, the artist applied more than twenty layers of thin acrylic paint over a concise pencil drawing. In Beam of Light and Midnight, light itself becomes a central character, penetrating the surrounding darkness and evoking canonical styles from Western art—Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and Edward Hopper’s poetic realism, in particular. Yang finds a unique approach by working on a different substrate than her predecessors. Jangji paper absorbs each acrylic color as it’s applied, creating a unique, radiant, and layered quality that preserves the artist’s marks over time. Instead of bouncing light, as oil on canvas might, Yang’s layers of paint engulf it, amplifying her compositions' profound, emotional atmospheres. Titles function as gentle descriptors of the strangeness Yang experienced in encountering the scenes she depicts. In Ring, light passes across fingers while in Butterfly, it draws decalcomania-like patterns around an emergency lamp. Language spurred the artist’s fascination with the unfamiliar. Yang notes that two Korean words—teum (틈, “gap”) and teumsae (틈새, “in between”)—differ by just one syllable, yet their subtle distinctions suggest ideas about the boundless possibilities of various openings. The teumsae throughout Stranger convey emotions as intricately layered as Yang’s paint. –Hayoung Chung ____ Night Gallery is thrilled to announce Series Collapsed, an exhibition of sculpture, photographs, and performance by MPA. This is the artist's first solo show with the gallery and follows her inclusion in the group exhibition The Heavy Light Show in 2022. With her artistic practice grounded in performance, MPA investigates questions surrounding power and the impact of social and political forces on the body. In Series Collapsed, the artist examines the overwhelming precarity of contemporary life, contemplating the cycles of violence that have shaped human history and perpetuate ongoing conflicts on interpersonal and collective levels. As part of previous projects investigating the potential colonization of Mars, MPA spoke with audiences about the future they imagined and encountered a kind of apocalypse fever: a collective sense that history repeats itself and war is inevitable. While meditating upon these predictions, a “received image” emerged in the artist’s mind: an infinity symbol broken open by an outstretched leg. MPA interpreted this unconsciously formed pictogram as representing the possibility of interrupting repetitive cycles of violence and domination as default narratives for humanity’s future. Instead of being viewed as a dystopian outcome, what if the proverbial “end of the world” could be embraced as an opportunity to create new ways of being, an unexpected escape from the seemingly infinite loop that characterizes our current trajectory? The broken infinity symbol is recreated in an installation on the gallery floor comprising gravel arranged to form its distinctive shape. This gravel recalls the use of precious stones and other rocks as a rudimentary form of currency, a material choice that appears as a metaphor for basic economic exchanges and a critique of the commodification of artworks within a capitalist market. At the same time, however, the work is itself for sale. It becomes a meta-commentary on the purchasing and collecting of art while also enacting an alternative model for such transactions: the proceeds from the sale of this work will be offered to a mutual aid fund, and the purchaser will receive a pendant of the broken infinity symbol, displayed as a necklace on a nearby wall, rather than the gravel from the installation. This economic commentary takes a scatalogical turn in a series of sculptures made by casting fecal excrement in brass, raising questions about how objects are assigned value and the boundaries of what is categorized as art. The works in Series Collapsed employ methods that are alternately intuitive, ritualistic, and conceptual, combining serious concern with humor and playfulness. While the broken infinity symbol represents the end of existing social structures and the potential for imagining new alternatives, it also, as the artist has noted, resembles a pictographic rendering of a butt. A series of photographs of a bare backside against a red background form the installation But, but… butt, presenting the image as a visual innuendo mimicking the infinity symbol (∞). The work’s pun-laden title also evokes a conversation or argument, summoning a sense of linguistic play amid disagreement or miscommunication. Continuing a visual motif from MPA’s earlier work, the color red recurs throughout the exhibition, functioning as a multivalent signal of emergency and passion, as well as referencing the muladhara, or root chakra, which relates to survival, sex, primal desires, and the unseen. One photograph saturated with red light shows a frank, close-up image of a transgender person’s genitals, insisting on the visibility of queer and trans bodies during a period of widespread threats to the well-being and autonomy of such people. A blurred image of a car’s red taillights appears in a large photographic print, and other photographs contain nearly abstract depictions of scenes bathed in the color. In the installation Magic Eye, MPA assembles together dozens of iPhone screenshots of palindromic numerical timestamps captured unintentionally over the course of the year 2021—2:22, 9:59, 8:08—to construct a document of her own intuition. Magic Eye disrupts impressions of linear time, instead emphasizing the fluctuating cycles that pervade our lived experiences. The work cultivates a capacity for intuitive recognition, a way of training the psyche to identify patterns and find new meanings in a flood of sensory information. Each Saturday throughout the exhibition, MPA will be present in a hallway adjacent to the gallery in the live artwork Back Room Talk. Members of the audience will be invited to bring her stones inscribed with the names of individuals she has known previously. Upon receiving each stone, MPA will tell the audience member something she has learned from this individual to initiate a conversation. These conversations introduce an open exchange of dialogue into the space, making the physical and psychic presence of the artist and others an essential part of the work on view. If humanity is to survive this apocalyptic present, MPA suggests, it will be by returning to intimate, deliberate actions of mutual presence and shared conversation, in encounters we create and embody together. ____ Night Gallery is pleased to present A New Flood, an exhibition of watercolors by Sterling Wells. The show will also feature a floating studio installation. This is Wells’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, following his 2020 show La Brea and the River. His work was included in the group exhibition Hot Glue this past spring at NADA East Broadway in New York City, NY, and in Shrubs at Night Gallery in 2022. Sterling Wells brings an irreverent approach to the traditions of plein-air painting and watercolor. He renders the detritus he finds around the hidden waterways of Los Angeles, using water from the sites and composing scenes that collapse city life into intricate arrangements. His work becomes a portrait of a contemporary metropolitan community as he documents what it leaves behind. Throughout Wells’s paintings, sky, shrubbery, and embankment flow down into patches of wetland. Bottles, plastic cups, and junk food packaging emerge from the grass and mud, while images of kelp-covered shopping carts conjure nature’s ability to overpower man-made designs. Fluid brushstrokes and errant drips further integrate objects and landscape: It’s murky where the human ends and the environment begins. For A New Flood, Wells constructed his own floating studio and transported it to Ballona Creek in Playa Vista, where he planned to work for the month leading up to his show. He selected the site due to its hazy position at the confluence of various Los Angeles jurisdictions. After local news media picked up Wells’s story, the city required the artist to apply for a permit. He submitted an application (which was ultimately denied), and the city replied with an email. The subject line, “A New flood—access Permit has been CREATED,” gives the exhibition its name. “A New flood” suggests biblical proportion and ecological specificity; the marsh in Wells’s paintings must be dredged periodically so the channel has the proper flood control capacity. Out on the water, Wells experimented with his materials. He worked at a new, larger scale and mixed powder pigment with creek water to make his own paint. Mud, algae, and markers of the tide flecked his surfaces. The barge’s wood slats accumulated bird droppings. The barrels beneath became repositories for seaweed and marine life. As Wells exhibits the barge alongside his delicate paintings, he celebrates the muck and beauty of the artistic process. Wells’s diaristic engagements with debris recall Yuji Agematsu’s careful arrangements of Brooklyn litter and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s residency at the New York Department of Sanitation. Wells’s barge also functions as a “bird blind”—an unobtrusive site for watching (and painting) seagulls, pelicans, egrets, herons, and anhingas—which evokes Mark Dion’s projects with bird sanctuaries. Yet Wells chooses a very different medium and site. The artist fully immerses himself in L.A.’s overlooked crevices and illuminates them with hopeful southern California light. Tides are ultimately the main subject of Wells’s paintings, a natural cycle that dictates the ebb and flow of litter and marine life between ocean and creek. While the tides respond to the moon, the plein air painter responds to the sun. Evidence of the celestial bodies commingles on Wells’s paper substrate, suggesting the rhythms that will repeat long after life, art, and debris wash away. Image: Yooyun Yang