Night Gallery is pleased to announce Strange Lands, an exhibition of new work by Derek Boshier. This is the artist’s fourth presentation with the gallery, following Headlines (2021), On The Road (curated by Jamie Kenyon, 2017), and Journey/Israel Project (2014). Boshier's work served as the inspiration for the group show Cogwheels Carved in Wood (curated by Jonathan Griffin, 2014). Derek Boshier’s latest series of paintings, Strange Lands, beckons viewers into carnivalesque realms that defy the constraints of time and space. Bizarre characters appear both in earthly and extra-planetary scenes where ancient, medieval, modern, and future eras collide: Alien acrobats twirl fire batons; a demon brandishes a tomahawk while leaping off a flying, severed arm that holds a tiny mosque; centaurs joust with scepters on a blue and orange planet; and the clown-headed “Former Guy” grasps a bow and arrow as he leads a procession of zombies under a sky blackened by bombers and helicopters. Since 1962, when he emerged as a significant figure in British Pop Art alongside Royal College of Art peers including David Hockney, Pauline Boty, and Peter Blake, Boshier has critiqued the media’s mechanisms of influence. His art has considered how the Cold War nuclear arms race encroached on our domestic spaces via TV and cereal boxes, and how we’re now affected by the 3.2 billion images shared daily on the internet. In the Strange Lands series, he takes satirical swipes at organized religion, MAGA-era politics, corporate malfeasance, and the audacious fantasy of colonizing other planets while heedlessly exhausting our own. Like Samuel Beckett, whose plays he has admired since his youth, Boshier focuses his incisive wit on the vagaries and absurdities of the human condition. A bracing interpenetration of figurative elements and sheer geometric form has been critical to Boshier’s conceptual strategy. This approach is at play in his experimental films, his stage set maquettes for David Bowie, and his drawings, collages, and paintings. In Strange Lands, bold, reductive colors; thick, jittery outlines; and vibrant spatial ambiguities activate the network of images that Boshier has culled from art history, science fiction, mythology, and the media. Squares, triangles, circles, pyramids, and cuboids hover on many of the new paintings’ surfaces. These primary shapes appear to magnetically align and attach to others. In Strange Lands: Planet Orange, this creates multifaceted architectural structures. In Strange Lands: Corporate Ladders, silhouetted triangles morph in stages into stemmed trapezoids, a skirt with legs, and, finally, full figures that veer off into a queue of spectators. Boshier’s masterful blending of representational and complex abstract systems is also evident in Strange Lands: Landscape #1, a medieval village scene with a background detail from Pieter Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death. At the center of the composition, a saint clutches an elongated cross that leans towards—and nearly merges with—a floating rendition of El Lissitzky’s 1920s lithograph New Man, which consists of squares, trapezoids, triangles, and crescents. To the left, a courtier descends a pathway of rectangles that appear as if windswept from the Lissitzky. In the saint’s anachronistic revelation, we see in a flash what a brilliant instrument of design the cross was, traversing from pre-Christian times into pure modernist abstraction. A decade ago, in his foreword to Derek Boshier’s monograph Rethink/Re-entry, David Hockney remarked of his former classmate that he is an artist “who has never lost his sense of wonder at the world.” In Strange Lands, Boshier’s insatiable curiosity, fierce imagination, and dynamism of spirit radiate. Boshier is a true alchemist of images. - Night Gallery is pleased to announce Sand Box Living, an exhibition of new sculptures by Ry Rocklen. This is the artist’s first presentation with the gallery. It is organized in conjunction with neighboring Wilding Cran Gallery, whose related presentation with Rocklen, titled Shelf Life, is on view from March 16 — May 4 at 1700 Santa Fe Ave. Unit 460. In the Mojave’s tan expanses, sanctity is constantly in view. Resilience strategies for enduring the daily news are embedded in real weather’s wear and tear. Art that observes and addresses this is political poetry. Ry Rocklen’s indexical sculptures remind me that shacks, sneakers, and snack crackers—like fossils embossed with geological strata—are occult clues that point to shelter from overexposure. Whether his symbolic lexicon is apocryphal or sage is up for debate. These artworks, like the desert they celebrate, properly disorient viewers before any conceptual quest can begin. The clay sculptures throughout Sand Box Living were inspired by photographic “templates” Rocklen takes of the dilapidated jackrabbit homesteads erected during the Small Tract Era’s legacy of land theft. United States citizens who erected 400-square-foot cabins on five-acre parcels claimed land ownership, illegally overriding tribal rights. While many are now refurbished, some lots languish as disintegrated souvenirs of property dispute. As mid-century ruins, their wood and concrete skeletons are irresistibly haunted, so Rocklen has transformed his architectural fascination into shoebox-like, tabletop miniatures featuring hallucinatory scale shifts and subversive trompe l’oeil that elicit formal questions about perspective and space. Eavesdropping through the teeny windows as one does through their desert cinderblock counterparts, treasures appear: Instead of woodrat middens, graffiti, snakes, shot-up rusty cans, and disintegrated curtains flapping in wind, we find Reebok replicas ensconced in découpage. These cast and carved trainers are super cozy and honorifically housed in art-adorned domiciles, but they’re also paradoxically morbid, recalling reliquary and cult fetish. While the hand-built, clay-slab boxes that contain the shoes are compositionally packed, they encapsulate and deliver into the gallery the same vast solitude that desert fans love. There’s an ironic slippage between the compact homestead cabin structures and the vast lands they failed to claim. This incongruity breeds an uncanny loneliness that can be charming and dollhouse-like. But just when these sculptures lean towards model or diorama, they steer viewers back towards eternity through earthy, neutrally colored clay bodies and topography reminiscent of the Mojave’s rocky outcroppings. This body of work furthers Rocklen’s longstanding preoccupations with how American culture selects and produces iconography. How and why are some objects elevated to elite status? Who decides, and are their shapes and forms fixed? Are fabricated duplicates as precious as originals? Rocklen is a minimalist Sherlock Holmes of sorts, sniffing out the elusive champion-status inherent to plastic trophies, bathroom tiles, school lockers, and paper towels. His interests are wide-ranging, spanning high kitsch to humble, functional tools. But these sculptures are the first, he says, in which his desert home landscapes have permeated his aesthetics. For example, that these sculptures are emblazoned with decals made from 3D photo-printing ceramic glaze is a stark reminder that our perceptions about sublimity’s simplicity are erroneous. Just as wilderness evidences weather’s complex technical achievements, Rocklen’s homestead series makes deceptive light of highly skilled craft moves and dexterous material construction.