Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents this program in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Los Angeles. Join us for discussions around the processes and themes of our local artists’ current exhibitions. Melissa Huddleston will guide us through her exhibition Primordial Spring, and Phung Huynh will lead us through her immersive installation, Return Home. Refreshments provided. About the Exhibitions: Melissa Huddleston: Primordial Spring presents a series of paintings on paper that immerse the viewer in a luminous, prehistoric swamp populated with single-celled organisms, imaginary archaic life forms, and humanoid amphibian figures. Seen in silhouette, the figures’ complex relationships hover at the edge of narrative. Not quite land, not quite sea, swamps and wetlands represent a mingling of ecologies, a crossing of worlds. Encounters happen in these places that don’t happen anywhere else. The imagery in the paintings teems with mutation, decay, sex, death, and the magnificent messiness of life. The paintings in Primordial Spring utilize processes adapted from historic print and book arts techniques. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is applied to the surface of a water bath, manipulated, and then transferred to paper. The resulting paintings are dense with organic activity, and buoyant swirls of colors floating with mysterious levity. Phung Huynh: Return Home, brings together an installation of ornately framed graphite drawings and floating photographic banners that seek to ritually unite fragments of sacred Khmer Buddha statue heads that were looted from Cambodia. The artist examines Cambodian sculptures that memorialize the Golden Age of Khmer culture from the 9th to the 15th centuries, particularly the Buddha heads that are currently housed in American art museums and the remnants of the statues' bodies remaining in the temples of Cambodia. Huynh initiates critical dialogues in the pressing matters of repatriation and provenance within the collections of American institutions. “As a daughter of a Cambodian father who survived war and genocide of the 1970s, I am well aware of how Cambodia became a vulnerable place for destruction and the theft of so many of our statues that are essentially vessels for our divine, ancestors, and cultural heritage. Considering the profound impact of war, genocide, and American imperialism, my artwork is built on the desire (for them) to return home and focuses on the repatriation of ancestral art and heritage to Cambodia.” -- Phung Huynh