Reviews

“The only lasting truth is Change,” writes Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower. But inevitability doesn’t mean change comes without heartbreak. Kathy Gallegos and the team at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park know this all too well: After 25 years in the same space, landlords keen on developing condos forced them out. Gallegos has spoken candidly about the painful eviction process , telling CALO News in February how the most recent landlord warned her not to “freak out” as he planned to serve her papers. Eventually, the Pasadena Sheriff’s Department posted notices to vacate. All the while, she was consoling beneficiaries of the gallery’s public programs who didn’t want them to leave. After months of searching and a major community effort to help them relocate, Avenue 50 has reopened on Figueroa Street, debuting their new space with a group show, aptly named Changes/Cambios.

This exhibition marks not only a physical move, but also it speaks to deeper sociopolitical forces that have long threatened the gallery and its community. Gentrification, wildfires, and the Trump Administration’s attacks on Latines, immigrants, and arts and education funding have intersected in devastating ways at both national and local levels, deeply impacting Avenue 50 and the majority Latine population of Highland Park. Spanning from 2010 to 2025, works by twenty-nine artists, who are overwhelmingly Latine and have exhibited at Avenue 50 before, line the one-room gallery, reflecting this evolving turmoil without succumbing to despair.’

Johnny Castillo, Apa’s Vision, 2022. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.

Among the works on view, several confront these intersecting crises head-on, especially those referencing fire. In Johnny Castillo’s Apa’s Vision (2022), a red glow washes over the portrait of a man in a hard hat. This oil-on-wood painting eerily recalls the intensity of the 2025 LA fires, but it does not place its subject in a specific environment, allowing viewers to imagine any blaze—domestic or international, recent or historical—exacerbated by power companies and climate change. Eric Almanza’s Black Masks and Gasoline (2024), depicting a figure in a full-face respirator surrounded by yellow flames, is more explicit about its setting. An accompanying sketch, First a Spark, Then a Flame (2024), zooms out on the masked subject standing near a barrier that suggests one side of this border is Indigenous land. Within this context, Almanza’s works evoke the disproportionately negative consequences of natural disasters on BIPOC communities, while also highlighting the Tongva people’s restorative land stewardship practices, such as removal of invasive, fire-prone plant species like eucalyptus, that helped mitigate the Eaton Fire. Large swaths of Altadena burned, but without the care and diligent work of the Tongva people to better manage their land, far worse destruction would have aggravated an already devastating disaster.

Installation Image of Changes/Cambios. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
Eric Almanza, First a Spark, Then a Flame, 2024.Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.

While tens of thousands of people continue to grapple with the aftermath of these wildfires, the Trump Administration has deployed ICE to raid neighborhoods and round up migrants for deportation without due process. This horrifying continuation of policies from Trump’s first term is echoed in Abelardo de la Peña Jr. ‘s photograph The Familia That Marches Together, February 17, 2025 (2025), where a handwritten sign reads, “NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND”, a phrase that could easily have appeared in 2016. Of course, anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States predates Trump. Martin Bustamente’s 2014 digital collage Degrees of Separation resembles a word search puzzle, filled with pejoratives used to describe immigrants during Obama’s presidency, which continued their use from presidents past.

Abelardo de la Peña Jr., The Familia That Marches Together, February 17, 2025, 2025. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.

Now combined with plainly fascist co-optations of the American flag, the current iteration of anti-immigration policies coming from the White House adds new urgency to a decades-long conversation unfolding within this exhibition. It’s unclear whether the man wearing an American flag as a cape in Angela María Ortiz’s photograph 5th St-Downtown LA (2010) meant it as a point of pride or protest or both. But the similar imagery in Edwin Vasquez’s mixed-media piece Who is In Charge? (2025) leaves no room for uncertainty. On the right of Vasquez’s painting, three green lines like prison bars cut through the stars and stripes of Trump’s cape. On the left, a silhouetted figure dons a blood-red cloak adorned with a golden Tesla logo. What may once have seemed like an innocuous fashion choice now signals to many a clear allegiance to a government that no longer pretends to serve everyone.

Amid the somberness of the moment, humor anchors both the works and the gallery itself. Pen and ink wash illustrations by Ronald Llanos resemble New Yorker cartoons, both in style and wit, and speak to what the Avenue 50 team may have asked themselves in the wake of their eviction: “Where are we going?” (as a train heads into the ocean) and “Is this going somewhere?” (asks a satellite). But unlike the ambiguous discovery in Llanos’s 2022 piece of the same name, Gallegos seems to have found a treasure on Figueroa Street, and people want to follow her there to see it too.

Ronald Llanos, Where Are We Going, 2022. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.

By returning for Avenue 50’s comeback show, artists who have exhibited there before reaffirmed their commitment to the gallery and the values it upholds. The physical space may be new, but the gallery’s heart beats the same. The world has changed unimaginably since Avenue 50 first opened its doors in 2000, yet Gallegos and her team remain committed to ensuring everyone—artists and guests, young and old, citizen or not—can find a home with them, ready to face whatever challenging changes/cambios come next.

Heriberto Luna, Existence, 2025. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.

“Changes/Cambios”
March 8th – April 5th
Avenue 50 Studio
3714 N. Figueroa Dt, Los Angeles, CA, 90065

​Read More “The only lasting truth is Change,” writes Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower. But inevitability doesn’t mean change comes without heartbreak. Kathy Gallegos and the team at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park know this all too well: After 25 years in the same space, landlords keen on developing … Continue reading “Changes/Cambios” 

Frieze Art Week runs the 17th till the 23rd of February this year, meaning many gallery openings, art events, public installations, and fairs happening concurrently all over the city. The bread and butter of this week, though, are the art fairs, and one of the most notable of the bunch— and the week’s namesake— is Frieze Los Angeles.

One hundred and one galleries from around the world have come together in a makeshift convention space at the Santa Monica Airport, made up of industrial sized tents, temporary walls, and carefully placed portable bathrooms that, when constructed together, almost feel like permanent spaces. If you’ve ever been to a convention where a large space houses multiple booths selling anything from sports cards to the latest trends in dental care —it’s like that, but with incredible contemporary art.

This fair is indicative of the glamour and decadence that one would expect from an event selling pieces ranging from five thousand dollars to just north of a million. There are also big-named brand sponsors, high-end bars, and an admission price to fit. Friday preview tickets were $215, while Saturday and Sunday tickets were $80 with limited $40 student tickets (at the time of this writing Sunday student tickets are still available).

One might argue that the fair is cost-prohibitive to working-class appreciators of art, yet Frieze has been making efforts to provide free passes to schools and organizations, allocate a larger amount of discounted student tickets, as well as other efforts to be more inclusive. All of this makes for an opportunity to see work you’d normally only see in a museum, complete with the rising contemporary stars of the art world all in one place.

Here are a few highlights:

MARIANE IBRAHIM GALLERY

Installation view of Serene by Patrick Eugène at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

Starting at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery’s booth was a beautiful series of paintings by the Haitian American artist Patrick Eugène. The references pay homage to Abstract Expressionism’s philosophies and gestural brushstrokes, creating deeply evocative scenes of quiet emotion. Dreamy depictions of Black people in everyday situations—dining at a restaurant, strolling through the park, or having a morning coffee pair together— frame a world where one can appreciate the quiet and beauty of life.

Aptly titled, Serene, one painting portrays a woman sitting at a restaurant table, either prior to ordering or while waiting for her food. The colors —muted, darker blues, greens, and browns—blend to create a space that is familiar yet nondescript. The woman, sitting in reflective silence with her eyes closed, appears thoughtful and beautiful. Everything about the work draws the viewer in.

It’s interesting to note that while Abstract Expressionism was one of the first movements of art that was truly a distinctly American style, it also helped pull the center of the art world away from France’s stronghold and squarely into the hands of New York City. Haiti, too, was once (quite violently) in the hands of the French, and by painting Black people in scenes of beauty and quiet grace, Eugène’s work subtly redirects power to his Haitian heritage.

Installation view of The Hours Left Behind by Patrick Eugène at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY

Another must-see is Charlie James Gallery’s booth, exhibiting a duo show of Ozzie Juarez and Jackie Amézquita. This year, the gallery is pulling triple duty, with multiple exhibitions closing this week in their Chinatown space, and a booth at Felix Art Fair in Hollywood. Both Frieze booth featured artists are having breakout moments in Los Angeles and beyond right now. Juarez participated in the much-celebrated 2024 group show, “At The Edge of the Sun” at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, and both artists also had well-received solo exhibitions with Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

Installation view of artwork by Jackie Amézquita at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

Continuing her solo show series, Amézquita creates work that embrace pre-Colombian and indigenous practices for her tile and ceramic pieces, celebrating both her culture and womanhood. Her handmade pottery and stonework vessels evoke the five stages of regeneration, and are thoughtful reflections on notions of community and collective ancestry.

Installation view of Soledad by Ozzie Juarez at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

Juarez’s mixed-media paintings — part of his ongoing solo show series— present colorful scenes and images painted on fabricated metal gates. The imposing nature of spike topped metal gates, often found in industrial corridors or alleyways, is juxtaposed with images that either celebrate Mexican heritage— like the piece Soledad, which features a Xolo dog sitting majestically in a mountain scene— or portray scenes one would find in fantasy novels or cartoons, like the very large double-panel Añoranza. The paintings can either soften the opposing nature of the gates or serve to repurpose them into portals into another world, hiding the treasures within. In his work, Juarez reconceptualized and uplifted distinct aspects of cultures and communities that are quite powerful.

Installation view of Añoranza by Ozzie Juarez at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

Beyond the booth, both artists are presenting large-scale pieces outside the main fair hall as part of the Frieze Projects “Inside Out” program curated by Art Production Fund.

Installation view of Pásale! Pásale! Todo Barato! by Ozzie Juarez at Frieze Projects. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

FRIEZE LOS ANGELES IMPACT PRIZE

Installation view of I.C.E. SCREAM by Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez at Frieze Los Angeles 2025.

No fair would be complete without prizes, and this year The Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize was granted to Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez. This award celebrates an artist whose work has made a profound social impact, with the winner receiving a $25,000 award and a solo exhibition space at the fair. Quiñonez used the opportunity to present his I.C.E SCREAM series, a profound exploration and confrontation of the United States’ ugly history with immigration and the resilience and beauty of the primarily Latino people caught in the crossfire. Sculptures, paintings, and mixed media pieces adorn the installation, with a central melting popsicle revealing handcuffs within. At the base of the installation, referring to the scene of caged migrants on the stick, a label reads “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement,” and is easily the fair’s most powerful representation.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY

Installation view of Currents Never Die by Sydney Cain at Casey Kaplan Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

The absolute star of Frieze is Sydney Cain’s deeply haunting and introspective paintings on view in Casey Kaplan Gallery’s booth. Shadowy, monochromatic images tell stories of the dark histories of the African Diaspora. Each painting depicts a group of people shrouded in shadows, with Cain seamlessly blending detailed figures into the void, as the void simultaneously transitions into figures. Using deeply expressive, somber faces, they also seem to evoke feelings of shared wisdom in Currents Never Die. Here, an authoritative woman offers guidance to the other figures, with the closest slightly bowing his head in reverence. Two less defined figures possibly representing those yet to come, are receiving the tools they need to carry the torch. By tapping into the strength and power of ancestral record, Cain is capturing a world beyond the terrestrial and into the afterlife.

Installation view of Undercurrents by Sydney Cain at Casey Kaplan Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

In another standout painting Undercurrents, a large group of people travel through dark waters on a small boat that can barely contain them. Yet amongst the grave faces, a small child stares directly at the viewer with a resolute gaze, a subtle yet profound blueish light emanating from her dress and hair, piercing the surrounding darkness. This ethereal light in the darkest of seas is a beacon of hope.

It’s that very same hope, evident in Cain’s work and in many others, that makes Frieze an experience worth having this year. With the aftermath of the fires in both the Palisades and Altadena still fresh in many Angelinos’ minds, one might wonder if it’s too soon for events of this scale in a city that has yet to begin rebuilding, let alone clear the rubble. However, it was clear—from efforts to incorporate fire relief in the event, to many artists donating prints to the Grief and Hope fundraiser, to the mindfulness of attendees, as well as the jobs and economic benefits these events bring—-  that art remains a vital means of fostering community. Whether you are a collector, a casual art enthusiast, or an art student seeking inspiration, there is something for everyone.

Finally, while the fair may feel a bit daunting to navigate with the sheer number of galleries on view, the entire space can be explored in about two to three hours —even with frequent stops for reflection when a work catches your eye.

Freeze Los Angeles
February 20-23rd, 2025
Santa Monica Airport
3027 Airport Ave Santa Monica, CA 90405

 

​Read More Frieze Art Week runs the 17th till the 23rd of February this year, meaning many gallery openings, art events, public installations, and fairs happening concurrently all over the city. The bread and butter of this week, though, are the art fairs, and one of the most notable of the bunch— and the week’s namesake— is … Continue reading “Frieze Los Angeles 2025 Edition” 

When one reflects on their life and the moments that shape who we are, we often discredit the quiet and solemn moments before or after a big occasion or tragic event.  The spaces ‘in between’ all the stuff we place emotional weight on are where we have space to just be who we are, to process all that we have been through, or begin to form dreams of the future. It is in these everyday spaces where life arguably truly takes shape. They can hold everything and nothing all at once.

In the thoughtfully curated duo exhibition, Imagined Long Before at the DMST Atelier Gallery, Andrea Castillo and Will Zeng examine aspects of their own lives and identities in varying ways. While both artists reflect on how the quiet, candid moments can truly capture the essence of who we are, the approaches are quite different.

Andrea Castillo, Storefront I, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .

Andrea Castillo’s series of paintings, primarily done in oil on canvas, gives intimate glimpses into the Latina/o/x side of Los Angeles. In Storefront I (2024), Castillo depicts a scene reminiscent of the many storefronts in the fashion or fabric district of downtown Los Angeles. Large blankets with animal prints, synonymously called Mexican blankets by the San Marcos company but now made mostly in Korea and other parts of Asia, line the wall in the background of the painting. In the middle of the work, an employee with empty, or perhaps bored eyes, is hanging shirts that run the gamut of an MF Doom band tee to a Gucci shirt. There is a wall of Nike sneakers flanking the left side of the room and Sanrio and Disney ephemera on the right. In the foreground on the counter is a greatest hits collection of Cumbia songs. If you’ve ever been to the alleys in downtown LA and walked through a store like this, you are instantly transported back by this scene. The sights, the sounds, and the intermeshing of varying products serve to attract a broad clientele. This work is seeped with a level of care and love of the culture.

Andrea Castillo, Hollenbeck Park, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .

Castillo does an interesting thing with perspective in her pieces. There is, at times, no true distinction between background and foreground. Things just bleed into one another. The scale of objects and subjects in the work can be either smaller than normal or larger than life. For example, in Hollenbeck Park (2024), the male subject’s body sitting at a park table at the center of the painting is astronomically larger than the rest of the work, while his head is much too small for his body. This juxtaposition is quite interesting when comparing not only the size of other figures in the piece, but also the various body parts as well. The weight that the body commands is prevalent in the work. The figure is looking up towards the sky pensively, as if dreaming. This anti-perspective allows the focus to shift in a myriad of interesting ways. One could see the enlarged figure in contrast to the rest of the scene and get that feeling of dreaming for something bigger in your life, that everything is too small for you. Similarly, seeing how everything is so miniscule in relation to oneself, it can be a reminder that the world, or our problems, are not always as big as we make them out to be. By choosing to play with perspective in her pieces, she allows the viewer to come up with more emotional connections to the work and themselves.

Andrea Castillo, The Visit, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .

Many of the pieces play with a monochromatic color pallet that adds to the dreamlike, moody feel of the pieces. In Hollenbeck Park the work is bathed in blue tones, while in The Visit (2024), an orangish hue washing over the subject sitting at the kitchen table, contrasting with the dark blue of the outside world. While the woman’s head is again quite small in proportion to the rest of her body, her hands are exceptionally large and elongated. Like each of the paintings, the subject’s eyes are quite expressive. You can feel the weight in them.  Mexican talavera style plates adorn the wall of the room, and a poetry collection by Christopher Rey Perez about Mexico City sits on the table. It is these small details that Castillo adds to the work that add layers of texture and cultural value.

While Castillo’s work is steeped in LA with its use of place and cultural iconography, Will Zeng uses the car culture of the city and how some Asian Americans are quite connected to it. This notion is interpolated with the exploration of queerness and the violence that can come from a car crash. The paintings have a sharpness and depth to them that makes them immediately striking. The subjects in the work are more defined and proportional to the rest of the images in the work. The paintings are not quite photorealistic, but the level of realism in the pieces draws you into a more direct level of reality.

Will Zeng, BOYRACER I, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .
Will Zeng, DRIFTCORE, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .

In BOYRACER I (2024), you can feel the tenderness and vulnerability of the Asian man contrasted with the more traditionally masculine street racing car. The car itself is painted a pinkish hue that further complicates the gender dynamics in the piece. In DRIFTCORE (2024), seemingly the same man is seen shirtless peering almost blankly over a drift car as it burns out. While the car elicits notions of excitement, the subject’s gaze bathes the work in a deep sense of loneliness.

Will Zeng, OOPS, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .

The two pieces, OOPS (2024) and Crash I (2024), explore scenes of the aftermath of a car crash. In the former, a family minivan adorned with stickers filled with hopes and dreams of family— a new child, the academic success of the family’s other children— has very literally been smashed into by an opposing force. The rear bumper is cracked and partially dislodged, but somehow still hanging on. Even though the car has been wrecked, the colors in the piece still remain bright and subtly optimistic, and the “oops” on the license plate adds a little humor to the mishaps of life. The iconography of familial expectations, hopes, successes, and failures captures so much of what it is to be the child of immigrant parents— the weight that one can feel to uphold expectations created before one is even born.  In the latter, the viewer is presented with the aftermath of a head-on collision by two cars in the background. The scene is dark and filled with emotional weight. In the foreground, a subject that is seemingly the same one as in two of the previous pieces looks back over his shoulder as if in shame.

Installation image of Imagined Long Before at DMST Atelier Gallery, 2024. Image courtesy of DMST Atelier Gallery. Photo Credit: Monique G. @_amor.duro.fotos_ .

From deep longing, sorrow, regret, shame, hope, connection, and love, it’s the sheer emotional weight of all the work in this show that makes it especially interesting to witness. This is especially poignant with the various ways both artists connect with and reflect with their own cultural identity. Those small touches of slipping in a musical album, book, or blanket, or bumper sticker make all the difference in the work. Ultimately, with their different approaches, both Castillo and Zeng are able to pull the viewer in and reveal a bit about the world, themselves, as well as the humanity that lives within us all. The pairing allows the viewer to reflect on those quiet, in-between moments in life to see how much more impactful they truly can be. Because it is in those moments before or after the storm that the calm can settle on you and let you hopefully feel at peace.

Imagined Long Before is now on view at the DMST Atelier Gallery until January 31st 2025.

Imagined Long Before December 14, 2024 – January 31, 2025 DMST Atelier Gallery  4614 W Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90016

​Read More When one reflects on their life and the moments that shape who we are, we often discredit the quiet and solemn moments before or after a big occasion or tragic event.  The spaces ‘in between’ all the stuff we place emotional weight on are where we have space to just be who we are, to … Continue reading “Imagined Long Before” 

Like many major metropolises, Los Angeles is a city brimming with transplants from across the U.S. and around the globe.  Uprooting their familiar lives to move here in search of new opportunities, many find their corner of community and ultimately make L.A. ‘home.’  Yet, for many—especially at first—the transition to Angelino can feel challenging, often marked by an unshakable feeling of being an outsider. Stark contrasts from their hometown, paired with an unfamiliar lifestyle and culture, can create a sense of observing life from a distance, making the concept of “home” feel perpetually just out of reach. This meditative unease and  questioning melancholy—layered with a desire to belong—permeates each of Kevin Yaun’s canvases in In Between Walls.

In his first solo show with Billis Williams Gallery, Yaun delves into our complicated relationship with the feeling of ‘home.’  Originally from Georgia, Yaun’s transient lifestyle has moved him across the United States as well as to international locales in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia. Capitalizing on this experience, his work cautiously examines the elements that make a place feel like home, balancing internal emotions with the way we perceive our surroundings. Each of the fourteen paintings in this intimate exhibition plays with this tension, contrasting interior and exterior spaces, clear window panes with distinct reflections, captivating light set against hazy or deep shadow, and painterly abstract brushstrokes with distinctive land or cityscapes.  Yaun skillfully creates visual barriers—cement walls, imposing hedges, and glass windows—that separate the viewer from a perceived reality just out of reach. This calculated distance allows us to reflect on our own beliefs and perceptions, examining the distance between our sense of belonging and the desire for connection from a safe vantage.

Kevin Yuan, Shiny Objects 1, 2024, Oil on canvas, 47 x 80 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

Kevin Yuan, Pacific Coast 27, 2024. Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

Though these paintings lack distinctive landmarks, they evoke an unmistakable essence of Los Angeles. Works such as Pacific Coast 35 (2024) and Shiny Objects 1  (2024) capture the vibrancy of west coast sunlight as it transitions from early morning to evening neon, while the iconic three-story hedges in Pacific Coast 27 (2024) bring to mind the defensive walls of a medieval city . Each scene feels precious and personal, as if observed by someone who admires the beauty in simplicity.

One of the most dynamic works in the show, Hillside Glass (2024), is also its most colorful and abstract. Initially presenting a view of a large red building, the composition is interrupted by an ominous reflection from a window behind us that casts a fence-like image over the building, commanding our attention. Its shadowy, thick jagged lines, reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still’s signature style, become an additional obstacle or distraction that separates us from the outside world. The intense red hue and fervent brushstrokes give the work a more anxious feel, perhaps hinting at doubts creeping in about belonging to this place. As Yaun’s work descends further toward abstraction, with objects blending into fields of color and thicker brushstrokes, the emotional value feels more complex and saturated.

Kevin Yuan, Hillside Glass, 2024. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

In another standout painting, Pacific Coast 7 (2024), a strong vertical format artfully displays hillside homes in a window-like composition. Here, buildings clustered at the top of the canvas catch golden-hour light, contrasted by an indistinct field of deep indigo below. The floating translucent rectangle at the bottom of the canvas reinforces the window illusion, subtly nodding to Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, with his somber color fields, rectilinear forms, and quiet introspection.

Kevin Yuan, Pacific Coast 7, 2024, Oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

Yet, perhaps the most striking art historical parallels to Yaun’s work can be found in the paintings by American Modernist Edward Hopper. Known for his portrayals of New York City’s retail and apartment buildings with distinct light, Hopper’s compositions often peered through residential and storefront windows to highlight the fishbowl-like existence within the city, creating scenes of isolation that capture a soundless solitude. Both Hopper and Yaun explore a psychological connection to observation and solitude in their paintings. The difference in their approaches is subtle: while Hopper documented a (often idealized) sense of detachment amid his home city, Yaun’s work is more introspective, evoking a longing to connect while maintaining a cautious distance.

Installation image of Kevin Yaun: In Between Walls at Billis Williams Gallery, 2024. Image courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

One might wonder if Yaun considers L.A. to be home yet. His piece At Home (2024) offers some clues. Distinguished by painterly, textured brushstrokes, it depicts a view of a sand-colored neighbor’s wall with a small window. Superimposed on the image is a reflection from another window, showing a silhouette of a small solitary houseplant perched on the sill—a personal touch that instills comfort to the scene. While feeling ‘at home’ is a deeply personal experience, this reflection seems like a subtle reminder of the efforts made to feel at ease in new surroundings.

Installation image of Kevin Yaun: In Between Spaces with At Home, 2024 located at second from the right. Image Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

Overall, Yaun’s work balances abstract forms, technique and hue with intriguing reflections, creating an ideal vehicle for channeling our often contradictory inner thoughts about belonging. His scenes create safe vantage points to observe and invite viewers to contemplate their desired sense of place and home through gently placed barriers.  Though early in his career, the artist certainly feels at home as a pensive observer with brush in hand.  Looking forward to seeing how his work evolves, and curious to see if he decides to call L.A. home.

Kevin Yaun: In Between Walls JOctober 12 – Nov 9, 2024 Billis Williams Gallery 2716 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90012

​Read More Like many major metropolises, Los Angeles is a city brimming with transplants from across the U.S. and around the globe.  Uprooting their familiar lives to move here in search of new opportunities, many find their corner of community and ultimately make L.A. ‘home.’  Yet, for many—especially at first—the transition to Angelino can feel challenging, often … Continue reading “In Between Walls” 

Image of Elana Mann. Photo Credit: Monica Orozco.

Elana Mann is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice, the embodiment of language, and deafness. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for the past twenty years she has researched the act of listening and everyday communication through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Mann’s rattles, trumpets, and other instruments are tools that galvanize the sonic energy of her work; together, they make a synergistic roar that embodies the voices of those who strive for social and environmental justice. She has participated in exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, among many others. Mann’s awards include an International Artist-In-Residence at Artpace San Antonio, the California Community Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the Cali Catalyst award from the Center for Cultural Innovation. 

Q: Artistic Challenges: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in a project, and how did you overcome it?

A: Ha! So many challenges over the years that it is hard to choose. Here’s one: in 2017, I found this incredible home-made folk musical instrument that was used in protests in Claremont, CA during the 1970s. It was called the Mega Kazoo Horn; it’s ten feet long and has six siren whistles attached to a long central horn. I wanted to create an homage to this piece and use it in present-day street protests and performances. I started to work on it in late 2019/early 2020 after having my second child. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I isolated myself at home with my newborn and my five-year-old while my husband worked—it was hard for me to go to the bathroom, let alone the studio. On top of that, it dawned on me that this sculpture, made for six people to breathe into simultaneously, had become a COVID-19 super spreader. And the only people protesting in the spring of 2020 were those who didn’t want to be vaccinated or masked. I thought: This is the worst idea for an artwork of all time, and this sculpture will never be finished.

But then the summer of racial reckoning happened. Masses of people risked their lives to protest for racial justice, and I began to imagine that the piece could be completed and used someday. I finished the sculpture during a residency at Artpace, San Antonio in late fall 2020 and called it Our Work is Never Done (Unfinished Business). It took another three years before I felt comfortable using the piece in a performance, and I finally premiered its sound in January 2023 with Hope is a Hammer at Human Resources, Los Angeles, in collaboration with composer and musician Sharon Chohi Kim.

Elana Mann, Hope is a Hammer, 2023, a collaboration by Sharon Chohi Kim and Elana Mann, Human Resources LA, CA. Photo Credit: Ruth Kim.

Q: Influential Experiences: Is there a particular experience that significantly shaped your recent artistic direction? 

A: I learned this summer that I was born Hard of Hearing—after twenty years of making art about the act of listening, the collective voice, and embodied language. I laughed and cried at the same time at the irony of it all. Clearly, my subconscious knew about my disability before my conscious mind did. It’s very strange to learn, at the age of forty-three, that you’ve had a disability your whole life and never confronted it. This new self-awareness shook me at first. I had built up so many ways to compensate for and cover up my hearing loss, and my internalized ableism was strong. But after I got over the initial shock, I was elated. Suddenly, I started to understand my life and my art practice in profound ways, and I could see that my artwork has been dealing with disability and deafness for years. I even have a large collection of antique hearing aids that I made into an artwork in 2014 called Having a Choice and Having a Voice, Having a Voice and Having a Choice. I am still in this process; it has only been four months since I was diagnosed with congenital hearing loss. I am so excited to see how this self-knowledge will shape my work moving forward.

Elana Mann, Having a Choice and Having a Voice, Having a Voice and Having a Choice, 2014, Metal and assorted antique ear trumpets from the 19th and 20th centuries, 7’ X 4 ½’ X 3’. Image courtesy of Elana Mann.

Q?: Unexpected Mediums: What’s the most unconventional material or medium you’ve used in your art? How important are these media in your work?

A: My material curiosity is endless—last night I was making letters out of cooked spaghetti for a new text piece. I was trained as a sculptor, so mediums and materials are critical to my work. In 2019, I started making ceramic rattles for protest and ritual (Shake, Rattle, Roll), and it was vital to me that they be made of clay. They sound incredible, are easy to transport, and have a deep association with all the ceramic wares we use at home. The rattles are delicate, though, and they break if dropped. People often ask, “Why can’t you make these out of a more durable material?” Building them out of another material like plastic would diminish the piece for me. I love how the rattles share a vulnerability with the human body and mirror the fragility of the hand that activates them.

Elana Mann, Shake, Rattle, Roll, 2019-present, Documentation of a rattle action at the “Bans off our Bodies” rally at Los Angeles City Hall, May 14, 2022. Participants of Shake, Rattle, Roll included Jerri Allyn, Anne Bray, Frida Cano, York Chang, Courtney Fink, Janice Gomez, Everly Gomez-Hoang, DeniseGray, Maya Gurzantz, Micol Hebron, Robby Herbst, Juniper Herbst-Varella, Ella Hushagen, Michele Jaquis, Mick Lorusso, Shana Lutker, Susan Mogul, Mehregan Pezeshki, Claudia Pretelin, Jeremy Quinn, Milo Quinn, Michael Rippens, Ron Schneck, Sandy Shannon, Stephanie Sherwood, Colin Smith, Matias Viegener, Jan Williamson, Jemima Wyman, and Joan Zeta. Photo Credit: Monica Orozco.

Q?: Favorite Sound: As an artist who often works with sound, do you have a favorite sound or auditory memory?

A: This summer, I was on a residency in rural Minnesota at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. Just before this trip, I had been fitted for my hearing aids, and this was my first time traveling with them. One of the best parts of the trip was my sound walk along the marshes of the Mississippi River, a five-minute trip from my hotel room.

The sounds of the marshes were off the charts. My hearing loss affects my ability to hear mid-frequency sounds, so I had never heard such a beautiful chorus of buzzing, trilling, and chirping sounds of swampy insects and animals. I must have taken at least twenty sound recordings—my mind was lit up with joy.

It’s fitting that I had this experience during my residency because the pieces I exhibited at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum are part of a project called Sounds from the Swamp. It was a chance for me to go physically deeper into the project’s ideas in ways I did not expect. This kind of experience is happening to me all the time with my new hearing aids—I just discovered that my husband of twenty years swears like a sailor under his breath! But the swamp cacophony was truly unforgettable, and I long to return so that I might hear it again.

Elana Mann, Sounds from the Swamp, 2020, Outdoor installation at the Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX. Photo Credit: N. Baker.

Q?: Audience Interaction: How important is audience interaction in your work, and how do you encourage it? Do you feel it’s intuitive? Do you think there’s a wrong or right way to engage with your work? 

A: Participatory artworks have always been a part of my practice: I’ve made sculptures that amplify voices and/or create sound, built sonic architectural structures, and used mirrors that reflect a viewer’s body and mouth. My hearing disability has influenced my drive to create physical, bodily experiences for viewers, often involving the sensations of sound. I cannot control how audiences will interact with my work, and I always approach these participatory pieces with  deep curiosity about how people will engage. This allows me to conduct real-time research; as I observe how people interact with my work, I come up with new ideas. For example, I made my first hearing aid—a sculpture called a “histophone” — for a commission from the Getty Villa called Villa Murmurs (2014). I designed these objects to facilitate the sonic exploration of the museum. During the listening workshop, I witnessed how one participant used the sculpture as a megaphone, a way I never would have imagined. This inspired my piece Call to Arms (2016), which I have been using for the past eight years in performances, protests, and collaborative projects.

Elana Mann, Villa Murmurs, 2014, Commissioned by the Getty Villa Museum, Pacific Palisades, CA. Photo Credit: Jean-Paul Leonard.

Q?: Artistic Evolution: How has your artistic style or focus evolved over the years? 

A: It’s funny because I look at past work and think: “I am just doing the same thing, over and over.” I know many artists have similar experiences—your work continues to unfold over your lifetime, like peeling an onion. A few life changes have really altered my work, though. Early in my career, I was working predominantly with performance and video, alongside producing large-scale collaborative pieces with others. Becoming a mom really shifted my capacity to create this kind of work. My time is so compressed, I am physically exhausted, and I yearn for time alone. Although I still work performatively and collaboratively, making objects and images has become an increasing source of solace for me over the past decade.

More recently, my artwork has started to incorporate more and more text. This is influenced by my encounters with changes in communication technology, AI, social media, and a deep internal feeling that I am losing my grasp of language. Perhaps this is also impacted by my increased hearing loss. Regardless, I am noticing a strong desire to write and use letters and words in my art practice.

Q?: Playful Projects: Have you ever created a piece purely for fun or experimentation? What was it?  Do you think experimentation is an important part of your practice? Has it led to any breakthroughs?

A: All of my work emerges from processes of play and experimentation. Recently, I had the opportunity to work for free in a shop that does prototyping for start-ups. They have all kinds of high-tech machines —laser cutters, water jets, CNC machines, mills, and more. I had never used any of them, so I began to experiment with a laser jet machine. I programmed the machine to cut out text (sayings I had written, heard, or misheard) from paper, acrylic, and wood. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with these pieces, so I stuffed a bunch of them in the back of my car. Whenever I had a free minute, I would look at them or take them out to play with. One day, while waiting at a park to meet someone, I brought these pieces out and started experimenting with how they intercepted the sunlight, using the cut-out text to cast shadows on the pavement. This is how my current body of work, Shadow Poems (2024), was born.

Elana Mann, Shadow Poems, 2024, Archival photograph on paper, 19″ x 22″. Image Courtesy of Elana Mann.

Q?: Creative Inspiration: What non-artistic sources— books, music, films, nature—have inspired your work?

A: Some literary inspirations include: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer; Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Food and Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by Adrienne Maree Brown; and

Doppleganger: A trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein.

As far as music, I enjoy work by the composers Kate Soper, Raven Chacon, Sarah Hennies, Caroline Shaw and Pauline Oliveros.

Activism is also a critical part of my practice and I’ve found inspiration from The Occupy Movement, #Metoo movement, Extinction Rebellion, The Movement for Black Lives, and The Bread and Puppet Theater.

Even hiking in the San Gabriel Foothills and playing with my kids are great sources. 

Q?: Public Art:  How do you view the role of public art in communities? Can you share an example of a public art project you’ve been involved in and its impact on the community?

A: In 2013, I was invited by Side Street Projects —a community-based arts organization—to create a temporary public artwork at their headquarters in Northwest Pasadena. This part of Pasadena has been historically underserved and underrepresented. At that time, most of the Northwestern Pasadena population lived under the poverty level, with the majority of residents being immigrant and undocumented families. The project I created, called Listening as (a) Movement, focused on amplifying community voices through public artworks and events. I built three large-scale sonic sculptures in an open lot and collaborated with local groups for over a year to host a series of community events. This was deep, relationship-building work that expanded on the foundation of trust Side Street Projects had been nurturing for years. I attended neighborhood council meetings, reached out to every non-profit within a ten-to-fifteen-mile radius, and listened to the needs and concerns of individual stakeholders.

As a direct result of the project, new safety infrastructure (more street lamps!) was installed—something the neighborhood council had been trying to implement for years. The city also increased youth programming for Northwestern Pasadena, and Side Street Projects adjusted the way it commissioned future artworks. One of the project’s main participants, who was a teenager at the time, now works for the City of Pasadena as a planner.

Honestly, I am still amazed and proud of all the positive effects Listening as (a) Movement had on the neighborhood. When given the right support, partnership, and time to move at the speed of trust, community-based artwork can have that power. At the same time, I don’t expect or even want all my artworks to be functional or have quantifiable effects. If I did, I would stop being an artist and become a social worker, a community organizer, or a city planner. Poetry and mystery would be replaced by mission.

Elana Mann, Listening as (a) Movement, 2013, Commissioned by Side Street Projects, Pasadena, CA. Photo Credit: Jean-Paul Leonard.

Q?: Career Advice:  Can you describe a moment in your career when someone’s help was indispensable to your current success?  With that moment in mind, what advice would you give to aspiring artists? What was the best advice you received?

A: When I was ten, I met the artist José Clemente Orozco Farías, the grandson of the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Clemente (as he was known) was my summer camp counselor and the first professional artist I had ever met. He was full of warmth and schemes for artworks and pranks that he pulled off in collaboration with the older campers. I idolized him and thought he was a genius. We stayed in touch until his passing in 2021. It wasn’t a specific piece of advice Clemente gave me per se, but just witnessing how he lived his life—with curiosity, openness and joy— that I took as a model for how I wanted to be when I grew up.

Art is a tough career path, especially for women artists and quadruple that for moms. Although I graduated from art school at the top of my class, my college mentor actively discouraged me from continuing on as a professional artist.  At that stage of my life, I had very few role models. Last year, I was commissioned by artist Gala Porras-Kim to write a letter to young women artists for a project at REDCAT as part of “The Feminist Art Program (1970-1975): Cycles of Collectivity.” I imagined the advice I wanted to give myself when I was young and here is what I wrote (in shortened form) below:

Ten Tips for Young Womxn Artists

1.    Find your coven

2.    It must change

3.    Say “no” early and often

4.    Nurture patience

5.    Guard over your studio time zealously

6.    You are not a cow

7.    Welcome fallow times

8.    Mother earth cares for us and we must care for her in return  

9.    Look within, not without

10. You are not alone

Q?: Relationships:  Can you tell us about some of the important relationships you’ve forged over the years, and how they’ve been mutually beneficial?

Community is everything and keeps me afloat. I want to take this opportunity to give a big shout-out and massive love to the artists whose friendship has been so important to me in this period of coming to terms with my disability: Alison O’Daniel, Gabie Strong, Debra Scacco and Audra Woloweic. The intimate and frank conversations I have with these four women have grounded me. Their artworks and the ways they navigate the world—each in their own unique way—inspire me and everyone they touch.

A: Art Collection: We hear that you also collect art. Can you tell us about your collection, and why you feel it’s important to collect?

I collect art every chance I can. The pleasure of living with art you love cannot be understated. The artworks up in my home are more than merely decoration; they are spaces to think, objects that offer comfort, things that make me laugh, and bring me moments of deep feeling. 

I have a large collection of works by two of my close friends, John Burtle and Audrey Chan. In our living room, we have paintings by Anoka Faruqee, my graduate school mentor. More recently, I acquired a gorgeous work on paper by Patricia Yossen that I still need to frame. 

I love to support working artists who are hustling every day to survive and thrive—especially ones that are dear to my heart.

Q?: The Dream Exhibition: If you could exhibit your work anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

A: For the past year, I have been dreaming of a collaborative project with Japanese and Japanese American artists that would take place in Los Angeles and Los Alamos (USA) alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan). This project would be an excavation of a heavy family legacy: my grandfather, Dr. Leonard Pepkowitz, was a chemist who worked for the Manhattan Project and assisted in inventing the nuclear bomb. In my tradition (Judaism), you can always do repair work, even for events that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. I feel called to do restorative work around the massive destruction that Grandpa Len helped to unleash, and I hope to start work on this project in the near future.

Q?: The Pipeline:  Please share with our readers where they can see your work and let us know about any upcoming or current projects.

A: I am currently part of an exhibition titled A Nation Takes Place at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, MN, curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. Griffin. The show explores race, water, and the founding of the United States, presenting critical new narratives that provide vital antidotes to the rise of fascism, racism, ecocide and white supremacy in our country.  

A Nation Takes Place

curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. Griffin

August 21, 2024 – March 2, 2025

MMAM (Minnesota Marine Art Museum) 

Winona, MN

I am also participating in WILD UP!’s Democracy Sessions project at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which opens this week and runs from November 8-10. This multi-dimensional project examines the nature of democracy, and I was commissioned to create a score for a ‘zine produced in tandem with live performances and other events.

WILD UP!’s Democracy Sessions

November 8-10, 2024

MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art)

Los Angeles, CA

In March 2025, I will be presenting a show of new works called Shadow Poems II at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi in Rome, Italy, curated by Camilla Boemio. The exhibition will include new photographs and sculptures, as well as a community-based project with migrants who are seeking refuge in Rome.

Shadow Poems II

curated by Camilla Boemio

Opening March 2025

AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi 

Rome, Italy

The ART[MEMO] editorial team would like to thank Elana Mann for taking the time to share her incredible story and discuss her work.

To learn more about Elana Mann you can visit her website at www.elanamann.com and follow her on Instagram @elanamamma.

​Read More Elana Mann is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice, the embodiment of language, and deafness. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for the past twenty years she has researched the act of listening and everyday communication through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Mann’s rattles, trumpets, and … Continue reading “Elana Mann” 

Erick Medel, Floras para Mama (Mother’s day), 2024, Polyester thread on denim, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

When thinking of sewing and textiles, our first thoughts may be of large garment factories like those once prevalent in Downtown LA. These were often staffed by mostly women of color, usually immigrants from Latin America or other parts of the world, working tirelessly to produce our clothing. But the practice also evokes memories of matriarchs who carefully mend a pair of ripped pants, add a patch to a denim jacket, or make a dress for a sister’s quinceañera. Sewing can move beyond the utilitarian and into a place of care, of love. Every stitch reinforces the bonds of not just the fabric but also of the connections to things we hold dear. Every thread becomes an integral part of the fabric of our lives.  It’s in these everyday essential threads where Erick Medel sources inspiration for his elaborate sewn ‘paintings.’ 

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Installation Image. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

In his sixth career solo show— and first at Charlie James Gallery— titled “Vidas,” Medel presents a series of intimate portraits stitched with such painstaking detail that they resemble textured paintings from afar. His subject matter (except for three still-life flower arrangements that the artist said he did because “all painters have a still-life era”) portrays intimate moments within Medel’s community in Boyle Heights. The working-class people of color, along with their families and animals that make up the neighborhood, are documented with care and reverence that elevates and places importance on each subject. One such moment in the work titled Hold My Hand depicts a woman leading a child across the street. The tenderness and love of a mother for her child on their daily walk from school is felt in the scene, carried over into every stitch. Witnessing this simple moment between a parent and child becomes a document of care and community.

Erick Medel, Hold My Hand, 2024, Polyester thread on denim, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

While many types of art incorporate stitching — such as crochet, knitting, hand-embroidery, quilting, assemblage, and numerous forms of indigenous textile arts that are all important both culturally and historically— Medel’s approach is distinct. He enlists the sewing machine like a paintbrush to meticulously blend hues and create compositions, transcending genres to “make it new,” a point American critic and poet Ezra Pound argued that every artist should do. This unique approach is significant because Medel does not consider himself to necessarily be an artist in the traditional sense of ‘painter,’ and yet his technique borrows from and innovates off of so many elements from the painting medium that the designation is undeniable. 

Erick Medel, Frutas Frescas (Pride parade 2023), 2024, Polyester thread on denim, 24 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

Medel originally studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning an MFA in 2018, and only began exploring sewing as a medium of expression in 2020. He would take quick street-style snapshots with his phone (to remain more inconspicuous) and later used those photos as preliminary studies for his compositions sewn onto denim. His early work showed promise, though pales compared to this current body of work. The beautifully crafted early pieces used spaced-out lines that resembled sketches. Now, his new series is much tighter, with every inch of the surface covered with thread, feeling more like finalized ‘paintings.’ Subjects have shadows composed of multiple colors of threads layered together like thin linear brushstrokes to provide the perfect color and effect. Even cracks in the sidewalk are jagged and meticulously rendered. Every strand is carefully manipulated to show a range of textures, from a dog’s soft and tousled fur in Walk Around the Block to the realistic, colorful panels of a street vendor’s umbrella in Frutas Frescas (Pride parade 2023).

Erick Medel, Walk around the block, 2024, Polyester thread on denim, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

Medel’s admiration for the eastside of Los Angeles is palpable in his work. He emphasizes the sense of community and culture that permeates the neighborhood.  Here, public art seamlessly integrates into everyday life, with new murals appearing on nearly every corner. Pintor documents one of these murals and plays with a three-point perspective, making the mural feel like a scene straight from Guanajuato, Mexico.

Erick Medel, Pintor, 2024,Polyester thread on denim, 46 x 35 inches.Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

Detail of Pintor. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

An immigrant himself, Medel also noted how his neighbors, of all ages and backgrounds, embrace and support one another. He has observed how people come together for community events, much like those he has experienced in Mariachi Plaza. This very place inspired the stunning night 

Erick Medel, Sonidero Night, 2024, Polyester thread on denim, 48 x 54 in. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

scene depicted in the artist’s largest work of the show, Sonidero Night. Here, youthful couples dance happily while seniors look on and engage in conversations. In exceptional detail, single threads depict light emanating from the stage, gently grazing the figures below.  His personal connection to the scene further lends an emotional connection in the work inviting the viewer into his world. 

Detail of Sonidero Night. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

By thoughtfully depicting the everyday lives of his fellow residents, Erick Medel captures their essence and elevates their significance, ensuring their stories are visible and acknowledged within the larger canon of art — a crucial affirmation. His painterly approach to the sewing medium, pushes the genre to new limits while maintaining its deeply empathetic tradition that enriches the portrayal of his community.

We look forward to future evolutions of his artistic process.

Erick Medel, Smiley (La Favorita Bakery), 2024, Polyester thread on denim, 11 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

Erick Medel
“Vidas”
July 20 – August 31, 2024
Charlie James Gallery
961 Chung King Road Los Angeles, CA 90012

​Read More When thinking of sewing and textiles, our first thoughts may be of large garment factories like those once prevalent in Downtown LA. These were often staffed by mostly women of color, usually immigrants from Latin America or other parts of the world, working tirelessly to produce our clothing. But the practice also evokes memories of … Continue reading “Vidas” 

Circus of Books exterior and storefront window. Image courtesy of Mito Aviles @artteasela. Photo by Jimena Sandoval. 

Blazing pink like a Willy Wonka fantasy on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, Circus of Books is a historic gay bookstore and porn shop with a history stretching back to the 1960s. The store is the subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name about the older heterosexual Jewish immigrant couple who ran it for years as a mom-and-pop business, un-discriminatingly serving the gay community they found themselves in the midst of. 

The shop was repurposed and reopened in 2020 by director and drag queen Chi Chi LaRue, offering the surrounding gayborhood sex toys on the right side of the store and, on the left side— in an unlikely move—an art gallery. This June, in celebration of Pride, the gallery hosts a group show entitled “ART-TEASE,” curated by West Hollywood (WeHo) City Arts Commissioner Mito Aviles. The exhibition features a range of photographs, fashion pieces on mannequins, and an immersive room by WeHo artist SKÜT.

ChadMichael Morrisette, Storefront window installation detail. Image courtesy of Mito Aviles @artteasela. Photo by Jimena Sandoval.

The show begins in the storefront window with a display by multimedia and mannequin artist ChadMichael Morrisette, whose interest in the human form is apparent. This mixed-media display spotlights a collage flanked by two mannequins from the artist’s 2,500-strong custom collection, from which he keeps Hollywood’s wardrobe departments well-supplied. The collage features mainly magazine clippings of chiseled torso forms (read: hot men), and at first glance, it feels like an underwear ad for Calvin Klein. It isn’t until further inspection that the viewer realizes that, hidden in the PG-13 underwear ads, there are glimpses of the artist’s naughty and snarky streak, with fully nude figures joined by a werewolf and a naked group in sunglasses, giggling, and covering their genitals. The effect continually unfolds for the viewer, at first deeper into desire but then, surprisingly, into play.

The window display is street-facing in front of Vaseline Alley, the notoriously cruisy parking lot behind the building. Curator Aviles insinuates that the collaged images are a sort of menu of desire, in which each passerby can see their sensibilities reflected. The mannequins complete the assemblage effect, somehow both more natural and less attention-grabbing than the photo clippings. They are in conversation with each other, contesting the reality versus artificiality of both forms, and bringing to mind the proliferation of headless torsos on gay dating apps – the anonymity of a mannequin mirroring the anonymity of the gay closet, a space of possibility at once open to interaction and yet shut off from any identifying details.

Entering the space, the first things one sees are commercial products – this is a store, after all – a pop-up shop with a range of apparel from gay-owned business Frootloots, with hoodies that say things like “Alphabet Mafia” (a reference to the “alphabet soup” of LGBTQ+ identities) and “Don’t Fuck With the Gays.” Behind this table and a table of memoirs by drag queens, you’ll find where the “ART-TEASE” exhibition continues.

ART-TEASE Installation image. Image Courtesy of Brian Sonia-Wallace

First and most striking are pieces from trans-fashion designer Sylvio Hooper’s fantastic fashion collection, a range of gender-bending metallic underwear displayed on mannequins in front of a wall of photos and sketches. The fashion’s nod to BDSM styles like harnesses and expose, exaggerate a mix of genitalia rather than hide them. The chrome of the garments gives everything a futuristic flare, as if the viewer has entered a strip club on another planet.

Eric Scot, 6163, n.d. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.

On the wall behind the fashions, photographer Eric Scot’s series “First Touch” is a play of light and shadow between two figures in a variety of intimate positions that are more pornographic than tender. Yet each is lit almost to the point of abstraction, with the whole emotion of the piece coming from the curve of a back or the angle of a shadowy face. All of the sepia-tone photos are of the same two models, giving a sense that the series explores a single encounter. Next to the photograph display, artist Kevin Cortez presents a range of sketches and pastels of body parts, zooming in on potential loci of desire with a few thick, bold lines. These works resemble loose sketches  —like something from a queer figure drawing night—with the most successful works tending toward a minimalism that reveals the artist’s style and humor, like in After, where five bold lines suggest a softened penis.

Kevin Cortez, After, n.d., Charcoal on paper. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.

Photographer Christopher Garcia’s work, in contrast to the rest of the works on display, is an explosion of warm color. Young men are framed intimately and seemingly all too aware of the camera’s presence. Photographer VAGHO completes the collections on the walls with black-and-white natural landscapes in which inconspicuous nude figures lounge amid rocks and waves.

Christopher Garcia, Forever Young, n.d., Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.

VAGHO, Within, n.d., Archival print. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.

“The theme the gallery asked me to curate was ‘Pride,’” says curator Aviles, “but I didn’t want to do a historical show, I wanted to show what elevated erotic art could look like.”

ART-TEASE Installation image. Image Courtesy of Brian Sonia-Wallace.

The piece de resistance is the backroom, a deconstructed temple or shrine to Pride by local artist SKÜT, who started his career by creating the Grindr logo. Here, SKÜT displays a mix of sculpture, painting (including a version of his iconic skull logo dripping in rainbow paint), and multimedia sound/projection, creating a space of tranquility and meditation in the backroom (and I don’t need to tell you what you might normally expect to find in the backroom of a sex shop).

SKÜT, Unicorn Origami Kaleido, n.d., Acrylic resin with mixed media, Maquette. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.

SKÜT, SkullPop Kinetical, n.d., Acrylic and mixed media on an upcycled core. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website.

There is a pop-queer sensibility to SKÜT’s aesthetic, with the most impressive piece being a rainbow origami unicorn on a plinth, backed by spinning obelisks with, ostensibly, the “themes” of Pride, ranging from “MAGIC” to “SERENITY” to “SEX.” After emerging from the low-colored lights and the meditation of the shrine room, the rest of the shop feels overly bright and cluttered.

This concludes the “ART-TEASE” exhibition, but reflects only a fraction of the art in the store. On the other side of the counter, past the poppers but before the harnesses, a permanent art exhibition features playful works like ceramic vases in the shape of jockstraps and the requisite Keith Haring prints alongside beautifully lit cases of what might be sculptures but are actually just anal toys.  

Circus of Books shop interior. Image Courtesy of Brian Sonia-Wallace.

In truth, Haring feels omnipresent through much of the gallery and store. The 1980s New York street artist who died of AIDS in 1990 is enjoying something of a resurgence right now, with retrospective shows from The Broad to Luna Luna. His bold lines and cartoon characters are childish in a way that balances playfulness and raunchiness. Still, Haring was successful in part because he crossed the divide between high art worlds and commercial products, attracting criticism from the art world for his Pop Shop, which sold t-shirts, toys, posters, buttons, and magnets with his images as a way to create access for everyday people to own a piece of his work.

The artists featured in “ART-TEASE” are likewise casually commercial, spanning a range of experience levels, and with artwork price points ranging from $150 to $4,000. Homoerotic art has always been fringe, often even cheap. Their idea is that one might go into Circus of Books for a puphood and also come out with a pastel drawing of a man’s lip ring and mustache. There is a value, the gallery seems to assert, in art “for the masses.” 

Kevin Cortez, Muscle, n.d., Charcoal on paper. Image courtesy of Circus of Books website. 

Though tamer than, say, the illustrated gay sadomasochism of Tom of Finland, the art on display at “ART-TEASE” gives a portrait of desire, one that is tied to connection, to nature, and to play.

Just in time for Pride. Go for the poppers, leave with some art.

ChadMichael Morrisette, VAGHO, Christopher Garcia, Kevin Cortez, Sylvio Hooper, Eric Scot, and SKÜT
“ART-TEASE”
May 23 – June 30, 2024
The Gallery at Circus of Books – West Hollywood
8230 Santa Monica Blvd. West Hollywood, California 90046

​Read More Blazing pink like a Willy Wonka fantasy on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, Circus of Books is a historic gay bookstore and porn shop with a history stretching back to the 1960s. The store is the subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name about the older heterosexual Jewish immigrant … Continue reading “Art-Tease” 

Medical professionals forecast somewhere between 130 and 176 million people globally will have dementia in 2050, dramatically rising from 57.4 million in 2019, meaning that the chances of developing a neurodegenerative disorder or knowing someone with one are increasing at an alarming rate. “Preserved Memories”, a solo presentation of installation work by Aazam Irilian at Gallery 825, tells the stories of five people who suffered from dementia-type neurodegenerative disorders and the stories of those who loved them in life and kept their memories alive. This is Irilian’s second time showing this body of work, and as the rate of dementia diagnoses continues to rise, her passion project expands with more profound significance.

Installation view of “Preserved Memories” with Transitional Bodies and Shredded Mind Panels. Image courtesy of the artist.

Each of the five stories is told in four parts. Flanking five sculptures are five floor-to-ceiling drawings of the human body swallowed by synapses starting below the neck called Transitional Bodies (2022). Five Shredded Mind Panels (2022), distressed red canvas panels with holes mimicking a decaying brain, accompany the drawings. Finally, a hanging chain of family portraits printed on Duralar clear paper identifies the subjects of the central sculptures, but the photographs are altered, so each face gradually loses  clarity until it fades. Depending on the lighting and size of the gallery space that houses these works, the transparency of the paper translates the images onto the walls, further distorting these memories.

The dim overhead lights in Gallery 825’s small back room don’t quite project the images onto the walls, but what the room lacks in width, it makes up for in atmosphere. At certain angles, the portraits interact with the red panels, resembling stained glass. It feels more like a chapel  than a gallery.

Together, these accessory elements illustrate the drastic collapse of the brain’s internal workings that is characteristic of dementia-type neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Aazam Irilian, Detail of  Fading Memory Family Portraits, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

At the heart of “Preserved Memories” are the sculptures made from personal belongings that both distill and provide a window into the lives of their subjects. Clusters of salt crystals cling to the treasured items—Irilian grew these crystals in her studio to make assemblages from organic materials, found objects, and evolving technologies. In this body of work, salt acts as a natural preservative for the compiled belongings, and QR codes printed on a wall provide visitors with short audio recordings about each sculpture.

Aazam Irilian, Detail of Tea Time, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tea Time (2022) spotlights a mint green and cream-trimmed teacup and saucer resting on a lace doily. These belonged to the mother of Ellie B, who purchased the set during one of their secondhand shopping adventures together. Ellie’s mother ate biscuits with her afternoon tea every day. In the late stages of her memory loss, she still remembered this teacup and refused to drink from any other vessel.

Aazam Irilian, Detail of Soccer Player, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

Another sculpture, Soccer Player (2022), reflects Irilian’s late husband, who passed away in 2023. One of his great passions was soccer, having been a player, coach, and referee over the course of his life. For a time, he maintained the ability to play with their grandkids despite his diagnosis. Still, eventually, the progression of his dementia deteriorated his verbal communication and motor skills until he could no longer be active. However, in her recording of this story, Irilian recalls seeing his face light up when they watched practices at a local park and official matches on TV.

Here, the artist hangs his yellow referee jersey near a pair of clean black cleats and a soccer ball as if ready for the next game. For a moment, melancholy bends to bittersweet comfort; seeing his worn-in and well-maintained gear, knowing he did what he loved, one feels Irilian’s husband must have had a happy life.

The initial motivation behind this exhibition was Irilian’s husband—how she loved him for many years as both wife and caregiver—and how they respectively dealt with their impending losses. But this experience of feeling people slip through our fingers is lamentably common.

Installation view of “Preserved Memories” with the artist at center.  Image courtesy of the artist.

Understanding this, an integral part of the show is visitor response: on a table in a corner of the room are blank notecards for guests to write down memories of loved ones who suffered from these diseases. Irilian incorporates new cards into the installation by hanging them beside the entrance. On the table, there is also a sign with a phone number to call for those who may prefer to share their stories aloud.

Written on one card, a message from someone named Chris concludes with:

“To see yours + your husband’s story represented so beautifully here is yet another reminder of cherishing what we have while we have it and of holding onto the love and the memories—in the end, everything fades for all of us. Except perhaps, for love. And perhaps, that’s enough.”

Installation view of the message wall. Photo by Caroline Vasquez.

As we age, we face decisions regarding our bodies, minds, legacies, and possessions. Who will take care of us? What will survive us? Will there be anything left to show of our lives?

“Preserved Memories” demonstrates how multiple methods of memory keeping can and should exist. Where photographs may wither, sculptures stand firm. When the written word fails, recorded voices can carry. The people memorialized in the sculptures once chose their items, and though their caregivers cannot keep every scrap of someone’s life, they can choose to continue imbuing meaning into certain objects as a representation of their loved ones.

Of course, people are not only their possessions; we know each other in different ways. Caregivers will remember their loved ones through these objects, and we, as visitors, will remember Irilian’s beautiful tribute to those who continue to be loved.

Aazam Irilian, Detail of Prayer, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Aazam Irilian
“Preserved Memories”
May 4 – June 7, 2024
Gallery 825
825 N. La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles,CA 90069

​Read More Medical professionals forecast somewhere between 130 and 176 million people globally will have dementia in 2050, dramatically rising from 57.4 million in 2019, meaning that the chances of developing a neurodegenerative disorder or knowing someone with one are increasing at an alarming rate. “Preserved Memories”, a solo presentation of installation work by Aazam Irilian at … Continue reading “Preserved Memories” 

On rare occasions, there are gallery exhibitions that make a strong statement—either politically, culturally, or both— capturing the zeitgeist of a moment, and sparking a myriad of conversations. Perhaps the work is by an artist whose star is quickly rising or one whose art is so striking you know that their work will be included in future textbooks about a particular art historical movement. Simply put, there are exhibitions where you walk in, you know you are experiencing a historical moment. “At the Edge of The Sun” in the Deitch Gallery LA is one such exhibit.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White

Part of what makes this show so profound is how it came to be. Twelve Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x artists —Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Michael Alvarez, Mario Ayala, Karla Ekaterine Canseco, rafa esparza, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Gabriela Ruiz, Ozzie Juarez, Maria Mara, Jaime Muñoz, Guadalupe Rosales, and Shizuoka Saldamando—all of whom met and connected over the last decade, were given free rein to curate a group show that encapsulated their individual and communal stories. Much of the work expands on ideals from the inception of the Chicano Art Movement, an offshoot of the larger cultural Chicano movement in the United States. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican-Americans sought to challenge and resist the societal hierarchy and stereotypes to build cultural autonomy, record their history, and celebrate their experiences that were often rejected in mainstream culture. All of the sixty-two artworks included in “At the Edge of The Sun” strongly speak to different elements of each Chicano/a/x artist’s personal and cultural identity while also elevating their everyday experiences. Collectively, their work transcends being a mere historical record, and instead elevates it to a place that says my experience matters, my experience is beautiful.

rafa esparza, Trucha, 2024, Acrylic on adobe and steel,123 x 145 x 156 inches (overall), 60 x 48 x 3 inches (each). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo by Joshua White.

One notable work by performance and physical artist rafa esparza (the artist intentionally uses lowercase while spelling their name) is a mural titled, Trucha. This large-scale painting of acrylic on adobe and steel features a male Latino figure lying on their stomach gazing at the viewer from bed. The subject’s eyes are cold yet contain the slightest tinge of softness when you study them for long enough. But as the Chicano script style tattoo of “trucha” (translating loosely as vigilant, both as an action and a way of being) on the subject’s arm implies, you would not mistake their eyes as vulnerable. Symbols of strength continue on their sprawling back tattoo depicting conquistadors slaughtering indigenous people. The symbolism of this alone is quite powerful but pairing it with flanking images of the Mesoamerican god Xipe-Totec, along with various books running the gamut of Aztec accounts of history, post-colonial theory, as well as global colonialism and oppression, you have a complex image that can be unwrapped in numerous ways. In one complex reading, you could explore the ‘conflict of existing’ within the context of colonialism as many (not all) have both European and indigenous blood. Yet, while grappling with this, they also fight to detangle the ties colonization has on suppressing their indigenous roots — cultivating and celebrating the positive, while ardently rejecting the violence and attempts of cultural genocide. Like the tattoo on the man’s back, history is not forgotten and still lived with today.

Karla Ekaterine Canseco, Las profundidades del asfalto,entre vida y petrificación. Perra que nada en petróleo. / The depths of asphalt, between life and petrificación. Perra that swims in petroleum., 2024, Steel, bronze, stucco and motor oil,93 x 40.5 x 77 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White

The exhibition becomes especially reflective when artists incorporate objects and iconography that are common to the cultural experience of many working-class people of color, and re-envision them into higher planes of being. One of the strongest examples is the mixed-media sculptures by Karla Ekaterine Canseco. Canseco takes various elements from an auto-mechanic shop and transforms them into otherworldly dark dreamscapes. One such piece titled Las profundidades del asfalto,entre vida y petrificación. Perra que nada en petróleo. / The depths of asphalt, between life and petrificación. Perra that swims in petroleum., starts with a cherry picker engine hoist as its foundation, with sharp metal flames rising up its back and across the arm, as a chain lowers a bronze dog into an oil pool. Dogs are often considered to be spirit guides, so placing one into a Dante’s Inferno-esque environment protects them on their journey into the emotional depths. But just as the chain of the cherry picker —symbolically representing culture or family—-can lower you into the pits, it can also pull you back out. Both the source and cure for our trauma can come from the same place giving these symbols a dual meaning.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.

Heading into the backroom, there are multiple installations by Jaime Muñoz, Alfonso Gonzales Jr., and Mario Ayala that in addition to providing some of the strongest cultural commentary, create the most immersive experience of the entire show.

Jaime Muñoz, Ad Space, 2024, Acrylic, paper, and flocking on wood panel, 72 x 60 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White

Jaime Muñoz’s work deals with themes of transportation, labor, technology, and advertising, exploring how they intersect now and in the future. Two of the immaculately designed paintings resemble the back of Big Rig truck doors. One such example, Ad Space, features soft yet vibrant colors depicting a collage of images including Jesus on the cross and decals of Japanese nectar drinks that the truck is potentially hauling. Truck door hinges adorn the painting’s edges accompanied by the all too familiar “How Am I Driving?” a cracked bumper sticker with the added lines, “How Does an Engine Even Work?” and “How Can a Loving God Cause Such Agony.” All of this is painted across a diamond grid pattern that appears as if it were assembled on tiles. When viewed through the lens of working-class people who are often the most impacted by the machinations of commerce, these larger themes of facing suffering feel especially poignant. We often look towards God for solace, but what do we do when there is none?

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Injured?, 2024, Oil, enamel latex, dirt, gel medium, LED lightbox, on wood panels, and canvas, Dimensions variable.Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.

Detail, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Injured?, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.

Another rather large installation titled, Injured, creates a wall you might find in any South or East Los Angeles neighborhood. Saturated with recreations of real ads from insurance agencies and injury attorneys, they are familiar examples of marketing strategies to communities of color in the greater LA area. One such ad is of the San Gabriel Valley lawyer James Wang, who has long been part of an urban legend claiming Wang is the real-life Better Call Saul-style character. Another ad for Adriana’s Insurance agency takes on new meaning after becoming a cult meme through the Instagram page Foos Gone Wild. It’s conversations like these that the work incites, both deeply critical as well as humorous, and that elevate everyday experiences to levels of art.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist(s) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo by Charles White.

It would be immensely easy to discuss each of the twelve artists articulating how profound their work is in both the context of “At the Edge of the Sun” and the larger Chicano Art Movement. It is also important to note that many of these artists are already in the permanent collections of major museums such as LACMA, MOCA, SFMOMA, among others. This show, and its forthcoming book with an introduction by Dr. Rose Salseda and interviews from the artists, will no doubt become important artifacts to learn about the forefront of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x art from the 2020s. Expect to hear a lot more about each of these artists for years to come.

Group Photo, Photo by Estevan Oriol

At the Edge of the Sun
Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Michael Alvarez, Mario Ayala, Karla Ekaterine Canseco, rafa esparza, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Gabriela Ruiz, Ozzie Juarez, Maria Mara, Jaime Muñoz, Guadalupe Rosales, and Shizuoka Saldamando
February 24–May 4, 2024
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery
925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles

​Read More On rare occasions, there are gallery exhibitions that make a strong statement—either politically, culturally, or both— capturing the zeitgeist of a moment, and sparking a myriad of conversations. Perhaps the work is by an artist whose star is quickly rising or one whose art is so striking you know that their work will be included … Continue reading “At the Edge of the Sun” 

A map is a drawn representation of space, making sense of and setting limits to a given area. The earth’s terrain is charted through its natural barriers, carved and reshaped by mountains and rivers, as well as its man-made artificial borders used to enforce territory. Similarly, the human body can also be thought of as a map when we describe neural ‘pathways’ in the brain and use ‘body mapping’ in psychology to work through lived experiences, or in neuroscience as a form of conscious, corrective physical therapy. In her recent exhibition “Imaginary Cartography”, Marthe Aponte explores these ever-shifting boundaries between nature and the body, while embracing time as a marker to map change throughout her career.

The twenty paintings in “Imaginary Cartography” span over fifty years, before Lancaster-based Marthe Aponte even considered herself an artist. She began her professional art career in 2010 but made art throughout her life while in France, Venezuela, and the United States. Aponte’s early work was primarily acrylic on canvas or wood—pairing bright colors with craft materials, such as mesh and beads, or building up scenes using tiny dots, akin to Pointillism. These dot paintings are a cousin to the picoté style that Aponte is most known for, an intricate 13th-century French folk art tradition of meticulously piercing holes in paper with a needle and awl. Yet where there are several dot paintings in the show at the Palmdale Playhouse, there are no picoté artworks.

Marthe Aponte, Woman in the Forest, n.d., Ink on paper. Photo by Edwin Vasquez.

One of the oldest pieces on view is “Woman in the Forest” (n.d.), inspired by a drawing she made in Venezuela in the 1970s. A female figure lies on the ground beneath a grove of trees, and a couple of trunks blend into the solid black of the figure’s lower body and the side of her head. Other trees are given life with delicate lines and empty white space. Throughout her career, the human form and nature have been Aponte’s two primary subjects as she believes people are not separate from nature.  This painting, and the more recent “Mapping the Body” (2021), a horizontal red piece featuring another figure bonded with trees, interpret this literally.

Installation View of Mapping the Body, 2021 (top). Image Courtesy of Palmdale Playhouse

In “Mapping the Universe” (2021), Aponte portrays a humanoid figure with no identifying features other than a turtle on its face and arms and legs dismembered at the joints. This figure resides in an abstracted intersection on top of parallel vertical lines like roads, and on its torso and legs are tubular protrusions resembling side streets, all connected by a wavy dotted line that ‘drives’ our eye around the composition. While the canvas edges may bear physically defined borders, the cropped appendages imply continuation beyond those boundaries: too long to be contained. Growing up, the artist described feeling as if her body continued past her limbs, infinitely. “Sometimes when we pay attention,” Aponte said when I interviewed her in early March, “we connect with a dimension that is beyond space…and then, all of a sudden, you feel like you are in touch [with the natural world].”

Marthe Aponte, Mapping the Universe, 2021, Acrylic on canvas. Photo by Edwin Vasquez.

During our conversation, Aponte admitted she was at a crossroads with her career. In part, she revisited past work to view it in a new light, as many of these paintings have never been shown or have languished in her garage since their last appearance. Yet a longer discussion revealed the artist’s hyperconsciousness of her changing body. Recent hospital visits and weak spells have made plain the reality of aging, and although she spent much of last year exhibiting her recent work across Southern California, she questioned her productivity and relevance in the art world. These days, she worries whether she has the strength to do picoté again, or if she does, that the quality will not be like before she fell ill.

Marthe Aponte, Mapping a Maze.  Photo by Edwin Vasquez.

Modern society demands forward progression, discovery, and newness of artists. To pause or return to a previous point is viewed as a waste of time. “Imaginary Cartography” pushes back against that idea and instead forges emotional pathways into Aponte’s autobiographical past for viewers to traverse. Her metaphorical maps of the human form and nature are not about exchange, acquisition, or possession in the material sense of map making, but rather they chart the psychological states of one’s body to reflect upon our lived experiences.

Marthe Aponte, Sacred Flowers, n.d., Acrylic on canvas. Image Courtesy of Palmdale Playhouse.

After a similar conversation with her friend, CSUN art professor Betty Brown, Aponte has continued to create dot paintings like the ones on view in this exhibition. While painting is relatively faster than picoté, she still cherishes the repetitive work of mark-making.  By returning to her roots, Aponte is embracing a tried and tested familiar path in her practice to move forward. Considering life’s natural cycles, where every end heralds a new beginning,  “Imaginary Cartography” accurately documents the conclusion of one journey while widening the path for the next.

Marthe Aponte
Imaginary Cartography
Feburary 29 – March 28, 2024
Palmdale Playhouse
38334 10th St. East
Palmdale, CA 93550

​Read More A map is a drawn representation of space, making sense of and setting limits to a given area. The earth’s terrain is charted through its natural barriers, carved and reshaped by mountains and rivers, as well as its man-made artificial borders used to enforce territory. Similarly, the human body can also be thought of as … Continue reading “Imaginary Cartography” 

Learning about new and emerging contemporary artists can be daunting for the average person who doesn’t regularly attend gallery openings to mingle with artists, collectors, and the occasional celebrity, or discuss the latest art trends while exuding an equal level of aloofness and coolness. To do this in the first place, you would need to know about the plethora of galleries and obscure artist-run spaces that exist all across the sprawling landscape that is Los Angeles—and beyond. This is where art fairs can bridge the gap, providing a large survey of what is currently happening in cities throughout the art world today, all condensed into one accessible space.

For those unfamiliar, an art fair is similar to any other type of convention, where you generally have various vendors —in this case art galleries— erecting booths to display or sell their goods. In an art fair, each booth houses a different local, national, or international gallery that brings a sampling of art from the artists they represent. Los Angeles’s Art Week runs from February 26th to March 3rd hosting three major art fairs that run concurrently across the city. There is Frieze in Santa Monica, which is the largest and most commercial, SPRING/BREAK in Culver City, a curatorial and installation-driven theme, and, arguably the more interesting, Felix Art Fair in Hollywood. What sets Felix apart from most other art fairs is that it inhabits various rooms and floors throughout the historic Roosevelt Hotel. Not only does the locale allow for each gallery to present their work in a fully separate and enclosed space—enabling their installations to take center stage—but it also allows the gallery to display the works in a more natural setting. For potential buyers, seeing a piece of art on a static white wall next to a series of other pieces is one thing, but being able to see how a painting looks and feels in a living space can provide more context, and become something you can imagine living with.

Leo Mock, We Stand Surrounded by a Million Years at M+B Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen.

Walking into Felix is a true LA experience. On the ground level, the cabana rooms encircling the pool are transformed into gallery spaces, all labeled with the gallery name and their home city. This curated experience is further extended to rooms on the 11th and 12th floors of the towers. Here the unexpected is to be expected with hallways adorned with paintings or a sculpture jutting out from the ceiling. Bathrooms have artworks displayed above the toilet, or even featured in the shower. You may find a sculpture placed in the middle of a bed as if casually inviting the viewer to lay down with it—though to be clear, unlike the lady who happened to lay down next to it for a selfie on the preview day, you should not. It is this contextualizing, as well as clever re-contextualizing of real residential spaces that allows the art to take on new life. Each work becomes something that is lived with and experienced rather than something just to hoard away in vaults only to be acquired for its potential resale value. Even if you are not someone who has the means, or interest to collect art on this scale, Felix is a great and fairly affordable immersive introduction into the contemporary art scene.

As for the artworks themselves, there are quite a few galleries that have some intriguing and thought-provoking works on view. Here are a few of the Los Angeles-based galleries that had especially strong showings:

RESIDENCY ART GALLERY

Will Maxen, Untitled (Fourth of July) at Residency Art Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen

Residency Art Gallery based out of Inglewood, California had one of the more inspiring exhibits by a solo artist. Featuring a selection of new paintings by Will Maxen in a series titled, “I’ll Be With You As You Go,” Maxen uses both personal and historical memories as well as his mixed-race background to examine the tensions of modern American life. The portraits, based on archival photos, are at once quite personal and yet are entirely universal. Details are both blurred and sharp depending on the feature with muted colors disconnecting the ghost-like subjects from reality and placing them between a shapeless dream and memory. Although

Will Maxen, My Hands Shake When I Try to Write Small (top) and Untitled (West Walk) (bottom) at Residency Gallery.

made to resemble photographs, at times they appear more like distorted film negatives having bled all over the canvas to reveal something more about the human experience. Overall, the portraits are some of the most beautiful works on display at Felix and should not be missed.

CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY

Erick Medel, Mom con Spiderman at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen

The Charlie James Gallery out of Chinatown had arguably the most compelling and cohesive group presentation in the entire fair. Composed of artworks from primarily North American POC artists, the work explores themes of identity and culture in powerful and inspiring ways. Textile works such as Erick Medel’s embroidered thread paintings offer a tender examination of life in the Boyle Heights community. The sheer level of artistry and skill it takes to sew each portrait and still-life are apparent in the emotive softness and care of every stitch. One scene of a mother walking down the street with her child dressed in a Spider-Man costume is a snapshot that embodies both youthful innocence and the loving nature of motherhood. In Danie Cansino’s multiple portrait and landscape paintings on striped serape fabric, we are introduced to strong statements of identity, resilience, and cultural pride. The serape fabric holds so much cultural context and at the same time hosts itself as a canvas for vibrant, almost photo-realistic subjects. One example titled Bloodline, is a powerful

Danie Cansino, Bloodline at Charlie James Gallery. Photo by Zachary C. Jensen

self-portrait of Cansino sitting nude while staring directly at the viewer. Her body is covered in tattoos with her legs as canvases for Chicano portraits and prominent indigenous line work on her face— all a detailed history lesson inscribed on her body. Keep an eye out for future shows at this gallery.

M+B GALLERY

Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Chante Fantome de Bob at Photo by Zachary C. Jensen

The M + B Gallery based in West Hollywood had another well-designed group show with works by Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Erna Mist, and Matthew Rosenquist. Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and now living in Paris, created portraits of colorful nightmare-like creatures with CHANTE FANTÔME DE BOB, LES ÂMES DANSERONT, LES MORTS SE RÉVEILLERONT ET MON TOUR ARRIVERA as a highlight of this collection. A large oil on canvas, it features a multi-faced creature with numerous arms playing the guitar, while smaller ghostly creatures hang on and around it. The painting, while dark in subject matter and palette, also offers a celebratory interpretation of the afterlife that many cultures embrace. Nearby, a playful series of wooden painted sculptures by Matthew Rosenquist feature hipster-esque characters. Posed in various aspects of everyday life, they are arranged on the patio of the gallery’s hotel room. By placing them close together, and in the center of a crowded space, these sculptures meld into the fair crowds while also

Matthew Rosenquist, (left) White Jeans (center) Lunchin’ WIth Lydia (right) Self Portrait at M+B Gallery

Matthew Rosenquist, Texting in A Tartan Skirt at M+B Gallery

forming their own group. In Texting in a Tartan Skirt, we witness an examination of our modern attachment to cell phones complete with the immobile moments of obliviousness we all experience with our screens.

SEA VIEW GALLERY

Sea View Gallery out of the Mount Washington neighborhood has a wonderfully eclectic booth that runs the gamut of artistic mediums and styles, while still embracing Felix’s domestic setting. The functional reclaimed wooden sculptures by San Francisco artist Nik Gelormino tie in shapes found in nature to create exquisite designs that can be both admired and used. Two such examples are the seashell stool made of naturally fallen cedar, and the multi-layered flat dove sculpture made of hard-carved redwood that doubles as a coffee table. Next, Canadian artist Jane Corrigan’s textured oil paintings depicting cartoonish scenes of adolescence, capture the whimsical nature of young adulthood while also thoughtfully representing the growing sense of anxiety that coming-of-age can bring.

Jane Corrigan, End Days, 2024. Image courtesy of Sea Shell Gallery

In Days End, her soft pastel palette paired with the serene sun setting behind a tree provides a warm comfort. Yet the skeletal form reclining beneath the tree tempers that feeling, and quickly brings realizations about the finality of summer, life, or journey. While many of the gallery spaces at Felix could be consumed in a few short minutes, Sea View’s installation is well worth a few extra moments of your time. 

NICODIM GALLERY

Installation view of painting by Emily Ferguson at Nicodim Gallery

Lastly, the Nicodim Gallery out of Downtown Los Angeles is always a pleasure to visit. One standout portrait by Emily Ferguson installed in the bathroom has perhaps an unintentional mirrored view as you approach causing the subject to look away from themself and made for an intriguing installation.

On any normal day in Los Angeles, it would be nearly impossible to view all of these galleries in a single day, let alone see works from London, Paris, New York, and Turin all in one place. Art fairs like Felix grant casual viewers and collectors alike the opportunity to globally gallery-hop in an afternoon.

Felix Art Fair
February 28 – March 3 2024
The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
7000 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028

​Read More Learning about new and emerging contemporary artists can be daunting for the average person who doesn’t regularly attend gallery openings to mingle with artists, collectors, and the occasional celebrity, or discuss the latest art trends while exuding an equal level of aloofness and coolness. To do this in the first place, you would need to … Continue reading “Felix Art Fair 2024 Edition” 

Drawing inspiration from film and art history, Karyn Lyons’ wistful, evocative oil paintings of teenage girlhood are charged with coming-of-age romanticism. In her first solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, “The End of the Night,” New York-based Lyons presents a suite of intimately scaled, semi-autobiographical oil paintings that capture the tenderness, mischievousness, and enchantment of a bygone adolescence.

Karyn Lyons, The Afternoon in August, 2023, Oil on linen, 23 x 29 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

Lyons’ redheaded protagonist exists in an East Coast prep school fever dream. She wanders the halls of a lavish home and dons designer labels but with a decidedly unaffected air that belies her privilege. Her apathetic expressions and slouchy posture hint at the tedium of this chapter of her life as if she knows all too well that she’s playing a waiting game on the cusp of adulthood for bigger and better things right around the corner. In The Afternoon in August (2023), the girl lays alone in a grassy field, kicking her sneaker-clad feet, gazing into the horizon, and seemingly yearning for an inscrutable something. Lyons cleverly captures the universal feeling of waiting for your childhood to end with a mixture of apprehension and exhilaration.

Karyn Lyons, The Bright Midnight, 2023, Oil on linen, 30 23 ½ inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

Karyn Lyons, A Crush on Byron, 2023, Oil on linen, 18 x 22 ¼ inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

At the same time, revealing a multifariousness unequaled by anyone who has never been a teenage girl, she is driven to explore new, grown-up experiences. In many scenes, the backdrop is littered with loose matchsticks, cigarette boxes, and liquor bottles. In others, she kisses a dark-haired boy in varying states of undress, her first sexual forays happening under the watchful eyes of a recurring feline friend and beaming full moon, in The Bright Midnight (2023), or a stern 19th-century portrait, in A Crush on Byron (2023).

Karyn Lyons, Mystery Down the Hall, 2023, Oil on linen, 22 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

To counteract the mature themes and emphasize this transitional state of her subject’s life, Lyons inserts reminders of youth and mischief. In Mystery Down the Hall (2023), the girl wields a flashlight and, with her shoelace childishly askew, prepares to investigate a dark hallway a la Nancy Drew, signaling girlish curiosity and the thrill of the unknown at that ripe age. Lyons also carefully fills out her world with sentimental and lighthearted emblems of adolescence — a baggy Mickey Mouse tee, a copy of “Wuthering Heights” more than likely assigned as summer reading, a cup of lemon Italian ice eaten with a flat wooden spoon, a red solo cup sipped from while curled up on the ground, a bedroom wall poster of David Bowie. Lyons masterfully colors the titillating gray area between being a kid at heart and wanting to be seen as so much more. She reminds viewers that they, too, once ached for new experiences and daydreamed about who they might become. Perhaps, as in the cheekily titled Dream Date (2023), they even fantasized about dating Bowie.

Karyn Lyons, Detail of Dream Date, 2023, Oil on linen, 17 ¾ x 14 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

Karyn Lyons, The Dominion of Night, 2024, Oil on linen, 53 x 73 ¾ inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

In The Dominion of Night (2024), the only work that features the protagonist from a distance, the artist provides a voyeuristic view of the girl through her bedroom window; the scene is suspended in a disconcerting twilight with her house shrouded in shadows under a curiously clear daytime sky. The scene holds up a mirror to Lyons’ practice of painting herself as a teenager from the outside looking in and highlights the disorienting experience of reflecting on your own childhood with a breadth of understanding your younger self couldn’t even begin to fathom. 

Karyn Lyons, The Lemon Italian Ice, 2023, Oil on linen, 22 ¼ x 18 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photograph by Mason Kuehler.

Woven throughout her work, Lyons embraces longstanding artistic traditions such as her renditions of gallery walls, chiaroscuro shades of light and dark, and framing scenes as though they are vignettes of Sofia Coppola film stills. These aesthetic choices speak to the classical and universal nature of youth and innocence.      

Overall, Karyn Lyons’ compositions smolder with surrealist undercurrents that make her pieces feel timeless and magical, an homage to the resonance of girlhood memories.

Karyn Lyons
The End of the Night
January 27 – March 2, 2024
Anat Ebgi
6150 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Installation Views by Matthew Kroening.

​Read More Drawing inspiration from film and art history, Karyn Lyons’ wistful, evocative oil paintings of teenage girlhood are charged with coming-of-age romanticism. In her first solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, “The End of the Night,” New York-based Lyons presents a suite of intimately scaled, semi-autobiographical oil paintings that capture the tenderness, mischievousness, and enchantment of a … Continue reading “The End of Night” 

The meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, in 2023 has commanded our attention. From its popularity on platforms like ChatGPT—capable of generating and editing text with a few simple commands—to headlines of Hollywood on strike to renegotiate contracts based on AI’s newfound capabilities, to even President Biden’s recent executive order ensuring the “safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence,” it’s evident that AI is infiltrating more of our daily lives. And the art world is no exception. Amidst this sea of confusing terminology, news, and hyperbole, artists have raised legitimate concerns about copyright issues, especially as AI learns from freely-scraped web images and produces “artworks” that mimic their artistic style. Despite this apparent threat, AI also presents opportunities to artists who seek to explore its capabilities as a tool and teachable assistant—and for Los Angeles-based Argentine artist Analia Saban, AI presented the next logical step in her artistic practice.

In Saban’s latest solo exhibition, Synthetic Self, which took place at both Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, she presented an insightful investigation blending both digital abilities and natural materials. An ambitious exhibition that concluded last month, it featured sixty-three new works that spanned across sculpture, painting, tapestry, and clever tech-centric mixed media. Deeply philosophical, the show eloquently questioned and reframed the role of an artist in an ever-expanding technological and AI world.

Analia Saban, detail of Circuit Board with Deliberate Lines #4, 2023. Ink on ash burl wood. 72 x 72 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Sprüth Mager

When describing her show in an Instagram reel, Saban expressed, “It’s a show about: What does it mean to be an artist these days? What’s the creative act and what are our gestures that really count?” After traversing through both galleries, viewers witnessed how this very thought process unfolded as the complete essence of the term “artist” manifested in an exhaustive selection of media, methods, and materials including linen, copper, stone, wax, graphite, wood, oil and computer parts. Throughout both exhibition spaces, viewers were encouraged to discern and question which elements were “synthetic,” by the artist’s hand, or something entirely novel.  The artworks presented in the show addressed Saban’s role as a creative force and showcased her commitment to a dual approach to this new technology, utilizing it as both a tool to create elements of her works and, at times, treating AI like an apprentice by teaching it in-depth explanations of how to create various works of art.

Analia Saban, Flow Chart (Painting a Painting), 2023. Oil stick on encaustic paint on canvas. 72 x 128 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Sprüth Magers.

One such work was Flow Chart (Painting a Painting) (2023). In this work we encounter a sprawling blackboard-inspired canvas filled from edge to edge with writings, directional arrows, and sketches in white.  As the title suggests, the artist has meticulously designed a comprehensive flowchart detailing the steps a potential artist might undertake to begin and complete a painting. Careful consideration is given to elaborate on each element such as comprehensive lists of pigments, illustrations of various brush shapes, and detailed diagrams on how to draw a hand, eye, and skull. One particularly intriguing step involved a signature, where the artist offered seven variations of her name before culminating in a circled “END.” Curiously, this exhibition marks the first time Saban has incorporated drawing into her work. This emphasis on mark-making shows Saban considering her physical role as an artist where she ultimately created an analog artwork to train a future digital AI in the art form of painting.

Another standout painting was Face Mapping (2023), which included 150 photos of the artist’s face at different angles. What set it apart was the deliberate decision not to digitally alter the errors and inconsistencies present in each photo before printing; instead, they are left intact. Many images on the grid bear notes to “remove hair” or feature scribbled-out backgrounds and again emphasize the artist’s hand. This work also served as a study or training tool to craft a “deep fake” of the artist’s likeness, Prompt Drawing: Deep Fake (2023), which feels reminiscent of a 1980’s school portrait with three floating heads of different sizes all gazing to the left. Together, both works question and challenge how we think about, categorize, and consider art. Can this still be considered a self-portrait with so much input from AI? Is a self-portrait only about capturing the likeness? Or can it be acceptable for Saban to simply ask the image generator to craft all her self-portraits? The number of questions raised by these works is dizzying.

Analia Saban, Face Mapping, 2023. Graphite on encaustic paint on panel. 48 x 73 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Sprüth Magers.

A great analogy of thinking about AI’s role in Saban’s work is within the constructs of a traditional artist’s workshop. During the Renaissance, inexperienced youths—almost always young boys—would take an apprenticeship under a master artist to learn the trade of painting, metalwork, or sculpting. They would learn the basics, such as preparing the support structures, or grinding and mixing pigments, and would eventually participate in the creation of a finished work. Customarily, the master would sketch or design how the work would look, and then the workshop full of other artists would complete the masterpiece under his watchful eye. One famous example would be Andrea del Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ (c.1475), where his young pupil, Leonardo da Vinci, beautifully painted and rendered one of the kneeling angels.

In the context of Saban’s exhibition, the title implies that she views her artificial “apprentice” not as a separate entity, but as a “synthetic” extension of her own artistic practice.  Consider it more like training a craftsman for her workshop rather than training the next Leonardo. However, the fact that she does train AI like an assistant or apprentice prompts even more questions: Will AI ever be accepted as an artist in its own right? Can art only be made by humans? Should art only be made by humans? Do any of these questions even have answers yet?

At the end of her interview clip, Saban prophetically asks: “What is the point about technology right now?” I believe she alluded to an answer in her show: Like every other tool we’ve created, it should be used while also thoughtfully considering the impact it will have on ourselves, society, and the environment.

Synthetic Self was a very timely exhibition that grappled with both the anxiety and potential of AI. It fostered critical questions about the evolution of art media and tools as well as the complication of technology’s role in creating art and how the artist can and should fit into this equation.

Analia Saban
Synthetic Self
September 14 – Oct 28, 2023
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
1010 N Highland Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Sprüth Magers
65900 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Installation view by Jeff McLane.

​Read More The meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, in 2023 has commanded our attention. From its popularity on platforms like ChatGPT—capable of generating and editing text with a few simple commands—to headlines of Hollywood on strike to renegotiate contracts based on AI’s newfound capabilities, to even President Biden’s recent executive order ensuring the “safe, secure, … Continue reading “Synthetic Self” 

What is revealed behind the fold? What is hinted at, but goes unseen? This is the power of art; to make something in our minds beyond what’s on the page.

Hank Ehrenfried’s work — on display in Los Angeles for the first time as the new Vardan Gallery’s entrée into the art world — is a pared-down photorealism, painting after painting of crumpled collages thumb-tacked to the walls, as if the artist had chosen to frame and immortalize the contents of his pockets. It’s a tribute to ephemera, partial and redacted portraits of a man’s taste — textual, sexual, stylistic, and artistic.

Installation of “Under the Impression.” Courtesy of Vardan Gallery.

I visited Ehrenfried’s postage-stamp studio in Brooklyn three months before his Los Angeles opening. It’s in an unassuming warehouse subdivided with 8-foot walls to create a cell-block of studio spaces. Ehrenfried’s studio, like his work, is simultaneously minimalist and crowded. His plain white walls are hung with the collages that I recognize from his paintings, and his floor space is occupied by cubbies of paints and a cheap metal bookshelf with neat rows of titles that neatly mirror his themes: Magic, The Male Nude, The Art of Illusion, Working Out, Pablo Picasso, Cubism. “The mentality to hoard and let things accumulate is part of maintaining a studio,” Ehrenfried tells me.

Since 2019, Ehrenfried has been working on his current collection of collage paintings. During the pandemic, when he wasn’t able to get new materials, he found himself treating and re-treating the materials he had on hand, a mix of found magazine cut-outs and tracing paper. This breaking apart and recombination in a controlled system led to the collages which serve as his subjects. They are overlapping, folded — as if you could reach into the painting and turn their pages to see what’s on the other side, hinting at more information that is irreversibly lost to the viewer in the transfer from collage to paint.

Courtesy of Vardan Gallery

Ehrenfried traces his lineage to the cubists, who collaged and flattened the world during a shift into modernity. He draws an analogy between the first World War and COVID, one hundred years apart, a period which saw artists sitting and waiting, trying to track the slippery compression of time and history that happens in moments of crisis. “The cubists were also interested in obfuscation,” he tells me. By placing disparate references — from male nudes to antique furniture — overlapping and folded into one another, Ehrenfried suggests a unity and a dialogue between his subjects, the way Picasso makes a face from many cut-out angles of a face.

“There’s a camp value to antiques,” Ehrenfried says, before revealing that one of his favorite pastimes is watching furniture restoration on YouTube. He revels in the obscenity of luxuries past, but also the permanence of objects and their images through change. “At what point do you let something become garbage?” he muses. There’s a documentary quality to his painting, a restoration and recombination of images to bring the past and the present into alignment.

Ehrenfried shares that his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. After her passing, he was left with tons of documents, but just as many questions — questions he’ll never have answers for. “The lack of answer in itself is content,” he says.

This tension of desire between the known and the unknowable in the paintings slips discreetly into a dialogue with the erotic. Antique furniture ads nestle next to nude models and tear-outs of hardcore gay porn, an aesthetics of queer domesticity that contests what is (or historically has been) appropriate to the sphere of the home. The underlying theme of obfuscation feeds into this historical narrative and hints at the kind of “looking under the folds” present in gay cruising culture, in which men encounter one another in public spaces for sex. Historically, with the home as a wife’s domain, this sort of risky public encounter in restrooms and parks were how gay men were able to meet. The banal and everyday (a public restroom, for instance) become erotically charged if you stay long enough and look hard enough. Likewise, these paintings invite a lingering, an undercurrent of sexuality that is sometimes evident, often masked.

Courtesy of Vardan Gallery.

Space plays a role in these paintings, too, as Ehrenfried’s studio walls themselves become part of his subject, down to the electrical outlets. It’s a winking nod to the process behind the painting. The walls in the paintings are punctured with tacks and splattered with paint, themselves artifacts of the painting that’s happened on them. “We’re in a moment where everything feels miscellaneous,” Ehrenfried tells me, thinking about the distance between the present moment and history, between subject and context.

“At the end of the day, the paintings are about looking,” he tells me. “There’s so much stuff — how do you make sense of it? How do you decide what’s important, and what happens to the other stuff?”

The stuff — and the studio itself — become a metaphor for the artist’s interior life. When you follow an obsession in a studio, Ehrenfried says, your brain itself becomes a studio, always working, so each artwork is a few hours of paint on canvas and many more of thought, effort, and obsession.

This obsession is what is on display here. Always obfuscated, always revealing itself.

Hank Whrenfried
“Under the Impression”
September 16 – Oct 15, 2023
Vardan Gallery
6810 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Portrait of the artist by Shaun Pierson

​Read More What is revealed behind the fold? What is hinted at, but goes unseen? This is the power of art; to make something in our minds beyond what’s on the page. Hank Ehrenfried’s work — on display in Los Angeles for the first time as the new Vardan Gallery’s entrée into the art world — is … Continue reading “The Illusion of an “Underneath”: an exclusive interview with artist Hank Ehrenfried” 

We as humans seem to have a fascination with documenting ourselves—with showing that we were here, that we mattered. From the crude marks of ancient cave paintings to more contemporary portraits of the wealthy and aristocratic, the act of documenting does more than just record its time. It also exposes something more universal about us, such as our fear of impermanence and fear of being forgotten. While the advent of photography catalyzed and democratized the ability to record ourselves (and, arguably, replaced painting as the primary method for recording ourselves visually), painters seem to keep finding ways of saying something new.

Will Thornton, Mine, 2023. Oil on linen, 28 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim. Photograph by Yubo Dong, of studio photography.

According to the press release for his solo show at Nicodim, “Hypnagogic Sex Idols,” Will Thornton forayed into portraiture as recently as 2019. Since traditional portraits were still very much in style where he lived in the South, Thornton thought it would be a lucrative venture to paint portraits of wealthy families in the area. But this journey into portraiture came to an abrupt halt when the Covid-19 Pandemic struck. As we all know, it was a time of fear—of sickness, death, and the unknown—and a constant reminder of humanity’s fragility. Most people were too hesitant to even have their friends over, let alone allow a craftsman or portrait painter to come into their homes. Yet, the pandemic opened a door for Thornton to explore something else.   

Harnessing the fears of the pandemic, his skill as a traditional portrait painter, and even his recent experience with becoming a father, Thornton manifested the nightmarish figures of “Hypnagogic Sex Idols.” Taken literally, Thornton’s paintings appear to be portraits of anthropomorphic sculptures, made of fabric, leather, clay and canvas, which are then posed in front of dramatically-lit backdrops. But they work in other ways, too, as if materializing something from the subconscious, or even functioning metaphorically.

Will Thornton, Some Have Broken Ankles (Some Have Broken Hearts), 2023. Oil on linen, 26 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim. Photograph by Yubo Dong, of studio photography.

One of the strengths of Thornton’s paintings is that they lend themselves to multiple interpretations and references, which often interact in unexpected or unsettling ways. For one, the figures aren’t human, but are familiar enough to be humanized. Features that look limb-like and effeminate easily transition into lifeless geometric forms, sometimes monstrous in proportion and shape.

More curiously, although these figures appear overtly sexualized, they can be just as grotesque. Some are even vulgar, dripping or spraying liquids onto the floor. Others give off an air of demure innocence or sadness. Very cleverly, they appear to draw from the visual language of ancient fertility totems (Venus of Willendorf, for example), but are also reminiscent of the freakish creations of contemporary pop culture (Ugly Dolls, Huggy Wuggy, Real Monsters, Feisty Pets). Despite their often nightmarish and even grotesque appearance, Thornton gives them a sense of tenderness.

Will Thornton, Dye Stealer, 2023. Oil on linen, 22 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim. Photograph by Yubo Dong, of studio photography.

It’s hard enough to create—and then balance—such disparate traits and expressions in human subjects, but Thornton makes the effort seem natural, and with inanimate objects too. Take Dye Stealer (2023) for example. The dark reddish-brown figure in this work features a prominent backside, a puffy leather couch-like texture, some sort of orifice, and tilts its “legs” in a casual pose. Owing to Thornton’s skill as a painter, Dye Stealer seemingly reveals a candid moment, or maybe even a private one, like nude portraits that are obviously posed but attempt to capture a casual feeling.

In an era when it is easy to draw on the ugliness and trepidation of life (in the face of a global pandemic, climate change, and other events seemingly beyond the control of any individual—just to name a few), Thornton offers something else. As if materializing an abstraction can provide some sense of control or certainty over it, these works offer something like that for the very real yet hard-to-place sentiments of life. They ask us to gaze into the nightmare, but find more than just fear.

Will Thornton
Hypnagogic Sex Idols
July 8 – August 12, 2023
Nicodim
1700 S Santa Fe Avenue #160
Los Angeles, CA 90021
www.nicodimgallery.com

Zachary C. Jensen is a writer, educator, and sometimes translator based in Los Angeles, California. He is the managing/founding editor of the literary journal Angel City Review and the editor of the chapbook series Animals by Business Bear Press.

​Read More We as humans seem to have a fascination with documenting ourselves—with showing that we were here, that we mattered. From the crude marks of ancient cave paintings to more contemporary portraits of the wealthy and aristocratic, the act of documenting does more than just record its time. It also exposes something more universal about us, … Continue reading “HYPNAGOGIC SEX IDOLS” 

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Understanding the chaos and grandeur of Hundley’s collage works means understanding the fundamental unit of their construction: the intimate and almost sentimental act of sifting through old objects and images, delicately cutting them out from their original form, and then pinning them like biological specimens (a decision that makes the act even more precious, compared to using something like adhesive). But Hundley does this hundreds if not thousands of times, sometimes without any images or ephemera attached to the pins, transforming the act into something obsessive and seemingly pathological. It’s easy to see how Hundley’s individual collage works earned him success. They stage a collision of old and new eras through collage and the post-internet age of information abundance, two visual languages that certainly have some household presence. And they stage that collision in such a way that their cultural commentary on contemporary living can be understood through the experience of viewing it, viscerally, instead of theoretical exercise/undertaking. Hundley is at his best with works like The Plague (2016), where he’s [created] the intimacy of a Joseph Cornell boxed assemblage, but also the mood and grotesque sprawl of a Hieronymus Bosch landscape.

Elliott Hundley, The Plague, 2016. Paper, oil, pins, plastic, foam, and linen on Panel. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.

Echo, a twenty-year survey of Hundley’s work at Regen Projects, features some of these works, alongside an array of others, including freestanding and hanging sculptures, assemblages, paintings, photographs, ceramics, and works on paper. There is even a hallway displaying what seem to be objects of personal importance to Hundley, interspersed between some of his smaller works. Echo is installed and presented as an immersive experience into the artist’s practice, but it overreaches, starts feeling less like a commentary on its time (or of excess and abundance), but more of a product of it. 

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.

Echo is installed much like Hundley’s collage works are assembled. Swarms of pins, images, and ephemera hover around individual works, which, according to the press release, was inspired by Hundley’s studio. This salon-style, everything-everywhere approach would seem to make sense, as it’s consistent with the theme of his work and provides a way to link the different media of his oeuvre, but is a step too far. There is so much going on—so many pins, so many choices, so many images intricately cut out—that it is implausible, if not impossible, that Hundley eked out this exhibition himself. Just looking at all of Echo can be measured in man-hours.

Fine artists use assistants all of the time, and for the most part it’s uncontroversial and no one even notices or cares. Filmmakers use hundreds to thousands of people, and this is seen as perfectly normal if not optimal. But there is a problem with it here. Hundley’s collage work is inherently intimate and personal, if not presented and promoted as such. When the use of assistants becomes so conspicuous, as it has with Echo, it changes the nature of the work. After all, part of what makes Hundley’s individual collage works great is because they seem created by one person. Breaching that illusion, Echo becomes less about the obsessive, intimate act of the artist—and the extraordinary effort and care of one man—but about the manufacturing of it.

[Should art be judged solely by its product, or are we allowed to consider the act of making it?]

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.

Echo’s conflict between feeling intimate or manufactured seems befitting in a culture that increasingly struggles with its own competing desires for authenticity and illusion. In a time when everyone has a camera, editing software, and a platform, the desire to constantly stage and curate one’s life seems to, ironically, take one farther from it—it creates a competing craving for authenticity. [social media effect on belief systems?] Maybe it shouldn’t matter what happens behind the scenes, and manufacturing something intimate is perfectly acceptable. But if that’s the case, I think there are more interesting questions about our tolerance and desire for illusion that we can ask ourselves. (that are not necessarily asked by Echo). Echo, though, seems more like a product of this type of identity crisis, not a commentary on it.

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.

It’s also questionable what Echo really achieves by its installation. It does blur the line between the art and the process of making it, but runs into perceptual issues with its more-is-better ethos. Unlike his individual collage works, which do corral overwhelming amounts of information into something more, Echo strains to tie together every collage, sculpture, painting, pin, image, brushstroke and fragment of at least three rooms of the exhibition.

Echo asks the viewer to conclude that its whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but it lacks the synergy or dynamic interaction of its parts that usually leads to that effect. Unlike his individual collage works, the installation spreads the viewer’s attention too thin, and as viewer bandwidth drops, less can be expected of each individual work, as it seemingly has a more important role as a part in a whole or, at worst, becomes decoration. I did not think that Echo really asked the viewer to do anything more than marvel at the immensity of its production. 

There is an appeal to the spectacle of the installation, but I can’t help but think that this is because contemporary viewers (myself included) are conditioned into having their attention spread thin, and that low bandwidth shapes what we’re drawn to. Maybe tapping into this is ingenious of Hundley. Maybe it’s pandering. Maybe it’s unintentional. But it feels like something I would expect more from a social media company instead of an artist.

Elliott Hundley, Untitled (2013, oil on linen), as installed in Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo by Art Memo Magazine.

Like Echo’s installation, Hundley’s paintings seem heavily influenced by his propensity for hyper-collage, but the concept and method of his individual collage works do not make for good paintings. For one, they often have too much information. There are so many styles, marks, and clashing colors all densely packed into the canvas (often with the same texture brush work), that it is hard to take anything from these paintings other than “their chaos is the point.”

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Regen Projects. Photo by Evan Bedford.

Although I don’t think it’s his intention, Hundley’s predilection for collage makes his painting quote other painters a little too much, almost as if he’s collecting marks and styles like one would endearingly collect objects or images for a collage. Works like face and form (2013) and Untitled (2013), for example, are a little bit too close to the work of Albert Oehlen. Of course, artists are always drawing from, and building on top of, the work of other artists, but in the incremental difference between Hundley’s paintings and his precedents, it’s hard to discern what Hundley’s contribution to painting is, if anything. And at a gallery as eminent as Regen Projects, the inclusion of these paintings begs the question.

Elliott Hundley, 21.12.22.1 (2022, oil on linen), as installed in Echo at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo by Art Memo Magazine.

I think Hundley has a lot more interesting things to say through his collage work, not his painting. And although Echo sometimes feels like more of a product of its time than a commentary on it (especially on its themes of excess and abundance), overall, it’s still a noteworthy exhibition. From what I can tell from other writers and artists, Echo seems to be quite polarizing. To me, Echo measures/reflects how cultural/aesthetic sensibilities are changing due to pressures on our attention, our relationship with illusion. Viewing and thinking about Echo leaves me feeling small. Not from the immensity of the exhibition, but being immersed in something much bigger / the slow motion of cultural change.

 

Elliott Hundley
Echo
January 14 – February 19, 2023
Regan Projects
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90038
www.reganprojects.com

​Read More Understanding the chaos and grandeur of Hundley’s collage works means understanding the fundamental unit of their construction: the intimate and almost sentimental act of sifting through old objects and images, delicately cutting them out from their original form, and then pinning them like biological specimens (a decision that makes the act even more precious, compared … Continue reading “Echo” 

With all of its flesh tones and synthetics, its re-purposed refuse, its simulations and premonitions, its wisps of human history and myth—and especially its rethinking of the body—“Durian on the Skin” feels very post-human, maybe even a little post-apocalyptic.

Before seeing the show, “Durian on the Skin” caught my interest as I wanted to see how the curator handled the dilemma that seems to arise when addressing forward-looking topics or drawing from emerging visual languages. And that is: if the work draws too much from a new or emerging visual language, it risks having no effect on a viewer, as visual languages need time to accumulate connotations and associations before the artist can go about orchestrating them for some effect. But if the artist relies too heavily on old or familiar visual languages, they risk failing to capture something essential about the forward-looking topic.

It’s easy to forget—maybe because artists have such free rein now or because art is “all subjective anyway”—but there are aesthetic decisions artists (and curators) should be making. It’s a role where they, and only they, can identify visual languages where others could not; and to surprise us, maybe even wound us, with what we know, but don’t recognize. This was just the sort of thing I found with “Durian on the Skin.”

Intallation view of “Durian on the Skin,” 2022. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.

“Durian on the Skin” was so expertly curated, and offered so many revelations in between its works, that it would be crude to categorize it as post-human or post-apocalyptic, or to categorize it at all. It does pay a lot of attention to the body, though, and owing to how its curator handled the “dilemma” of emerging visual languages, you can feel its definitions shifting.  

For a show interested in the body, the curator, Gan Uyeda, was apt to include a virtual reality piece. VR is known for simulating environments, but it runs another less obvious simulation: that conscious experience might not have anything to do with the material that holds it. In Rindon Johnson’s Meat Growers: A Love Story (2019), you’re guided through a forest of giant trees, you pass cloaked buildings, you glide over wet earth as if a storm had just passed. Occasionally, almost as if it detached and floated away, you remember your own body. The more immersed you become, the more you contemplate what it’s like to push conscious experience out of the material and into the immaterial.

Intallation view of “Durian on the Skin,” 2022. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.

Taking off the VR headset, that meditation on the body and immateriality continues with the neighboring works. The cast beeswax torso of Kelly Akashi’s Stratum (2021), for example, quite literally treats the body as a vessel, albeit a fragile and organic one. In Gabriel Mills’ DIAMOND SEA (2022), paint flickers between material and immaterial across three panels, and its floating ethereal pane sparks an unexpected connection between painterly abstraction and virtual space. In Danica Lundy’s Late Summer Pitch (2022), bodies glitch into bleacher seats and paint eviscerates its subjects.

Candice Lin, Piss Protection Demon, 2022. Glazed ceramic, vaporizer, water, wolf piss. Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson. 

Uyeda adds subtle touches of history and myth, too. Candice Lin’s squatty and gnarled totem, Piss Protection Demon (2022), feels like history and myth have curdled into artifact. Joeun Kim Aatchim’s fish-hooked porcelain works strike a tribalistic note. Isaac Soh Fujita Howell’s schematic painting of a humanoid-as-machine, with its nod to Italian Futurism, lends a tone of past-imagining-future.

Intallation view of “Durian on the Skin,” 2022. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.

Some work, like Liao Wen’s two humanoid sculptures, made me think of my own body’s hardwiring and how it has evolved to understand other bodies. That evolved response can be as simple as wincing at another’s injury, or it could be, if you’re familiar with Boston Dynamics, as curious as the trace of empathy you feel when the researchers abuse their robots to test their balance. Wen’s figures trigger something like that. Flesh-toned and jointed like dolls, they feel like full-body prosthetics, writhing but somehow in a state of Zen. One even has a weighted wire hanging through a slot in its body. Even though the figures are neither alive nor naturally posed, I still felt my body trying to make sense of theirs—trying to transpose quasi- or non-human sensations onto itself. It’s a little eerie visiting the periphery of the body’s natural responses, but with technology like artificial intelligence and genetic modification, contemporary life seems to insist on the eerie becoming relevant.   

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Peter from Hereditary, and a being with translucent skin whose water from the Rio Grande passes through it (when the sun has just set and the water is hazy and mercurial as it ripples the fresh drift of a new night sky), 2022. Plastic part from a TV (maybe) found in Guadalajara, pigmented silicone that my niece helped smear, pigmented rabbit pelt, goat leg, my aunt’s high heel, industrial shank nail put together to make the mouth of the bottom feeder found by the arroyo of what must have belonged to a construction worker that helped make a newly renovated park, horn tips, zip ties. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Murmurs Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson. 

One of Uyeda’s more counterintuitive ways of addressing the body was including works made from repurposed materials and the remains of manufactured objects. Appropriating the visual language of manufactured objects extends back at least to Duchamp’s “readymade” sculptures, but Uyeda stresses the darker aspects of that lexicon to invoke our changing relationship with fabrication and waste. In the same room as Wen’s figures are a wall-sized pelt made of porcelain shards, a spiked chimera of fur, plastic and scrap, and a plaster suit swirling without a subject. With works like these, Uyeda casts a shade of ecological desolation over the show. And in light of the show’s allusions to technology, myth and history, they sensitize the body to something both primal and prophetic.

Srijon Chowdhury, Andreas Under Cherry Blossoms, 2022. Oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Foxy Production. Photo by Paul Salveson.

One might say that, as we lurch through history, it’s the role of fine artists to make sense of our shifting condition by examining the corresponding changes of visual languages. But unlike other sense-making disciplines—and even some forms of art—fine art often does not offer answers or clear explanations. And, arguably, that makes it a better place for rethinking what feels so obvious or fundamentally true. Shows like “Durian on the Skin” remind me of that. Presenting the body as something suspended between myth, earth, virtual and synthetic, “Durian on the Skin” does what no dissection or system of rules could; as if, when looking more closely within, you could ever really expect to find a stable, certain, endlessly knowable thing.

 

“Durian on the Skin”
September 17 – October 22, 2022
Curated by: Gan Uyeda
Works by: Ann Greene Kelly, Brach Tiller, Candice Lin, Danica Lundy, David Douard, Gabriel Mills, Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Joeun Kim Aatchim, Kelly Akashi, Liao Wen, Maren Karlson, Mire Lee, Rebecca Manson, Rindon Johnson, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Srijon Chowdhury, Tomás Díaz Cedeño
François Ghebaly Gallery
2245 E Washington Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90021
www.ghebaly.com

​Read More With all of its flesh tones and synthetics, its re-purposed refuse, its simulations and premonitions, its wisps of human history and myth—and especially its rethinking of the body—“Durian on the Skin” feels very post-human, maybe even a little post-apocalyptic. Before seeing the show, “Durian on the Skin” caught my interest as I wanted to see … Continue reading “Durian on the skin” 

Oil painting’s historical connection to wealth—and more specifically to the rise of capitalism—is not news to anyone. As the art critic John Berger pointed out, oil painting’s rise to prominence as a medium had a lot to do with its ability to express the changing worldview of the Western European ruling class of the 16th century. That is, oil painting offered a model of the world where the world could be owned, possessed, and sold—where “everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.” Oil painting is remarkably good at representing objects of desire as though they are real. The medium set a new standard for representation of the newly commodified objects of the world, appropriate to the forms of desire they elicited. 

Rae Klein, Never Talk About it, 2022. 72 x 60 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.

In the vaporous and multilayered paintings of “LOW VOICE OUT LOUD,” artist Rae Klein seems to be thinking about the medium’s economic history through form. The paintings of the show, all completed in 2022, range in scale from a dainty 12 by 16 inches to a mansion-appropriate 72 by 120, and take similarly mansion-appropriate hunting dogs, horses, elegantly-coiffed women, pearls, elongated silver tableware, and candelabras as their subjects, as well as other vaguely mythological landscapes and figures.

There’s also a pronounced hint of another century in these objects, even as their arrangement and spatial logic hail from the dimensionless but well-lit world of Web 2.0 graphics. This is not only achieved by her palette choices (browns, Prussian blues, ochres, sepia tones) and the visual language of the depicted objects (pearls, lockets), but also how she handles light. Everything in Klein’s paintings gleams faintly, as though struck at once by antique candlelight and an unplaceable ethereal glow. There’s a certain classical aspect in how she achieves that effect, too, especially with the accents of pure white on top of diffuse layers of paint. Seeing Klein’s candlesticks and glassy ponies, it’s almost natural to think of the glass stemware in 17th century still life painting.

Rae Klein, Or Was I Dreaming This?, 2022. 60 x 72 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.

The formal choices of Klein’s paintings also allow them to ask, among other questions, something like: “What might the visual expression of the object-oriented desire of the wealthy be now, in 2022?” For example, Klein’s compositions often feature richly rendered objects floating amidst non-dimensional surroundings. It’s as if the surroundings staged the objects, but were uninterested in constructing any habitable world. No one lives wherever these subjects are. This motif—of objects floating in a dimensionless void—has been one of the major ways contemporary painting seems to have incorporated the computer’s impact on the visual landscape (one might think of Rute Merk, for instance).

Klein is astute to employ that motif in such a historically-charged medium, one often designed to represent the desired objects of the wealthy. Objects floating in dimensionless voids for our consideration for purchase is by now a deeply naturalized part of our everyday visual languages. Capitalism always decontextualized and abstracted objects, but that has certainly accelerated since oil painting first began depicting hunting dogs and pearls and horses. With a lesser artist, this pairing might come off as academic, but in Klein’s work they intuitively converge through the medium.

Rae Klein, I’ve Accepted It, And I Forgive You, 2022. 72 x 60 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.

If these paintings ask, “What might the visual expression of the object-oriented desire of the wealthy be now, in 2022,” they also ask: “What does all that feel like?” The answer might be something like “eerie, lonely, discomforting, and kind of… beautiful?” One of the most interesting paintings in the show, I’ve Accepted It, And I Forgive You, seems to me to get at this question.

It’s a mid-size piece (72 x 60 inches) featuring a woman’s hair and bleary eyes floating in a goldened field, and in the space where her face isn’t: tiny ducks, a dog, and a butterfly which all hover like sticker-book style face tattoos. The piece is both lovely and off-putting, which seems connected to how impossible it is to reconcile the painting’s multiple frames of reading. Figures are staged at different scales; objects are situated in a dimensionless void; the background flickers into the space of the foreground figures, or becomes them. How are these objects and their grounds related to each other? Which, or what, is actually figure or ground? How do we understand them in space?

The painting offers tonal complexity, too. Features like the teardrop-like butterfly feel both internet-irony funny but also sincerely sad. I’ve Accepted It, And I Forgive You, like many of the works in the show, does that lovely cognitive shimmering thing good art does as it resists easy conceptualization, easy tonal categorizing, easy anything.

Rae Klein, Burn To The Ground, 2022. 72 x 60 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.

Surrealism is also a hovering presence here. Many of Klein’s figures offer themselves as (il)legible symbols, staged in settings whose vagueness might evoke something like “the unconscious” or “a dream.” Her multiple frames of reading, too, connect her work to Surrealism. But the way she uses them enables her to go beyond Surrealism.

Klein’s work presents a layering paradox like that of, for example, Magritte’s The Double Secret (1927) or The Human Condition (1935), where narrative “reality” is confused with what is “painted.” Like Magritte’s paintings, Klein’s draw attention to the ways pictorial illusion, context, and layering can be used to generate logically incoherent spaces. But Klein’s attention to wealth and materiality—and the odd “dimensionless” quality—takes her past this chime with Surrealism. Klein’s version of that layering paradox is not just spatial or symbolic, but also about oil painting’s history colliding with the desire, discourse, and economic structures of the present.

Rae Klein, Dog Resting in the Field, 2022. 72 x 120 inches, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.

Like the oil paintings from the centuries before hers, these pieces would be perfect in the homes of the wealthy of their century. I can easily imagine any of these pieces in an elegant living room out of a jet-setting magazine, staged next to a fiddle-leaf fig by a white sofa on a gray marble floor. But in such settings, the painting would also smuggle in a certain unease, even as it beautifully complements the Danish teak coffee table or antique flat-knot rug. It feels naïve or a little silly to say that these paintings feel “haunted” or “off” or “poisoned,” but they do. And in that way, they feel slightly ironic, considering who will likely own her paintings. But I have no reason to suspect any ill-will on Klein’s part. If anything, it further connects her work to its subject matter and history, and in a not so comfortable way. This is important work. It finds deep intuitive connections between its medium, its world, and its history, and gives it a critical expression whose affective force and visual beauty speak, uneasily, for itself.

Kristen Ihns is completing her PhD at the University of Chicago, where she studies contemporary poetry and experimental film, and works as an editor at FENCE and Chicago Review. She also writes poems and makes films, sometimes as part of the video collective dunt project.

Rae Klein
“LOW VOICE OUT LOUD”
June 25th – August 13, 2022
Nicodim Gallery
1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160
Los Angeles,CA 90021
www.nicodimgallery.com

​Read More Oil painting’s historical connection to wealth—and more specifically to the rise of capitalism—is not news to anyone. As the art critic John Berger pointed out, oil painting’s rise to prominence as a medium had a lot to do with its ability to express the changing worldview of the Western European ruling class of the 16th … Continue reading “LOW VOICE OUT LOUD” 

Organized by artists Lawrence Gipe and Beth Davila Waldman, the ambitious exhibition included multiple artworks by each of the twenty artists working in a variety of media including: video, photography, collage, installation, and painting. Gipe and Waldman chose these artists —Luciana Abait, Kim Abeles, Fatemeh Burnes, Linda Connor, Rodney Ewing, Guillermo Galindo, Dimitr Kozyrev, Ann Le, Constance Mallinson, Ryan McIntosh, Liz Miller Kovacs, Deborah Oropallo, Andy Rappaport, Kit Radford, Aili Schmeltz, Alex Turner, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Amir Zaki—as their practices incorporated landscape and the sublime to reflect upon critical issues of climate change and the Anthropocene.

Ann Le, Tear x Scape / Terrorscape 6 (Green Monster), 2019. 24” x 27”, Photograph. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.

Meandering through the multi-roomed exhibition, one feels a sense of the scope and complexity of the obstacles we face as a civilization. We are confronted with mass extinction, melting glaciers, toxic waste, and vast regions negatively transformed by our human presence, among other issues. While these are all known and acknowledged problems, here they are reinterpreted in the context of the sublime, and then presented as physical objects for contemplation.       

In Constance Mallinson’s installation, It’s Amazon, Stupid (2022), viewers are lured in by a glass vitrine of oil paintings. The paintings are made on neatly cut pieces of found Styrofoam, and depict pleasing images of “exotic” flora or fauna from disappearing landscapes around the world. Seeing such highly detailed and colorful paintings rendered on trash, one can’t help but think of how we often treat nature as disposable and expendable. One also can’t avoid the cruel sense of irony by using Styrofoam, as this human-made product will certainly outlast the living inhabitants of these natural habitats.

Constance Mallinson, It’s Amazon, Stupid, 2022. Dimensions variable, oil on found Styrofoam. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.

Another fascinating grouping was a series of photographic works by Alex Turner that explores both the sociopolitical and environmental issues at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Turner captures the hidden movements of animals and humans traversing the shared landmass by marrying photography and remote sensing imagery. In 29 Humans (Smugglers) and 12 Horses, 1-Week Interval, Patagonia Mountains, AZ, (2019), we see a jumble of figures with heavy packs and intermittently visible horse legs, all lined-up on the same path as documented over the one-week period. By depicting them as a ghostly mass, the artist transforms their presence into a fixture of these desert mountains. Yet the use of “spy” cameras to capture these previously unknown paths feels dangerous in the wrong hands, especially in today’s political climate.

 

Alex Turner, 29 Humans (Smugglers) and 12 Horses, 1-Week Interval, Patagonia Mountains, AZ, 2019. 36” x 36”, archival inkjet print, edition 2 of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of Brand Library & Art Center.

Mallinson, who also contributed a must-read essay to this exhibition, stated, “There are no neutral landscapes.” In this show each artist takes full advantage of their license to delve deeper into the consequences and cautionary tales of our destructive behavior toward the environment and our “ungovernable technologies.” Yet, it’s their use of the sublime in landscape that tethers the viewer to a more personal and spiritual experience.

The exhibition’s theme also had strong art historical parallels to the father of Hudson River School painting and 19th century environmentalist, Thomas Cole. He too used the sublime in his famous landscape paintings to instill both a feeling of awe and power in nature, but also to help people comprehend what they were losing to industry and greed—a trend that continues today. In his 1835 Essay on American Scenery, Cole wrote: 

I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away—the ravages of the axe are daily increasing—the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. The wayside is becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement. […] Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet—shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.     

 

While it is not the artist’s responsibility to change the hearts and minds of Americans about climate change or encourage them to take action, this exhibition demonstrated that they can certainly provide the “map” for navigating our 21st century landscape. Here’s hoping that our “ignorance and folly” won’t keep us from asking for directions.

 

Ashley Ouderkirk is an independent curator & emerging artist advisor who splits her time between New York City & Los Angeles. She is currently the Curator-in-residence at Kunstraum in NYC.

“Mapping The Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century”
Curated by: Lawrence Gipe & Beth Waldman
April 2nd – June 11, 2022
Brand Library & Art Center
1601 West Mountain St., Glendale, CA 91201
www.brandlibrary.art

​Read More While the majority of Americans, 72% according to a 2021 poll by Yale University, believe global warming is happening, only 47% seem to believe that it would harm them personally. This alarming second statistic seems to prove the national disconnect as to why most individuals don’t seem to “feel” the same urgency as those who … Continue reading “Mapping The Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century”