Reviews

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

​Read More There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. 

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” 

“Listen up, motherf*ckers! Now we’re having fun.” The lines come squawking through a speaker (as in, an object producing sound) on the floor, but who is the speaker (as in, the subject producing the thought)? Is it the African grey parrot, or the scarlet macaw represented in high definition on two vertically-oriented wall monitors? Do we take it to be the human who has voiced it in the style of a parrot? Or is it rather the medium itself that speaks; the speaker on the floor? In any case, these elements comprise Talk to Us (2021, dual channel video/audio) one of two video installations from Diana Thater included in “The Conversation” at 1301PE.

 

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

 

Complicating matters, each line is echoed in a different voice from another part of the gallery. Moving to the second floor of the gallery, one finds Listen to Us (2021, dual channel video/audio) a similarly constructed installation. Here, the two monitors face each other from opposite walls, and the African grey has been replaced with what is by comparison a diminutive Amazon parrot.

 

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

 

In both pieces, squeaks, whistles, and caws from a second speaker on the floor punctuate, interrupt, and distract from the spoken text. Is this background noise? A translation of the human speak into parrot squawk? Maybe the other way around? Or is the titular conversation between these two voices speaking in wildly different tongues? If it is indeed a conversation, it’s not one that is easy to follow. However, the rich color of the high definition video, the enveloping sound, and the scarlet macaw-colored gels covering the windows on both floors of the gallery provide an enthralling sensory experience to move through. We are having fun!

 

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

 

Beyond the fun, however, there are layers of meaning to unpack and to contemplate. For example, the conversation between human and animal is one that is fraught with difficulty. We speak for animals, and we talk over them. A conversation implies two or more parties that are equal in some way, and this conversation is held back by those who believe that between human and animal there is (to borrow a phrase from Jane Goodall) a difference of kind, and not simply one of degree. Additionally, the idea that nature is somehow “out there” and not surrounding us at every moment—whether in a gallery, at home, or in the outdoors—erects barriers to sympathy as well.  

Thater’s work with animals has long pointed toward sympathy with the inhabitants of the natural world; sympathy that years of scientific classification and bifurcation have perhaps eroded in our culture. Layers of mediation and translation permeate the work, as do many of Thater’s video installations. She doesn’t shy away from revealing the technology that enables her immersive installations. Mediation itself is a key component to her thinking about the relationship between humans and the animals she films, whether it comes through a piece of equipment or through language itself. At this moment in history, the presence of the video apparatus may even heighten the experience. As so many of our day-to-day interactions with real people have been happening via screens, there is perhaps less of a barrier between mediated presence and actual presence. This lends the birds a sense of reality that viewers may not have been available two years ago. Even the occasional jump cut in the editing could be taken as evidence of a network hiccup rather than a preconstructed video feed. These birds feel both alive and live.

This also threatens to anthropomorphize the birds more than perhaps Thater would intend. Anthropomorphism is something Thater resists in her work, less the animals depicted simply become characters and not autonomous entities deserving of life and dignity. However, the piece never reaches the level of Disneyesque talking animals, and perhaps her close flirtation with anthropomorphism allows the viewer to realize how easily humans do the inverse—dehumanize one another. 

One instance of this dehumanization is how in-power groups refer to displaced humans, be they refugee, immigrant, or otherwise. Here is another group that is spoken for, interrupted, and spoken over. These birds in particular provide an apt metaphor for understanding something about cycles of displacement. The birds are all labeled “exotic,” but are also common household pets far from their places of origin. These birds have lived through trauma due to commodification, abuse, and/or neglect. As birds living at the Intertwined Conservation Corporation as part of their avian rescue program, they are witness to just some of the horrors of global consumption. In the context of global climate catastrophe and the resulting ever-growing migration and refuge seeking, some of the dialogue (particularly “remove and replace”) takes on a menacing tone. 

The connection to displaced humans is a parallel to contemporary society, and there’s a historical parallel one can draw as well. Birds remind us of a time when dinosaurs were the dominant inhabitants on the planet. That our current pending apocalypse is caused by burning the fossilized remains of that era as a fuel source has a certain morbid irony. Perhaps the tale of the bird is a cautionary one for us in the Anthropocene, one about how the mighty fall and the inevitability of change. 

None of these interpretations are directly suggested by the work, but the balance Thater strikes between concrete language and vague context opens up space for multiple interpretations. The loop is only a few minutes long, enabling the viewer to hear the entire performance repeated for several rounds in a viewing. Recognizable sections emerge. A section listing action verbs (some relegated to human activity, some to avian activity “to perch, to stand, so sit, to lay, to throw…”) is followed by a listing of pairs of related words (“talk and listen” “up and down” text and poetry”) to a listing of the formal aspects of video work (“space time image color sound light”) and then a series of exhortations. The words, though vague, all relate to the installation in some way, be it the birds, the technology, or the title. Again, mediation itself is a key element to the work conceptually and formally.   

There are meanings that are revealed via the initial unfamiliarity, and then others that are suggested only when one has a grasp of the cadence. Some phrases (i.e., “This is the good life”) are heard in varying degrees of sarcasm and earnestness. The copy seems as if it could have been lifted from a number of sources; one catches hints of Shakespearean text, Quentin Tarantino films, and advertising copy from the 1940s.  The work hints at didacticism without becoming overly teachy, and the experience of the language is a bodily experience above a textual one. After several cycles of the looping audio, the exhortation that stands out most is, “Get out of this room. Get out of my mind!” Point taken. 

“The Conversation” marks a welcome return to the gallery space for Thater, whose 2020 piece yes there will be singing was only viewable via streaming online video. Whereas that piece indicated a certain silence from humans, Talk to Us and Listen to Us are a cacophony of sound, and a spatial experience that encompasses two floors of the gallery. In conversation as well as in “The Conversation,” we communicate with much more than just words. The work is neither overtly optimistic nor pessimistic; just indicative that the conversation writ large goes on, and that we all contribute, in ways wittingly and otherwise.

 

“The Conversation”
September 25th, 2021 – December 4th, 2021
1301PE
6150 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048
www.1301pe.com

​Read More “Listen up, motherf*ckers! Now we’re having fun.” The lines come squawking through a speaker (as in, an object producing sound) on the floor, but who is the speaker (as in, the subject producing the thought)? Is it the African grey parrot, or the scarlet macaw represented in high definition on two vertically-oriented wall monitors? Do … Continue reading “The Conversation” 

One of my favorite half-truths in the art world is that there really isn’t anything new, just variations of what’s come before. It’s true that what might appear undeniably “new” can be endlessly dissected into “old” components, merely recombined. This seems like a dispiriting process, but it reveals another truth: that something exists apart from the components themselves; something that develops relationally, between them.

That same principle applies to exhibitions, too. Based on how works are grouped, aligned and contextualized, an exhibition can charge art objects with new meanings, evoke ideas and feelings between objects, and summon themes from a group of them. The power in this unseen relationality—the connections between things—often makes the difference between a great show and a show merely with great art.

In “We are all guests here,” a group show at Bridge Projects about the Jewish tradition of Sukkot, the difference is clear. Sukkot commemorates the time the Jews spent wandering the desert after being liberated from slavery in Egypt, and is celebrated in a “sukkah,” which is a temporary walled structure of foliage resembling the shelter that once protected them. Each work in the exhibition was selected or created in response to the holiday, often through the motif of the enclosure. What emerges from that group effort is a meditation on tradition, time and human vulnerability that is so layered and moving, it appeals to far more than strictly religious interests.

 

SaraNoa Mark, “Prayer for Rain.” Carved clay, carved glass, aluminum, water collected from Lake Michigan, Mississippi River, Colorado River, and Castaic Lake. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

 

Much of the show’s success comes from how it cultivates not only a deep sense of human history, but a heightened awareness of the present passing of time. In SaraNoa Mark’s warped and rectangular abstractions of carved clay and stone, for example, there is something both ancient and tender, like seeing humanity’s first marks on the earth. And like the glass vessels of her “Prayer for Rain” series, they don’t fit the logic of artifacts, but conjure the feeling of them. Mark’s clay and stone works are cleverly placed nearby Brody Albert’s found photos of desert rock formations, which are faded to near oblivion. Albert re-reframed the photos to include their un-faded edges, indexing decades of sun exposure—turning time into subject, image into object.

A sense of human history and sensitivity to time comes from ritual, too, not just objects. In a video-installation around the corner from Albert’s photos, a procession carries bouquets down a desert road. To a dirge, they walk, they perform a ceremony, they lay on the earth. Mira Burack, the artist behind Sacred Bouquet (2021), intercut the scene with closeups of local insects and flora, elegantly conflating the cycles of nature with the repeated actions of ritual, and what each carries through time.

 

Mira Burack, Sacred Bouquet, 2021. Four-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

 

Almost like a ritual might carry something ancient, many objects in the show also combine and confound past and present, old and new, permanent and temporary, often through contemporary technology. Adam McKinney’s Shelter in Place (2021), for example, pairs augmented reality with tintypes, an early form of photography common in the nineteenth century. Viewing the antiquated scenes through a smartphone, their subject steps into the present. Other artists used 3D printing, like the artist duo Rael San Fratello, who used the process to make their Ombre Decanters. From an ash-colored base, each vessel blooms into such intricate geometry that they resemble something both computer-generated and artifactual. Brody Albert also used 3D printing in his series “We Buy Houses” (2021), in which he recreated weathered and discarded objects in wood. After balancing the objects on scaffolding and dyeing the entire structure the same color, the objects merge—precarious fuses into permanence, temporary becomes totemic.

 

Brody Albert, “We Buy Houses,” 2021. Dyed wood, 3D-printed wood filament, steel. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

 

The ways in which these works overlap and interact—which invite the viewer to simultaneously think of the past and the present passing of time—create some of the show’s most compelling effects. “We are all guests here” bends the arc of human history inward, allowing the viewer to commune with past generations, seemingly all at once. And as an awareness of the past and the passing of time grows, so does a commensurate awareness of impermanence, both as a matter of personal experience, and collective. In this context, the touch of past generations—through the long, branching, iteratively-twisted arms of ritual and tradition—feels increasingly like a comfort. Even as an atheist, I nonetheless felt the force of the religious tradition emanating from these works.

But there are no simple statements in this show. Even when it stirs compassion, it’s no feel-good or easy exhibition. Its response to Sukkot is challenging, and its focus on the sukkah, that emblem of shelter, is more contemplative and poetic than it is protective. For instance, sitting inside Rael San Fratello’s Sukkah of the Signs (2021), a temple-like structure shingled with the cardboard signs of the homeless, you can see its exposed construction and smell its freshly-cut lumber. But among the implied presence of the many without shelter, those percepts take on a darker note. Likewise, Adam McKinney’s Shelter in Place encircles its viewers with tintypes, swirling tree branches, floating video displays, and a dancing, augmented-reality apparition, but the space feels more haunted by its past: the sole black man in each tintype stands next to a cop car, gravestones, and a trailer with “cotton belt” emblazoned on it. The exhibition’s poignant socio-political commentary occasionally drifts into the unearthly, too. In Jenny Yurshansky’s We Are All Guests Here (2021), for example, its floating, latticed walls of glass embody the ethereality of a spiritual object, yet appear fragile and unwelcoming.

 

Adam W. McKinney, Shelter in Place, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

 

The show’s simultaneous contemplation of the past and the religious object is further complicated, subtly, by several works that turn attention inward—by how they confuse the object with what is seen through the object. In another piece by Yurshansky, Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory (Memoriam) (2015), a shadowy landscape droops from two nails. As the voile gently ripples, awareness shifts from the printed image to the object itself, conflating the object with the image “beyond” it. Brody Albert similarly flattens object and vision with his Untitled (2019) pieces, in which cyanotypes of tattered window screens are framed in indigo-dyed wood. Where one might expect to see through, there is only an opaque object. Similarly, in Cuarto de Estar (Living Room) (2021), Susy Bielak has replaced the mirrors in antique dressers with photo transfers. Where one might expect their own visage, there is only past.

 

Jenny Yurshansky, We are all guests here, 2021. Glass. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

 

While I love fine art—how it lets us explore human experience through combinations of what we already know—I often criticize it for being too insular, too self-referential. What enables “We are all guests here” to accomplish so much, and why it stands out in today’s art scene, is that it speaks through a visual language understood by more than just the art world. From deep within our lived experience, it can excavate something unusual and unfamiliar, yet still feel universal. “We are all guests here,” in the way it intones human vulnerability, echoes the shape of tradition, and loops time inward, works a spell that no studio dialect could. And maybe more importantly, it teaches us—attuned to its spell—all that we should listen for when we step back into the world.

 

“We are all guests here”
Curated by: Cara Megan Lewis, Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss, Vicki Phung Smith, and Michael Wright
September 3, 2021 – January 15, 2022
Bridge Projects
6820 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.bridgeprojects.com

​Read More One of my favorite half-truths in the art world is that there really isn’t anything new, just variations of what’s come before. It’s true that what might appear undeniably “new” can be endlessly dissected into “old” components, merely recombined. This seems like a dispiriting process, but it reveals another truth: that something exists apart from … Continue reading “We Are All Guests Here” 

In a moment of acceleration and rapid climate change artists must ask what it means and entails to approach this moment—the Anthropocene—from the vantage point of art-making. How can artists recalibrate notions of art to respond to this new planetary epoch? And how can artists use the sites of art to imagine a new future? These questions have no defined answer, and many artists are finding new ways of exploring, investigating, and questioning the complexities of an ecology known or unknown to them. The wide range of exploration and recalibration in art-making is exemplified in Song of the Cicada at Honor Fraser Gallery, a group exhibition curated by Debra Scacco. The exhibition brings together all of the artists who have participated in Air Projects, a residency program founded in 2017 that supports artists who think strategically about climate and its implications environment and human interconnection.

The topic of humans and nature is far from new in the arts. In a way, art has always fundamentally been about relaying the human experience being in, and a part of, the environment as a living creature. It is often referred to as “eco-art” and “environmental art.” However, beginning in the 1960’s, many of the works were typically aesthetic interventions forced onto the environment by artists with little to no understanding of the geographical area in which they were working. Since then this genre of art-making has moved beyond context solely concerned with aesthetics and into an exchange with the environment itself.

Song of the Cicada is cleverly named after the Brood x Cicada that was hatched by the billions in 2021. Like the Cicada re-emerging after 17 years underground, humans are at a moment of re-emergence after a year of isolation. Motivated by a sense of urgency and care, the artists in this exhibition probe how we might move forward, imagining what the future might look like by questioning our purpose and interactions. And with Scacco’s curation, Song of the Cicada explores the depth and complexity of our relationship to nature in the Anthropocene.

 

Joel Garcia, polymorphic light eruption, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Polymorphic Light Eruption by Joel Garcia, for example, focuses on the capitalist abuse of land, which impacts Native Culture on a consistent basis. This work takes as its subject the poaching of sage from Native cultures by wellness industries, and how that demand has caused poaching problems on California public lands. When that happens, the sage is confiscated and redistributed to a number of community leaders of various tribes. Garcia’s piece is an isolated representation of one of the duffle bags that contain 100 pounds of unusable poached white sage. Set against the backdrop of the gallery’s white wall, the duffle bag becomes a symbol of appropriation and colonization.

 

iris yirei hu, Jorge Expinosa and Megan Dorame, Pakook koy Peshaax (The Sun Enters the Earth and Leaves the Earth), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Iris Yirei’s works focus on our relationship with land and how to be in consonance with living systems. Pakook toy Peshaax (The Sun Enters the Earth and Leaves the Earth) is one such work. Pakook toy Peshaax, which was a collaboration with Tongva community leader, Julia Bogany, and Tongva poet, Megan Dorame, and was originally shown as a functioning sundial at LA State Historic Park, considers the life cycle and rehabilitation of raw materials. Through Native symbols, eclectic colors and expressive brushwork, it harmonizes chaos, and merges past and present. It leaves one asking, “where do I lie in this cycle?”

 

Rebecca Bruno, Procession Relic, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Rebecca Bruno’s piece, Procession Relic, documents a performance she originally exhibited at the Bootleg Theatre during her residency with Air Projects. While its content does not directly point toward nature or landscape like the other works in Song of the Cicada, it nonetheless embodies nature through the passing of time. Procession Relic is an extraordinary performance, inspired by permaculture, wherein dancers move in and through layers of color, which transition as though signifying the passing of seasons. Its composition is a harmonious push and pull; a return to earth.

 

Britt Ransom, Singers of the Song that Sleeps Underground, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Almost contrary to Bruno’s piece, Brit Ransom’s Parallel Paths adopts a more clinical approach and aesthetic. Using 3D-printing, Ransom addresses the rapid rise of bark beetles and their devastating influence over California wildfires. Parallel Paths features an arrangement of 3D-printed branches, made to scale and in transparent material, that expose the paths of these beetles. But the intricate tunnels depicted seemingly resemble freeways, street patterns, and complex grids, illuminating our own invasive interventions on the environment. Parallel Paths begs the question: maybe we are the biggest pests of all.

Moving beyond strictly aesthetic concerns to an exchange with the environment itself, Song of the Cicada is not only an exhibition about conscious reemergence, but it also marks a new kind of art-making, one less concerned solely with aesthetics and more focused on the role and function of aesthetics within our living ecosystems.

 

“Song of the Cicada”
Curated by: Debra Scacco
July 17, 2021 — August 28, 2021
Honor Fraser
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
For more information about Air Projects, Visit AirProjects.Art, follow @Airprojects.Art or get in touch at Hello@AirProjects.Art

 
 

​Read More In a moment of acceleration and rapid climate change artists must ask what it means and entails to approach this moment—the Anthropocene—from the vantage point of art-making. How can artists recalibrate notions of art to respond to this new planetary epoch? And how can artists use the sites of art to imagine a new future? … Continue reading “Song of the Cicada” 

Perhaps it’s by default, reverence, or sentiment that we think of the progenitors of an art movement as having more difficult challenges than those who maintain it. But artists in the lineage of painterly abstraction increasingly face a new kind of problem, which verges on paradoxical: how does an artist advance an aesthetic when the features that defined it are now the very features that make it unimaginative? Artists are almost obligated to make moves that have been drained of vitality and meaning from decades of overuse. The answer is hard to know until you see it, which is why I’ve been following Los Angeles artist Maysha Mohamedi for several years, and why her first solo show at Parrasch Heijnen, Sacred Witness Sacred Menace, deserves attention.

 

Maysha Mohamedi, Left Hand Lucky Hand, 2021. 81 x 99 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Mohamedi’s faculty for mark-making is just one reason. Bringing an image into existence, and recording the instant it happens, has a certain wonder to it, and it’s part of what made painterly abstraction appealing. But that wonder often degenerates to self-absorption and has attracted a chorus of painters with the same exhausted and one-dimensional mark. Mohamedi’s marks, though, feel ambiguous and complex; sometimes they feel more like symbols or objects, sometimes both. They function like Cy Twombly’s part-mark, part-language, but in more directions. Sometimes, they even drift away from recording the movement of her hand. Her marks do what abstract painting is uniquely suited to do: refer to the real world without representing it; invite sense-making while withholding certainty. The viewer can phase through feelings and associations without ever knowing what they’re looking at.

 

Maysha Mohamedi, Aloe Cuts, 2021. 83 x 73 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Mohamedi often uses pairs or sequences of incrementally changing marks (or quasi-symbols) to reveal the part of the painting process that’s not on the canvas. By placing nearly identical marks next to each other, Mohamedi places attention on the slight deviations—what’s happening in between the marks. The physical mark still captures something immediate and intimate about the act of creating it, but the implicit is just as present.

 

Maysha Mohamedi, Cool Dreams Dropped Into Your Hearts, 2021. 81 x 99 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

One thing that struck me about the works of Sacred Witness Sacred Menace was how Mohamedi took these qualities—which seem inherent and idiosyncratic to small-scale marks—and extrapolated them to large-scale compositional elements. In Cool Dreams Dropped Into Your Heart (all works 2021), for example, many of the solid-shaped elements have features within them that vaguely repeat and, as a whole, those elements vaguely mimic others in the painting. They also take on small-scale qualities because their edges seem carved from quick movements, like handwriting or sketching, even though they’re large and created slowly by filling in the shape with paint. And the fact that the large elements share certain qualities with smaller marks and sequences conflates the experience of each. The way the mind interprets smaller marks changes how larger elements are interpreted.

 

Maysha Mohamedi, Accrued Merccy, 2021. 83 x 73 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.

 
Mohamedi has also subtly worked body movement into these paintings. Most of her compositions hang on a scaffolding of long, thin lines and wide arcs, almost like a wireframe Motherwell. It might be hard to sense by looking at these large paintings on a screen, but when standing in front of them, the scale and quality of those lines and arcs imply a sense of body movement, especially when they swoop, repeat, or span the entire canvas.

But it’s not body movement in the traditional sense. Normally, with large-scale records of movement like this, the expectation is thick and painterly marks, or fast and continuous movement, or even lines that record the breath or wavering of the artist’s hand. Mohamedi’s lines, though, are wiry and segmented, patched together from small applications of paint, which, after they’re added up, suggest a larger gestural move. There’s only a phantom physicality, a schematic of movement without all of the usual seriousness and self-importance of huge gestural marks.

In the paintings of Sacred Witness Sacred Menace, Mohamedi has harmonized that “phantom physicality” with the small-scale sequences and other repeating elements. She’s conducted what would otherwise be cacophony of sketch marks into a ragged musicality; a scratchy galloping of unraveling rhythms, a tumbling of intimate moments.

Whereas the forebears of painterly abstraction might have sought a more uniform aesthetic, or a purer visual language (in this case, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner come to mind), Mohamedi can achieve more complicated effects like this because of her decision (and ability) to devise and orchestrate disparate elements. Features of one element warp the experience of another, and the painting becomes more than the sum of its parts.

 

Maysha Mohamedi, Honey Vertigo, 2021. 99 x 81 inches, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles.

 

Sacred Witness Sacred Menace also raises the question of how far an artist can move away from some of a tradition’s inherent qualities while remaining a part of that tradition. One of those inherent qualities, for instance, is the painting being a record of its creation. Many aspects of Mohamedi’s paintings refer to it: brush marks are left as-is; lines have a sketchy quality; underlying pencil marks and canvas remain exposed; solid features are sometimes only partially painted; repeated elements suggest time; and primary colors suggest nascence. But she does not always leave these features in their raw or immediate state. For example, she will trace over pencil marks with a thin line of paint, removing the original quality of the pencil mark. Or she will paint over canvas with a flat, near-canvas color. Even her marks sometimes mask the trace of her hand. With moves like this, Mohamedi simultaneously denatures and exalts features of the painting, maybe even the process of painting itself. She takes the principle of “to observe something is to change it” and applies it to the standardized moves of painterly abstraction.

This exalt/denature move, and others like it, risk creating flat and texture-less images instead of something that can only be made with paint, but they’re necessary if an artist wants to advance the aesthetic, further our understanding of painting, or renew our experience of it. Mohamedi, with her phantom physicality and denatured marks, guides us through an uncanny valley of painterly abstraction, but the risks pay off.

​Read More Perhaps it’s by default, reverence, or sentiment that we think of the progenitors of an art movement as having more difficult challenges than those who maintain it. But artists in the lineage of painterly abstraction increasingly face a new kind of problem, which verges on paradoxical: how does an artist advance an aesthetic when the … Continue reading “Sacred Witness Sacred Menace” 

Desert X is an exhibition that exists in two modalities. One is in the physical world – the actual sites of the work scattered throughout the Coachella Valley The other is the virtual world of media – both that produced by Desert X, and the ad-hoc user-generated documentation via social media. After a year of existing primarily in the virtual world of online shows and artist talks via Zoom, the virtual mode does not feel as ancillary as it may have in years past.

I’ve come late to Desert X, partly by design. As someone who has recently taken to putting art outdoors, I wanted to see how the pieces were holding up. How they were doing, now that their work was almost done.[1] This is what’s exciting about art displayed in this way. The elements act upon the work over time, and no two visits to the work are ever the same. No track lighting, no climate control, the work lives and breathes outdoors the way it can’t in a museum, and It’s easy to oversimplify and consider the desert as a “blank canvas,” but the works this year (at least the ones I want to highlight in this writing) resist the temptation, and are site-specific in a way that is refreshing. The desert in this year’s show is a site where people live, where history has happened, that is connected in many ways to other deserts around the world.

It’s also late in the day as I make the short hike to Zahrah Alghamdi’s What Lies Behind the Walls. The sun casts longer and longer shadows, before they evaporate altogether as the sun dips behind the mountains, and will eventually leave me and the work in that still bright but directionless light that exists before actual sunset, but after the sun has disappeared.

Alghamdi’s piece is in part about human connection, though at the moment I find myself alone with it, and am grateful for that. I play in the long shadow cast by the wall (that calls to mind perhaps ironically the border wall prototypes of the Trump era). From one side, its lit side, the piece is very imagistic in nature. Layer upon layer of undulating material make up this monolith, all in hues of reddish-brown interspersed with grey-green. It both melds with and stands apart from the landscape, it is a paradox –– a concrete abstraction.

From the shadow side, the piece becomes more architectural, juxtaposed with the developed area surrounding it. Moving from one side of the wall to another is a key part of answering the question posed by the title. The scale of the wall – tall, but easy enough to walk around, suggests that the landscape is big enough so that any barriers are, ultimately, circumventable. We don’t need to fly, only to be willing to walk far enough.

As Zahrah Alghamdi’s work connects one desert with another, so does The Wishing Well, an extension of Serge Attukwei Clottey’s on-going Yellow Brick Road project. Clottey’s installation comprises two large cubes connected by a walkway, all covered with a mosaic of yellow plastic squares. The squares are from cooking oil jugs introduced to the artist’s native Ghana by Europeans for transporting cooking oil. That the jugs were largely repurposed to carry water suggests a shared fate between the two locales. Indeed, this connection struck a little too close to home for its initial intended locale, the city of Coachella in the eastern part of the Coachella Valley.

The piece sits in a park on the northern edge of Palm Springs, a location chosen after the city of Coachella denied the permit to stage the work within their municipality. This was due to concerns that Clottey’s work and the issues of water usage were deemed too sensitive and exploitative of the water issues in the eastern part of the valley. Perhaps the community is being too sensitive, and perhaps Desert X, as an organization, didn’t do enough outreach. An article from the Desert Sun can be found here.

The park is one of the few grassy spots I encounter on the trip. Grass has begun to grow out from in between the squares, in contrast to the unbroken yellow sheet portrayed in the official images. The cubes in this way take on a different meaning in this sense – they are the protectors of some measure of grass, as the area immediately surrounding the installation has been worn bare by foot traffic.  

Alicja Kwade’s ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds) is another work that juxtaposes the architectural with the natural. Five interlocking steel frames of various sizes cradle 4 chunks of marble. The frames are not aligned around any particular center (perhaps thence the title – “near the pivot”?) The predictable perspective shift of a rectangular frame takes on a musical quality due to their varying sizes and asymmetrical interlocking. The positioning of the marble blocks feels more and less stable as one views it from different angles. From one angle, a chunk of marble feels secure, resting soundly on its steel support, but from a quarter turn around the piece, it appears ready to fall out at any moment. The piece has rhythm, it has contrast, and it does suggest a delicately balanced ecosystem.

Desert X is a festival that exists as much online in media as it does in its actual locations. This isn’t really a criticism, as our (almost) post-pandemic world has learned virtual existence is perhaps on par in importance with our physical one. The photos, videos, and other forms of documentation become a necessary part of the works, and some works can’t be fully appreciated or experienced without the images. One such example is Ghada Amer’s Women’s Qualities, with words drawn from the community to reflect femininity “planted” in the ground with native flora growing from them. It’s a very subtle piece – Amer makes no discernible comment on the words chosen, but simply roots them in the community from which they sprung (no puns intended). The words face the sky, and while legible from the ground, it is only in the overhead drone shots that the full composition is perceivable. Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger is similar in this regard; the stark triangle only becomes apparent at altitude; the shape’s wayfinding clarity contrasts with the disorienting experience of walking through the piece.

Xaviera Simmons’ Because Ultimately You Know We Will Band A Militia is another such piece, but for a different set of circumstances. As a series of billboards situated along the Gene Autry Trail in the northeast corner of Palm Springs, one is drawn through the exhibition space at the speed of traffic. Her work is arresting, but one is not able to stop and contemplate the words: “Rupture your guilt amnesia.” “You are now entering the reparations framework.” Some of the messages are at least perceivable from a passing car. Some – “You keep our most brilliant minds in a perpetual loop of articulating and translating the ramifications of your systemic generational plunder” – arre not. It uses the billboard as a familiar, comfortable form of communication, while simultaneously subverting our ability to perceive it in an instant and move on. The words are sticky, like burs one might pick up hiking through the desert. They grab hold of any fabric, and it’s only once one reaches the destination that one is able to unpack them.

In a conversation with Zahrah Alghamdi, Simmons says we “have to get comfortable with some of the language that lets the country understand itself.” The tendency to diminish the country’s racist legacy, and this I think echoes her response to many critics’ take on the 2019 Venice Biennale as not “radical” enough. This language shouldn’t be radical, it should be as commonplace as a Big Mac on a billboard. We should be as comfortable talking about abolition and reparations as we are about real estate and accident lawyers.

Nicholas Galanin’s Never Forget is another work that is initially encountered by car. It, too, is arresting. As I see it from the car approaching the stoplight at N. Palm Canyon from Gateway Dr., encountering the piece makes me catch my breath. It’s startling to encounter, and the piece is one that works as a grand gesture – with any foreknowledge of the Hollywood sign and the relationship of Palm Springs to the entertainment industry, the meaning of the piece is immediately clear. It works immediately, and is open to other interpretations and connections that never stray from the work’s original intent.

The piece is a call to action for the Landback Movement (you can contribute to the GoFundMe here), and points to the history of the development of Hollywood as initially a whites-only development on stolen land. He speaks more on this in this video, and for further reading David Treuer’s recent article in The Atlantic is well worth a read.

My last stop is Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger. I don’t have a timed entry ticket, and it’s 8 am, before any of the ticketed times anyway. However, the piece is open and accessible, and I once again have the art to myself. I walk amongst the makeshift walls, made of panel of woven palm fibers, and the moment is a physical one. In the morning shade created by the walls, the panels creak. It’s timeless, and evocative of movement, and the experience is transported across deserts, and the mythologies of travel across deserts that fill our history and mythologies. When I reach the central courtyard of the piece,the area is half in shadow. I step up on the steps, and feel the sun and hear the traffic and see the developed areas adjacent to the site. I’m firmly back in my own time. I leave the piece, taking a shortcut through a panel that has come detached at one corner from its support. The desert wind has gently worn this piece as well.

Jackrabbit Homestead is phenomenal. The installation as part of Desert X is a welcome addition, but alone doesn’t really do the whole project justice. Seeing her lovingly reconstructed Jackrabbit homestead with the images of the dilapidated ones she has photographed is quite an experience. You can (and should) view more of this project at Kim Stringfellow’s website – https://kimstringfellow.com/portfolio_page/jackrabbit-homestead/.

This project serves as a nice inversion to the physical/virtual relationship established in the other works. Stringfellow’s photography is a record of the effects of time on such a homestead, while the physical presence is the idealized version of its subject.

Time, and light. Wind, and temperature. Sound, and touch. To borrow from the title of a Rackstraw Downes essay and eponymous book, “nature and art are physical.” So is knowledge, and surely so is the desert. It’s good to be back out in the world.

[1] Though the exhibition is officially over, several of the works remain on display for a few more weeks. Check the website for details.

​Read More Desert X is an exhibition that exists in two modalities. One is in the physical world – the actual sites of the work scattered throughout the Coachella Valley The other is the virtual world of media – both that produced by Desert X, and the ad-hoc user-generated documentation via social media. After a year of … Continue reading “Desert X 2021: Places and Ideas” 

Each of the five exhibitions currently on view at the California African American Museum (CAAM, www.caamuseum.org) stands on its own, but it is the sum total that makes the trip to Exposition Park worthwhile. On the whole, it’s intellectually, emotionally, historically, and contemporarily engaging. There’s a lot to see, but it’s digestible and not as overwhelming as some of the big-ticket museums in town. The fall offerings at CAAM find a balance between the “history” function of a museum and the “art” side of it. Art without history has no context, and history without art lacks emotion.

*The Notion of Family* traces African-American identity as defined through notions of family over generations. It has context and feeling. The exhibition features a number of artists and a variety of works, from historical documents, to documentary art, to art. A number of Gordon Park’s photographs from the mid-twentieth century complement documentary photos by Tracy Brown from the beginning of this one. William E. Pajaud has a couple of powerful monochromatic lithographs, while the serigraphs of Faith Ringgold explode with color and community. Kadir Nelson’s large oil painting *Stickballers* (2016) is a tense, cinematic scene of early nineteenth century children playing in the street. The vivid complementary reds and cyans bring an immediacy to the nostalgic scene.

It is unbelievable to think that we once had slaves in this country, that is of course until one looks around and sees its legacy alive today. *California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier 1848-1865* engages with the subject of California’s involvement in slavery; first enforcing, later rejecting the Fugitive Slave Law. *Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963* documents a moment in the Civil Rights movement when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of 40,000 at Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field (yes, we had a Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles – it was torn down in 1969). Both exhibitions were curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates (History Curator and Program Manager) and Taylor Bythewood-Porter (Assistant History Curator).

Nina Chanel Abney’s paintings are at their strongest when didactic, such as *Untitled (XXXXXX)* and *Untitled *, which reverse the typical power dynamic of white cop/black man. They’re at the most interesting when that same visual vocabulary is applied in less straightforward ways. The colors and repeated shapes evoke a system of communication, but one that is not predetermined. In this, one sees her inspiration from emoji. Pictographs that are meant to communicate, but in open-ended and combinatorial ways. She applies bold, supersaturated colors in solid fields. Like any good story, the full effect of each piece unfolds over time. Layers of reference from pop culture, the news, Internet terminology, cartoons, and scenes of racial inequity vibrate next to each other as do her impeccably selected hues. Abney’s paintings all seem just about to get out of hand, but a deft sense of humor keeps it all together. The pieces create this layering effect similar to having multiple screens and windows open at any one time: syntax gets jumbled, letters become shapes become colors, and yet something coherent still manages to come forth.

Layers of history, personal reference, and spiritual symbolism permeate the works of Robert Pruitt. Like Abney, he’s a figurative painter as well. But whereas Abney’s figures are highly chromatic, graphically abstracted, mediated figures — Pruitt’s large-scale figures rendered in charcoal, conté, and coffee are immediate, and evoke empathy and emotion. The title of the show is *Devotion*, and religious practices is a recurring theme in the work. In Pruitt’s world, the spiritual is omnipresent. *I turned myself into myself* depicts a woman in repose, her face glowing with what appears to be a heavenly, blue light. The light actually is emanating from a clip-on reading light, clipped into her own hair. A page from a Silver Surfer comic depicting that character’s origin suggest that spiritual revelation can com from the most unlikely of sources. There’s also a strain of techno-optimistic Afro-futurism within the work, embodied by a piece title *Archangel*, which depicts a drone carrying, among other things, a shirt with the words “I can’t breathe” emblazoned on it. The piece suggests the power of inverse surveillance, or sousveillance, may have for correcting injustices visited upon the black community by the criminal justice system. This piece sits directly across the gallery from John Thomas Riddle Jr.’s 1973 mixed-media assemblage *Pieces at Hand, Spirit versus Technology Series*, which also suggests a link between technology and spirituality. Mar Hollingsworth, curator of the exhibition, points out that Pruitt selected certain artifacts and pieces from CAAM’s collection to supplement the work (among them a John Outterbridge sculpture, two John Biggers lithographs, a headdress from the Yoruba of Nigeria, and a wig belonging to Ella Fitzgerald). This combination of museum artifacts and art pieces remind the viewer that art is never divorced from the culture and history that give rise to it. Still, the real stars of the show are the figures themselves. There’s a real sense of individuality – highly specific and yet fir The drawings are layered, figures rendered in charcoal on coffee ground, adorned with clothing and other accoutrement rendered in rich red conté. Though rendered in humble materials, the figures carry themselves and hold the page with a regal elegance. Pruitt is a superb draughtsman, able to capture gestures that are but tics, a fleeting glance, a loaded exhale. The figures flit between poised concealment and spontaneous revelation.

*Robert Pruitt: Devotion* is on view through February 17, 2019. *Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush* is up until January 20, 2019; and *California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848-1865* comes down the day after. *Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963* and *The Notion of Family* are both on display until March 3, 2019. Admission to the museum is free, and CAAM is located in Exposition Park, Los Angeles.

​Read More Each of the five exhibitions currently on view at the California African American Museum (CAAM, www.caamuseum.org) stands on its own, but it is the sum total that makes the trip to Exposition Park worthwhile. On the whole, it’s intellectually, emotionally, historically, and contemporarily engaging. There’s a lot to see, but it’s digestible and not as … Continue reading “2 monogrammatic shows, 2 historical exhibitions, and a familial notion” 

“All meaning accrues in duration.”
-Ken Burns*

Memory, nostalgia, duration, rhythm, repetition — time. A Journey That Wasn’t purports to show works of contemporary art that “[consider] complex representations of time.” It’s a pretty open brief, but one that allows for an unexpected and playful grouping of works from in and around the vast Broad collection. I’ve been a couple of times now, including once with a group of my film students. It’s an exhibition deserving of repeat visits.

A series of trompe l’oeil paintings by Ed Ruscha are the first to greet the viewer. The diptych Azteca/Azteca in Decline (2007) sets up one of the show’s primary themes — decay. Three smaller paintings, Atlas, Index, and Bible (all 2002) suggest a guidebook of some kind, but give only the exquisitely painted surface of such on raw linen.

Seated Woman (1999-2000), a life-like, but not life-size, old woman by Ron Mueck sits contemplatively next to the fireplace of Toba Kheedori’s wall-sized Untitled (Black Fireplace) (2006). The woman is small against the vast white wall, and there is a tension between her size and her level of detail, a tension reflected in the foreboding black surrounding the warm fireplace.

The docent was discussing Mueck’s sculpture with my students, and it’s use of scale as a perceptual point of friction. She went on to expound upon another phenomenon of the work that only becomes apparent in the photographing of it. When photographing the sculpture in profile, another person can stand just beyond the woman, and in the resulting photograph (due to the camera’s flattening of depth) the woman appears to be life-size. However, in shooting the same subject, this time with the person on the same plane as the sculpture, her true small scale is revealed.

To a group of film students, this was an interesting aside, but not a revelation. We’re all familiar with the technique of forced perspective; the cinema has been making small things appear larger than they are since the beginning. What was striking about this demonstration is that it called attention to the realtionship of photographic (or at least photorealistic) representation to the work in the exhibition. Perhaps it is an assumption taken for granted that in representing time in the ways the exhibition does, concrete objects are necessary. We can consider the effects of time on things more easily than we can as an abstract phenomenon. Aging and decay are processes that act on people and things. And much of the subjects represented are indeed humans, which are, to use Heidegger’s term, beings-in-time. That is, to be human is to experience time. We have memories of things past, an awareness of the aging and death that awaits us, and in between a slippery conception of the present, of time to be spent, used, wasted, etc. Photography and cinematography both have direct, formal relationships to time, and so it is fitting that much of the work falls into these categories.

Andreas Gursky’s F1 Boxenstopp series is on display. The large-sized frozen moments of Formula One pit crews have all the drama and visual density of a high Renaissance tableau, while strong horizontal lines and symmetry provide visual stability in the works. Elsewhere, the black and white Water Towers (1972) series from his teachers, Berne and Hilla Becher, share a room with Gregory Crewdson’s (also black and white) photographs of Rome’s derelict Cinecittà Studios from 2009. Seeing the site of cinematic production in decay through the lens of an artist who uses the tools of cinema to evoke scenes of suburban decay. It’s an interesting inversion of his conventional oeuvre (I’m thinking here of his Hover series, which is also black and white, and his Twilight and Dream House series), like flipping the card over and seeing the other side of an artist’s work, or like some perverse making-of featurette.

The eponymous Pierre Huyghe film, A Journey That Wasn’t (2006) operates with its own internal inversion. The film is part documentary, part operatic performance of light and music, intercutting Huyghe’s journey to Antarctica in search of an albino penguin with a staged recreation of that journey on an ice rink in Central Park. Slow, undulating icescapes in washed out blue contrast with pulsating tungsten stage lighting in Central Park. The cold, misty Antarctic is replaced in its recreation with fog machines pumping out atmosphere. In Antarctica, the camera does find the elusive penguin, whereas in Central Park an animatronic version of same is presented exclusively in silhouette. Viewing the actual event with the dramatized memory of it juxtaposed in real time suggests that perhaps reality, or the human experience of it, resides in the mediating of an experience – a necessary precondition for the sharing of an experience. The story behind the piece is that during the course of this journey, Huyghe was able to encounter lands previously inaccessible due to the ravages of climate change. In this way, the journey that was planned is perhaps the titular “journey that wasn’t,” and the journey as staged in Central Park is also clearly not the journey that happened.

In cinema, the camera is always encountering its subject – whether that subject is sought out by the operator documentary style, or whether it is placed deliberately in the lens’ field of view. There is a phenomenological cohesion between the shots of the actual journey to the Antarctic and the staged recreation in Central Park (simply put, they’re both sets of filmed images, and the camera never questions the veracity of what it captures). In a work that questions where the reality of the journey lies (what was the journey?), its filmic presentation provides some clues. The heat, the fog, the smoke in the Central Park recreation say something about climate change that the mute Antarctic landscape cannot. However, the documentary evidence of the voyage is as important to the meaning of the work as is the emotionally inflected restating, as the film is a response to a very real encounter with the effects of climate change.

Reality necessitates fiction in its expression, documentation requires imagination in (re)presentation. This juxtaposition between documented reality and recreated memory also serves as brackets for the rest of the exhibition.

If A Journey That Wasn’t offers a juxtaposition between the filmed reality and the cinematic presentation, then Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) creates a unified transformation of one space into another. Specifically, a farm house in disrepair is transformed into the installation comprising nine high-definition projections, each with its own audio feed. The tableau include musicians with their instruments in various rooms of the Rokeby farm house in upstate New York. The musicians all wear headphones, and are all contained within the bounds of a frame (though one or two may break those edges at various times), thus isolating themselves from each other visually, but united aurally. The ensemble all play the same song, drifting in and out of unison, building and releasing intensity over the course of roughly one hour.

“There are stars exploding around you,” begins one line of the song.

The view within each frame does not move. The subjects inside do, minimally. They smoke, they fidget, they sing, they play an instrument. Space is evoked via sound, and the viewer is compelled to move amid the silence by its call. The viewer can consider each individual (though some frames are occupied by more than one subject), but never outside of the context of the rest of the set. Any “lessons” drawn from the piece feel too simplistic to articulate — it’s a complex emotional experience of the conflation of aloneness and togetherness that one must feel for herself.

“And there’s nothing, nothing you can do,” it continues.

Maybe the cinematic subject is always a tragic subject — its fate always already sealed. Once an event is captured on camera, it always unfolds in a way that is phenomenologically real, yet already predetermined. The piece is movingly sad and exuberantly joyful. The imagery is very nice, but it is the three-dimensional experience of the music, the unexpected voice rising above the others from the other side of the installation, that gives the piece its emotional impact. But, like most of the works in the exhibition, that impact unfolds slowly over time.

What you can do is visit the exhibition — it’s up until early February 2019 — and give yourself plenty of time when you do. There is much more to see than mentioned here, including Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat Portrait Studio Series (which also occasions a screening of the documentary film in October at REDCAT in conjunction with the exhibition), and works by Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, and more — over 20 in total.

General admission to the Broad is free, advanced reservations are recommended.
www.thebroad.org

*Kennedy, Randy (October 20, 2006). “The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation”  *The New York Times*. Retrieved August 31, 2018

​Read More “All meaning accrues in duration.” -Ken Burns* Memory, nostalgia, duration, rhythm, repetition — time. A Journey That Wasn’t purports to show works of contemporary art that “[consider] complex representations of time.” It’s a pretty open brief, but one that allows for an unexpected and playful grouping of works from in and around the vast Broad collection. … Continue reading “A Journey That Absolutely Was”