"It's Personal!" + Best Art & Film of 2021

It’s Personal

+ The Best of 2021 in Art and Film

JAN/FEB 2022

JonMarc Edwards INTEGRATING MATTER Dec. 19, 2021 - Jan.16, 2022

Matter Studio Gallery 5080 West Pico Blvd, LA CA 90019 www.matterstudiogallery.com

GREG MILLER FLASHBACKS

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY 2525 Michigan Avenue E-1, Santa Monica CA 90404 www.williamturnergallery.com 310.453.0909

December 11 - January 29, 2022

Luna Anaïs Gallery presents

VIGIL AUNTIE

Ranee Henderson Jan. 8 - Feb. 26 Artist Talk · Jan. 30

Presented at LAST Projects 206 South Avenue 20 Los Angeles CA 90031

Luna Anaïs Gallery www.lunaanais.com @lunaanaisgallery 323-474-9319

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Raffi Kalenderian Before the Moon Falls January 22 - March 5, 2022

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

WATER, EARTH & FIRE

Courtney Mattison, Hope Spots: Coral Triangle II, 2015, glazed stoneware and porcelain

January 29 – April 16

Palos Verdes Art Center

pvartcenter.org

BENDIX NIGHT FEBRUARY 19 2022

AN OPEN HOUSE FOR THE GALLERIES AND ARTIST STUDIOS IN THE BENDIX BUILDING

1206 MAPLE AVE LOS ANGELES, CA 90015 213 627 3754 BENDIX-BUILDING.COM

© Cara Romero

N OW O P E N

1151 Oxford Road | San Marino, CA 91108 | huntington.org

HOSTILE WITNESS LAD DECKER

LADDECKER.COM

LADDECKER

Projects Gallery at Tin Flats 1989 Blake Ave Los Angeles CA 90031 Gallery Hours Thurs- Sun 12-6pm & by appt

ERNEST ROSENTHAL

prof emer

80 YEAR RETRO/INTROSPECTIVE JANUARY 15 - FEBRUARY 27 2022

102 BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION JAN 23

lastprojects.org

ernestrosenthal.com

ACTIVATION Featured Artists: April Bey Carla Jay Harris Keith Collins Mark Steven Greenfield Paul Stephen Benjamin

JANUARY 22 - APRIL 17, 2022 @LANCASTERMOAH

@MOAHLANCASTER

Lancastermoah.org | 661-723-6250 | 665 W. Lancaster BLVD, Lancaster, CA 93534 Image Credit: April Bey. Title: COLONIAL SWAG: First Edition Atlanticans, Digital print stapled into eco fur on panel 30 x 24, 2021

Table of Contents VOLUME 16, ISSUE 3, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022

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It’s Personal F E AT U R E S Top 10 LA Shows 2021 - by ezrha jean black Calliope Pavlides - by kate caruso Allison Janae Hamilton - by annabel keenan Hung Viet Nguyen - by genie davis Leila Weefur - by barbara morris Top 10 Films 2021 - by scarlet cheng Van A Gogh-Gogh! - by natasha boyd

26 30 32 36 40 44 54

C O LU M N S DECODER: What Art Should Do - by zak smith 24 BUNKER VISION: Baby Jane’s Doll - by skot armstrong 56 SIGHTS UNSCENE: Torrance Art Museum - by lara jo regan 58

C O N T I N U E D

»

ON THE COVER: Hung Viet Nguyen, Sacred Landscape V #32, (detail) oil, 48 x 84 in., courtesy of the artist.

ABOVE: Calliope Pavlides, Pyro, 2021, soft pastel and colored pencil on paper.

RIGHT: Allison Janae Hamilton, Waters of a Lower Register, 2020, (detail) Fivechannel video, courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York & Aspen, ©Allison Janae Hamilton.

NEXT PAGE, Top: “Queer Communion: Ron Athey,” installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photo by Jeff McLane/ICA LA. Bottom: Mary Weatherford, The Birds of Kilauea Point, 2021, photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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Table of Contents continued

From the Editor Dear Reader,

50 40 D E PA R T M E N T S 18 20 22 60 60 63

SHOPTALK: LA Art News by scarlet cheng MEDIA: CODAworx by seth hawkins BOOKS: Street Art & Soccer by anthony ausgang ASK BABS: Baby Steps by babs rappleye POEMS by john tottenham; daniel crook COMICS: Sour Grapes by butcher & wood

R E V I E W S Disassembly Line @ SPY Projects / Molly’s Garage Nancy Lorenz @ GAVLAK Bernardo Fleming @ Institute for Art & Olfaction Hank Willis Thomas @ Kayne Griffin Laura Lima @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Mary Weatherford @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Sanford Biggers @ CAAM Brendan Lott @ Walter Maciel Gallery David S. Rubin @ CSUN, West Gallery

46 47 47 48 48 50 50 51 51

NY: Ruth Asawa @ David Zwirner

52

58

50 14

“Everything’s political,” I always say when we decide to do yet another political-themed issue. “All art is political,” I repeat in the zoom meeting. Can it be said the same for art that is personal? “It’s Personal,” is our theme for this January issue.

“Everything is personal,” I say once again, feeling a bit of déjà vu. But how can it not be?

Most fiction is derived from personal experience: characters are lifted from real life, dialogue echoes remembered conversations. It is often said that all art is ultimately autobiographical. In fiction and music, it can be obvious that the author is drawing from personal experience. Take Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” series, which was essentially a photographic diary. I find it fascinating that something so personal and gritty as that body of work would appeal to anyone other than the people involved. The goal is to turn something deeply personal into something universal. If it’s done properly, people will relate to it because they’ve been there too. That’s when art is successful.

One of the first real paintings I did—on a panel board, a size to hang on a wall—was in my high school art class. I loved my art teacher; she really inspired and encouraged me—and even seemed to favor me, but I truly think it was because she thought I was talented. She held my painting up to the class: it was of my cat in our tree in the backyard. The cat was situated right in the middle of the trunk where the main branches meet, like a Y. The tree was expressionistically painted with shades of green, the sky was orange, and the cat was painted in a psychedelic pattern with curving lines and neon colors.

“Now this is what a good painting looks like,” the teacher announced to the class. She complimented my application of paint, choice of colors and composition, but then went further. She said it was especially good because I chose a subject that mattered to me, something that was real to me.

I’m not sure that those words were the ones that told me to always follow my heart with my art, but I think they gave me permission to let it all out and never hold back. Diane Arbus told her students to shoot what they feared the most. But there can be pitfalls to bearing one’s soul and being brutally honest. It’s not for everyone, but there are a lot of artists who create highly personal work and want to share that aspect of their life. It can be powerful, therapeutic and cathartic.

On our cover, Vietnamese American artist Hung Viet Nguyen talks about his family, his migration to America, and his personal relationship with nature. His art comes from the heart, and you can see it in the loving care he puts into his paintings. He goes through palette knives like brushes, as he pours his soul into the paint.

Breeze through this issue with the artists that have chosen a path through their art to communicate their pain, their love and their souls. I think you’ll agree that’s it’s personal, and feel it too.

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F E AT U R E D

C O N T R I B U TO R S Genie Davis is a published novelist, journalist and screenwriter. LAbased, she writes for a wide range of publications including Artillery, Art & Cake, Riot Material, Fabrik, Whole Life Times, Tourist Attractions & Parks Magazine, Only in Hollywood, and many others, as well as writing and publishing her own www.diversionsLA.com Natasha Boyd is a writer from Los Angeles with a degree in comparative literature. Her essays cover contemporary literature, art and film. She maintains an optimism of the will and a strong preference for formal over narrative devices.

You can follow her on twitter at @tash_boyd.

Kate Caruso is a Los Angeles-based writer. Selected contributions include Artillery, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Autre and Purple Magazine.

S TA F F Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher

EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Max King Cap - senior editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - copy editor/proof Dave Shulman - graphic design Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tucker Neel, Kelly Rappleye, Laura London

COLUMNISTS Anthony Ausgang, Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Kelly Rappleye, C. Kaye Rawlings, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Emily Babette, Lane Barden, Ezrha Jean Black, Natasha Boyd, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Bianca Collins, Shana Nys Dambrot, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Alexia Lewis, Richard Allen May III, Christopher Michno, Yxta Maya Murray, Barbara Morris, John David O’Brien, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, Cole Sweetwood, Colin Westerbeck, Anne Wallentine, Eve Wood, Catherine Yang, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, Peter Brock, John Haber, Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

ADMINISTRATION

Ezrha Jean Black is a Los Angeles-based writer, whose journalism has devolved from writing about film, theater and music, to covering fashion and fine arts, to her current assignment covering the end of the world. She remains tragically obsessed with beauty, which makes this assignment almost unendurable.

Anthony Ausgang is a Pop Surrealist/Lowbrow painter and writer who combines street attitude with his knowledge of contemporary and historical trends in art and literature.

His paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide but he lives in Los Angeles, CA where his flying saucer recently crashed. www.ausgangart.com.

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Anna Bagirov - sales Mitch Handsone - new media director Catherine Yang - associate communications editor Kelly Rappleye - director of development & digital engagement Rocie Carrillo - production intern

ADVERTISING Anna Bagirov - print sales Mitch Handsone - web sales Artillery, PO Box 26234, LA, CA 90026 213.250.7081, editor@artillerymag.com advertising: 408.531.5643, anna@artillerymag.com; editorial:

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FEB 13–MAY 8, 2022

Fahim Amir Holland Andrews Elke Auer Kevin Beasley Nina Beier Dwayne Brown Dora Budor Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber Varinia Canto Vila

Elaine Carberry L. Frank Charles Gaines Ley Gambucci Piero Gilardi Jules Gimbrone Paul Hamilton Asher Hartman IONE Shannon Jackson

1 MUSEUM

Cooper Jacoby Rindon Johnson Darrell Jones Morag Keil Justin F. Kennedy Jessika Kenney Bob Kil Kite Wayne Koestenbaum Ralph Lemon

Adam Linder Olivia Mole Roderick Murray Mariama Noguera-Devers Nima Nourizadeh Okwui Okpokwasili Pauline Oliveros Aubrey Plaza Senyawa Adania Shibli

Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum

Micah Silver Samita Sinha Meg Stuart Greg Tate Mike Taylor Rosemarie Trockel Andros Zins-Browne

ILLUSTRATION: OLIVIA MOLE, 2021

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S H O P TA L K

Mapa de Los Angeles for Those Killed by Police in 2018, Sandy Rodriguez

Fairs Bouncing Back After Pause Frieze returns to Los Angeles after a pause last year due to you know what. This time (February 17–20) it’s bound for a new location next to the Beverly Hilton, in a new structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast and his firm wHY, which created the white tent at previous Frieze LA on the Paramount lot. Leading the return is Christine Messineo, newly appointed director of Frieze LA and New York, with the LA edition featuring over 100 galleries from 17 countries. Also new will be a public art component, Frieze Sculpture Beverly Hills, in Beverly Gardens park, with support from the city of Beverly Hills.

Among the galleries at the main event will be 38 LA-based galleries—(the usual suspects): Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Gagosian, David Kordansky, L.A. Louver, Regen Projects and Various Small Fires (VSF). They will be joined by first-timers Bortolami, Sean Kelly and Galerie Lelong & Co., as well as

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New York returnees Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Marian Goodman, Gallery Hyundai, Pace, Maureen Thaddaeus Ropac, and David Zwirner. So, okay, a pretty heavy-duty array. Given the rather riotous success of Art Basel Miami in early December, Frieze should also benefit from people eager to gawk and gab and buy gobs of art.

Looks like other art fairs will also sprout around that time, including Felix returning to the Roosevelt Hotel, also February 17–20, and a new fair, the Clio Art Fair for “independent artists,” at the Naked Eye Studio on the same weekend. No news on any dates for Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which made an inspired move to the Hollywood Athletic Club in 2020. Apparently, that cost a bundle to launch.

Meanwhile, Intersect comes to Palm Springs Feb. 10–13, with exhibitors, talks and programming at the Palm Springs Convention Center and some other desert

locations. Specifics aren’t out yet as of this writing, but in a brief chat director Becca Hoffman conveyed their commitment to building community and connecting with the local art ecology. Hoffman was formerly director of The Outsider Art Fair. Intersect has already debuted in Aspen and Chicago.

At the start of the year the long-running Los Angeles Art Show returns to the LA Convention Center, January 19–23, after getting off-schedule in 2021 with a summertime session. This show covers both modern and contemporary art, and is making concerted efforts to be more relevant with special programming, this year concentrating on the global environment. The new direction is being led by Kassandra Voyagis. “With a focus on the global effects of humankind on the planet,” she said in a press release, “It is the right time to present voices from around the world, and I am excited to facilitate this wonderful event.”

BY

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

On a Roll LA artist Sandy Rodriguez is having a very good year—her work is currently in a solo show, “Sandy Rodriguez in Isolation” (through April 17), at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, plus she’s part of two major exhibitions in the LA area, “Borderlands” at the Huntington Museum (through fall 2022) and “Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes” (through June 12) at LACMA. I love the fact that everything she uses to make her work is carefully considered and contributes to the meaning of the work. For “Borderlands” she created a monumental 8’x8’ map of greater Los Angeles which mines deeper histories of the land. That map—YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Porciúncula /Los Angeles—shows topography, flora and fauna, language and stewardship over time. This work, like much of her oeuvre, is on amate paper, made by a hand-process that predates the Conquest, or the coming of the Spanish to the Americas. It is made from tree bark in a traditional manner involving being pounded by lava rock to bind the fibers. “At the time of the Conquest, it became illegal to make this paper or work on this paper,” she says on a museum video. “If it’s outlaw paper, I’m going to use this paper and tell that story on this sacred paper.” Rodriguez also uses pigments that are mineral and earth-based—in the gallery, there’s a showcase featuring the pigments she uses.

The solo at the Amon Carter features 30 new works-on-paper she created during her stay at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency. It was during a turbulent time of COVID rising and nationwide demonstrations against police brutality, and she looked to the natural world around her to guide her. Studying and collecting native plants, she incorporated them as raw material for this series, which includes landscapes, maps, scenes of protests, and botanical studies. A big congratulations, Sandy!

Photo by Libby Lumpkin.

We Love You, Dave!

DAVE HICKEY (1938–2021) Dave Hickey, who died this past November, at 82 (about a month to the day this is being composed), was in many ways a godfather to Artillery, friendly with its editor and several of its contributors, but more importantly, in his intellectual scope, irreverence, eclecticism and unflagging pursuit of fresh beauties in every medium and across a richly diverse cultural terrain, a guiding critical spirit. Long after the Cool School’s halcyon days (he wrote the catalog essay for Ed Ruscha’s SFMOMA 1982, I Don’t Want No Retrospective) and his years on the rock ‘n’ roll caravan—including songwriting in Nashville, writing for Rolling Stone, and backing up Marshall Chapman’s rhythm section—his essays for LA’s Art Issues tore a swath through the domain of art and cultural criticism as wide and as glittering as the Vegas Strip. His epochal 2001 SITE Santa Fe biennial, “Beau Monde” (which I covered at the behest of Artillery’s editor), was, among other things, a material and architectural dramatization of the art conversation he had himself ignited, and which not so incidentally foregrounded Los Angeles as an art and creative capital. It gives us no small joy to carry his legacy—“bad acting and wrong-thinking;… courageously silly and frivolous;… enthusiastic, noisy;… seductive, destructive”—forward, because (as he said in the same essay), “art doesn’t matter. What matters is how things look and the way we look at them in a democracy ...—as a forum of contested values where we vote on the construction and constituency of the visible world.” —Ezrha Jean Black

Other News

One of the top five art books of the year cited

by NPR’s Heller McAlpin is “Master of the Midcentury: The Architecture of William F. Cody,” authored by Catherine Cody, Jo Lauria and Don Choi. Cody helped create the sleek postwar Palm Springs look and designed a number of celebrated buildings still standing, including the Del Marcos Hotel and the Palm Springs Public Library. Yes, you can stay at the Del Marcos and enjoy the updated Mid-century furnishings and the central swimming pool outside your door. Catherine Cody is his daughter. Other books on the list are “Woman Made: Great Women Designers,” “Bird: Exploring the Winged World, “The Unwinding: and other dreamings,” and “William Morris.”

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EXTREME PUBLIC ART CODAworx Takes Over the Desert

BY SETH HAWKINS

CODAsummit 2021 was marked by an in-person conference in Scottsdale, AZ which coincided with the dramatic light/ art/water event titled Canal Convergence. While there was a COVID-friendly digital component for those not in attendance, the turnout was relatively staggering—a volume of renowned artists, museum directors and some of the heaviest global art fabrication companies all making the trek to the Arizona desert.

For those not familiar with CODAworx—simply put, it is an organization with a purpose of bringing together the needed elements to create public art on a massive scale. CODAworx touts itselves as “the hub of the commissioned art economy.”

It is a singular place where those commissioning art can link to creatives, fabricators, engineers and most any others needed to actualize a project. A thrilling announcement at the conference was that CODAworx is nearing the $2 billion mark for commissioned public works; Yes, billion with a B. The conference wasted no time diving into controversial issues around both COVID and problems with the traditional art institution model. Christy MacLear (inaugural CEO of SUPERBLUE, Rauschenberg Foundation, etc.) moderated a panel with artist and museum professionals that addressed The Reimagined Museum. The theme that continued to surface during this panel was how COVID regulations forced the archaic museum model to finally adapt, with new ideas, contemporary programming systems and nontraditional methods for engaging the public.

Jeremy Strick (Director, Nasher Sculpture Center) spoke about the series of the “Nasher Windows” exhibitions that were presented to remain relevant during a time of nonpublic gathering.

It’s worth noting that nearly all changes made in programing during COVID were highly successful and will be remaining in some context moving forward.

CODAworx organized presenters in a grounding dualistic approach, with conceptual art conversations were followed by tangible presentations such as the talk by Daniel Tobin, co-founder of fabrication powerhouse UAP. Daniel addressed the current need for manufacturing on a global scale—UAP has a facility in Australia, China and New York—but also the menagerie of difficulties that come from manufacturing public art on that scale.

The final component of CODAworx is the actual creative, the artist. Plenty of interesting presentations focused on the use of solar panels, robots or some tech in the artwork, but the standout artist was one with a far more traditional process. Los Angeles painter Ryan Sarfati, aka Yanoe, found his artistic footing while straddling large-format mural production with an AR twist. Yanoe takes both his moniker and learned skillsets from a prolific youth of graffiti painting in LA. He now applies them to world record setting murals as a part of a two-artist team—Oh Yanoe, LLC. The Majestic is a 15,000 square-foot mural in Tulsa, OK, which was finished in 2021 and is officially the world’s largest AR mural. This is not the first time Oh Yanoe has held the record, just the most recent. Their murals integrate community focused imagery and are inherently bright, stunning and dramatic to the naked eye. If the viewer chooses to employ the AR component it all starts to get real. Portions of the mural morph, hummingbirds fly off the wall, flowers grow and engulf the building. This is something new, and something great that builds on traditions we embrace.

Art and technology have been integrally related throughout the trajectory of human history with our current day and age being no exceptions. CODAsummit 2021 exemplified how many of our world’s foremost creatives are pushing the boundaries, working on global issues, and adding beauty into this world through the integration and use of technology in public art.

Arc ZERO: Oculus, James Tapscott (Melbourne, Australia); photo by: Chris Loomis.

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Reserve tickets at pacificasiamuseum.usc.edu

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The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art

By Mitja Velikonja 176 pages DoppelHouse Press

STREET ART & SOCCER REVIEWED BY ANTHONY AUSGANG

B O O K

R E V I E W

I got some bad ideas in my head—Celjski grofje, fans of FC Celjski; sticker; Trojane, Slovenia; 2015.

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Graffiti and street art are often considered synonymous since they affect the urban environment in similar ways. But graffiti is onomastic: the essential purpose is to advertise one’s presence; it’s the big “I am” that challenges metropolitan anonymity.

That is also achieved with latrinalia, slogans and phrases that serve as necessary disruption of daily life. Graffiti is a platform for outsider political and social activism among those who consider themselves silenced or purposefully omitted from larger societal colloquies.

Unlike street art, which is generally sanctioned and can remain an element of the street for an extended amount of time, graffiti is illegal and temporary. Consequently, some writers and sticker-bombers prefer membership in a group from which graffitaro can anonymously promote that to which they pledge allegiance. In Europe, soccer fans known as ultras typically design and produce their own stickers, pasteups and wall pieces promoting their favorite Football Club (FC). These remarkable DIY designs are featured in Mitja Velikonja’s scholarly illustrated book The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art, which examines the relationship between European soccer teams and their graffiti-oriented, street activist fans.

Velikonja posits that sticker bombing and stenciling reveal how soccer fan graffiti is never ideologically neutral or apolitical, and the statements being made often cover more than a single issue. The observation that soccer is a “means by the powerful to pit workers against workers in competition and as a potential tool for nationalism” means that in some cases the graffiti is about intense societal differences as well as sports rivalry. In The Chosen Few, Velikonja discusses such direct display of political preferences and values, as well as fans’ self-image and the recognizable aesthetics of their stickers or stencils.

Much of the graffiti and street art in The Chosen Few relies on altered versions of iconography already familiar to the public. This ensures that passersby, attracted by the striking image, will examine the sticker long enough to parse that it’s promoting a specific soccer team. For example, one sticker bomber fan of Slovenian Celje Football Club uses a metonymic image of Travis from the film Taxi Driver and the line “I got some bad ideas in my head” to express their disdain for other teams and non-fan society in general. The negative side of this “economy of means” is that present-day advocates of the extreme right resort to displaying swastikas and other Nazi symbols to promote their favorite soccer club, even though ironically, that team might have nothing to do with such ideology.

Although graffiti is an ancient method of visual communication, it is only in the last 20 years that it has matured to become a familiar element of self-expression in the urban arena. Consequently, Velikonja’s analyses are an essential addition to any discussion about the connection between football and graffiti, as well as its effect on social affairs in the streets. To be sure, an abundance of facts is necessary to support a thesis, but in this case it weighs down the fascinating nature of the subject. Velikonja’s exhaustive research makes The Chosen Few so dense that, while a compelling read, it could use a little more about markers and less about Marx.

Kellogg University Art Gallery, Bldg. 35A California State Polytechnic University, Pomona 3801 W. Temple Ave. Pomona, CA 91768

Exhibiting On-site site: Jan 18 - Mar 27, 2022

Mariona Barkus Chess Brodnick Claudia Casarino Gerald Clarke Keiko Fukazawa Mark Steven Greenfield Brian Ida Walterio Iraheta Tracy Keza Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

BLACK, WHITE, & SHADES OF GREY Artists’ Reception: Reception Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2-4pm Virtual Exhibition Coming Soon: Soon cpp.edu/kellogg-gallery

Gallery Hours

Mon-Tue: 4-8pm Fridays: Closed Wed-Thu: 12-4pm Sat-Sun: 12-4pm

Kellogg: (909) 869-4302

artgalleries@cpp.edu

Kellogg University Art Gallery

@kelloggandhuntley

cpp.edu/kellogg-gallery @cppartgalleries

W. KEITH & JANET

KELLOGG UNIVERSITY AR T GALLERY

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The Truth Is Out There, Somewhere

BY ZAK SMITH

D E C O D E R

Illustration by Zak Smith

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Who doesn’t like a bit of mystery? But where are they keeping it these days?

There are certainly unknowns—when will this pandemic really end? Did they really do that? But mystery is not the same as a mystery. True crime, for example, isn’t mysterious. In the end either one kind of crime was committed or another was. If the killer is eventually revealed, it’s extremely satisfying… and far less mysterious. A true mystery feels mysterious every time you see it.

True mystery gathers around something unknowable but compelling: fields of humanoid fossils in the Rift Valley, incunabula deep in the Bodleian or Vatican libraries, the heart of the sun.

Any art old enough to also be an artifact can feel mysterious just by dint of having been made by long-vanished minds we’ll never have a chance to know—but newer art summoning mystery is a neat trick. Francis Bacon did it, after so many surrealists failed, perhaps because his distortions seemed so necessarily to connect to pain (so less playful), Lee Bontecou did it (she made the biotechnohorrorvoid as abstraction before Alien made it literal), Mark Tobey was mysterious on a good day. But, aside from a few aggressive antifashionables like Jeronimo Elespe and Danny McCaw, “summoning mystery” tends not to be on the contemporary artist’s list of ambitions. Why? For one thing, we live in an age of explication. Seconds after hearing about a thing for the first time, we are googling up a gloss on it. The truth is out there, or at least several plausibly mundane competing theories.

We use explication in so many ways: explication-as-advertising (for the explicator or the explicated), explication-as-entertainment (What happened at Chernobyl? Who is this Tiger King?), explication-as-critique (or, more commonly, backdoor insult).

For another thing, it’s really hard to be both mysterious and funny— and since at least Warhol, it’s been hard to accuse anyone of genius unless they have “wit.” Giving up on wit looks like giving up on self-awareness, and in an age of social media that’s the only defense most of us have.

Science and the fictions science engenders seem less mysterious every day: our current style of public speculation tends to be less in the direction of what? and why? and more in the direction of how soon will we solve it? and how horrible will we be about it when we do? Science seems increasingly about us. About what kind of bad will we be with our new machines and new genes? Nothing could be less mysterious.

Is our music mysterious? Hip hop is the least mysterious form: the thrill has always been in how blatant it is. The orchestration and collage required of electronic music, on the other hand, can be mysterious, but it always seems to need help: a dancehall, a drug, a movie—it needs to be part of a larger dream.

Dreams will never go anywhere: that’s a good sign, for mystery. But are we putting any stock in dreams these days?

Religion is dream-adjacent, but lately we understand religion primarily as a social divider or a form of self-help—which makes it eager to explicate itself. Faith behaves now as if its survival depends on being de-mystified.

Artists in Western Europe stopped asking Why the Crucifixion? and Why the Resurrection? in the middle of the last century and the rest of the world is far too practical to spend any time wrestling with such things. Maybe in Latin America? But there the low-hanging peach flesh of infinitely discussable topics like gender, sexuality and colonialism are always close at hand. Issues are not mysteries—issues are vital, urgent, they have right and wrong answers, they can get you killed. It’s not safe to get caught messing with the ineffable when there are issues afoot.

This points to the absence of the most mysterious thing: god. Which I’m fine with, really, but you can see why people try to find substitutes in star charts or tarot cards: there is a dark and luxurious sense of privacy, intimacy and infinity that takes over when you become convinced that something really depends on how you handle being alone in a room with a metaphor.

To be pressed to puzzle out the truth from inert and inarticulate matter in a way no expert or psychiatrist could know better than you—that’s tremendously exciting. I would like more artists to try it.

QUADRANT OPENING RECEPTION: SAT. JAN 22, 6-9 PM

MASON

NGUYEN

Pilosus nuces orbis

Repetition of Difference

Tony Brown, Gioj de Marco, Carolyn Mason, Andre Yi

Asad Faulwell, Ibuki Kuramochi, Khang Nguyen, Alicia Piller, Brian Randolph, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Linnea Spransy, Kayla Tange

ROCKFORD

MORRIS

Out of Bounds

Nocturnal I

Brody Albert, Daniel Boccoto, Tanya Brodsky, Scott Froschauer, Ashley Hagen, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Anne Libby, Karen Lofgren

Dan Bayles, Linda Connor, John Divola, Eve Luckring, Rodney McMillian, Avan Smith, Martin Sturm

Gallery Two & Dark Room

LYNCHLAND: Genre, Auteurism and a Fish in the Percolator JAN 22 - MAR 12, 2022

HOURS OF OPERATION: Tues - Sat, 11am - 5pm (Closed on major holidays) Always FREE to the public.

Masks required for entrance.

Featured artists: Susan Ankersen, Alison Blickle, Polly Borland, Debra Broz, Matt Bucy, Bill Dane, Robert Gober, Tomoo Gokita, Tim Hawkinson, Trulee Hall, Shana Moulton, Penelope Umbrico, Tim Youd.

Curated by Tom Dunn and Steve Wolkoff

3320 Civic Center Drive Torrance, CA 90503

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Top 10 Picks of 2021

BY EZRHA JEAN BLACK I resisted compiling this list (the limitations of which are obvious); but then thought: “Wait! In this awkward year of slow emergence from a pandemic that may never really be over, how many really great shows could there actually be?” Until, as I went over the shows that had intrigued me enough to write, review, recommend, it was clear there were more than 20 of them. There are a number of reasons why this might be, beginning with the fact that artists and curators both understand that there is no time to lose; that anything is possible; and that there is no point in risking less than everything.

Still a few criteria may apply. As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “If people don’t want to go to the picture, nobody can stop them.”

The same thing applies to public or private art spaces and museums. Should there be any rules to it anymore? Great art is the donné, the baseline, the given. A good narrative helps—a strong, resonant theme and throughline; a provocative theoretical armature—something that moves the conversation forward, but is also ahead of it; something that suggests where we might be going—but also something that excites that conversation—a sound, image, idea, obsession—something you need to invent new ways to think about.

To the extent the list reflects my tastes and biases, I’m saved by the fact that many of the shows provided their own corrective—to the extent they knocked me off-guard with their sheer originality, the electricity of their provocations, their passions, even perfection— rendering bias almost beside the point.

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Queer Communion: Ron Athey Institute of Contemporary Art Conceivably not only the most important art exhibition of the year but the decade and certainly one of the most original—with the willing cooperation and participation of her genius subject, Ron Athey (whose artistic project might be described as the agony and ecstasy of human reinvention and the social pyrotechnics of creating a mythos for it), curator Amelia Jones curated an exhibition that (paraphrasing critic and theorist José Esteban Muñoz) “contest(s) and rewrite(s) the protocols” of such curatorial work and historical interpretation and exploded notions of what an exhibition of performance art might address or encompass.

No Humans Involved Hammer Museum To the extent art affords access to its exceptionally dark foundational legacies (“N.H.I.” functioning as a post-colonialist legacy of subjugation and oppression), the work of contemporary art must ineluctably dissect them and their underlying values and myths, which entails nothing less than a new vocabulary, a language recalibrated and reconfigured to describe new ways of seeing and navigating the freshly exposed terrain. The artists curated into this exhibition brilliantly dismantle such legacies (and their ‘alibis’) with a view to horizons beyond these exorcisms and excavations.

Karen Carson: Middle Ground GAVLAK Within the context of the ways and whys of seeing, Carson’s formal exploration of the juxtapositions of real and illusionistic space, and the ways both physical and virtual dimensions play with our perceptions and preconceptions and undercut any assumptions we may try to make about them, was both cheering and a bracing reminder that the hypothetical ‘middle ground’ between the ‘single thing’ and what might be open and ever expanding, might be the grandest illusion of them all.

Roland Reiss: The Castle of Perseverance Diane Rosenstein Gallery I arrived late to the party that was the work of Roland Reiss and I regret that I never told him directly just how much joy his phosphorescent (he called them “unapologetic”) flower paintings brought me. I wrote on a 2018 Instagram post that those paintings “let us celebrate the beauty even as we cursed the darkness.” But that’s life, baby; and Reiss’ work celebrated the whole of it—from its ‘castles’ to the private hells our myths and morality tales construct for us.

Reiss captured us in the maze—with all our tools, devices, pleasures,

ideals, hopes, ambitions, anger, vices and detritus; and from the show’s title work to its “fairy tales” and “morality plays,” I never wanted to leave.

Michelle Stuart: An Archaeology of Place Marc Selwyn Fine Art Simply walking into this show of Stuart’s most recent work was to be instantly struck by a sense of connection, not simply with a “place,” but with Earth itself—with its crust and living surface, its plant life, and the cosmos surrounding us. Stuart’s approach is both material and tactile and analytic; archaeological in terms of the human relationship to the earth and its duration—and awareness of its fragility and ephemerality. This was work that whispered with the impact of a scream.

Susan Silton: WE Luis De Jesus Los Angeles The confrontational aspect of contemporary art does not usually ‘shout to be heard’; nor do its masterworks announce themselves with fanfare or fireworks (or even neon—although the last one I saw did). Silton’s elegant suite of 16 photographic prints taken at the

OPPOSITE PAGE: Kazunori Hamana in collaboration with Yukiko Kuroda, installation view, 2021, ©Kazunori Hamana and Yukiko Kuroda, courtesy of the artists and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/ New York/Tokyo; photo by Dan Finlayson. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Tau Lewis, The Space Congregation (No Surprise to Find the Angels Come Here), 2019; courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Queer Communion: Ron Athey,installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photo by Jeff McLane/ICA LA; Sondra Perry, Typhoon coming on, installation view, 2018; photo by Mike Din, courtesy of the artist. SANGREE, The Grand Design, installation view, 2017; Image courtesy of the artists and Yautepec, Mexico City.

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Armstrong Redwoods Preserve (with pendant text contributed by writer Dana Johnson) were a deep structural dive into the perceptual divide that conditions what we see, and the ways we understand and talk about it—and where that might take us. “Into the woods without delay / But careful not to lose the way.”

Emblazoned World Bel Ami This was the show that provoked that question posed above: are there any rules to this? And here’s the answer: wherever you find something that freshly awakens a sense of the possible. It helps if there’s a personal connection. It can be a space between the utterly commonplace and the fantastical, what curator Lucy Bull referred to in her statement as “the precious detritus of daily life;” though also the “obsessive process” that allows the thought around it “to render,” to wander into “the subconscious.” So here’s the takeaway: If you happen to find any rules in your subconscious, think about throwing them out.

Kelly Akashi François Ghebaly Do you remember that penultimate scene in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where, after his solo space vessel has plunged a few zillion light years through a space portal, Captain David Bowman walks into a room that seems suspended between a kind of Renaissance earth moment and infinite space time? Akashi’s show had similar effect—with its constellation of objects, “crystallographs” (which have an X-ray/scan effect), tree branches, stone and cast crystal—

holding family jewels and heirlooms—and a flower-strewn effigy of the artist herself. In short, the artist was present—passing through us in the very atmosphere we breathed.

Kazunori Hamana in collaboration with Yukiko Kuroda Blum & Poe The show of Hamana’s tsubo vessels—borne out of the earth, embellished (or simply patched, by Kuroda) with recovered metals and bits of ceramic or the remains of similar vessels, detritus or simply the stuff of everyday life—might easily have been called a collaboration with nature itself. It transformed the gallery space into a kind of meditative space—really a garden missing only foliage, yet somehow conjuring it—along with courtyards, fields, forests and the infinite horizon beyond.

Witch Hunt Hammer Museum / Institute of Contemporary Art As a political “action,” as curators Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood characterized their exhibition of 15 international artists, Witch Hunt is about four or five years late to the demo—but this is more than made up for by the exhibition’s cultural and political scope and an uninhibited, transdisciplinary range of philosophical perspectives, strategies and media to match its transfeminism. Standout work included that of Shu Lea Cheang, Laura Lima, Teresa Margolles, Lara Schnitger—as well as Vaginal Davis, who alongside Andrea Dworkin, might be called the exhibition’s patron saints.

Roland Reiss, The Castle Of Perseverance, 1978 ©Estate of Roland Reiss

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Where LA Artists Curate Your Experience.

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PRAGMATIC SURREALISM A Journey into the Mind of Calliope Pavlides

BY KATE CARUSO

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Calliope Pavlides engineers her compositions like a to-do list, an Easter egg hunt, or survival kit. Her works on paper for an upcoming exhibition at Harkawik in New York City exist as impossible still lifes and contrary landscapes.

In the wake of a global pandemic, a climate crisis and personal micro-dramas, the Greek-born artist must “place everything on the table” and assess the damages. She works at microscopic levels, portraying a circuit of lemons pumping electricity (Citrus Circuit), or lab apparatus: magnifying glass, bulbs, prisms, circuits (There Simply aren’t Enough Colors on This Planet).

Insects populate her apocalyptic scapes, which depict historic events. Shock to the System features a silhouette of the first hydrogen bomb with an illogical shadow cast over it.

In her works—both still lifes and landscapes, which are often from a birds-eye vantage point, the viewer is given an omnipresent perspective on the happenings below. Pavlides, who received her BFA in 2020 from RISD, looks to her artwork to explore a system of knowledge and faith. Her artworks are cyclical in terms of composition and matter, exploring such themes as weather, and the life cycle of insects and combustion. We all know what happens after you strike a match, as alluded to in the troubling Pyro.

She takes an allegorical interest in weather, utilizing the motif for more challenging matter. The work is mostly reactionary and explores the healing factors of making art—“therapy painting.” But Pavlides’ works are more expedient than emotional.

These specific drawings follow on from her most recent series of paintings, made last year, which were shown at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles. “Seasons of Unraveling” follows a personal apocalypse of unexpected phenomena. Being impacted by these uncontrollable, external forces, Pavlides asks: What are the systems? Who make the systems? In an attempt to break down faith (or faithlessness) and superstition, Pavlides attempts to take control of being a victim of a series of unfortunate events.

One such series took place in the summer of 2021, when Calliope invited 10 guests to join her on a remote Greek island.

Within days of their arrival, everyone began to test positive for COVID-19—all aside from Calliope herself. The island, which has no medical facilities, quickly turned from exotic idyll to total dystopia. After she returned to Athens the city was ablaze with a raging fire. Then there was the jellyfish sting. A few days later, her car exploded on a ferry. A mirror smashed at her feet.

Her plane took off for Mexico to a Richter scale 7 earthquake.

A two-week quarantine in Mexico before entering the US, an already anxiety-filled migratory trip, punctuated by a ritualistic daily rain. These instances are not traumatic nor painful, but rather consistent and relentless. Rigorous. Pavlides considers the notion of “luck” and its antithesis and the invisible forces at play—the rhythms we mistakenly inhabit and how we come to occupy them; how we escape their grip. Pavlides narrates these tragicomedies through her work.

Pavlides appreciates the rules one must abide by in drawing, and notes that the setting of parameters can often open us up to surprising opportunities. It is in the tension between the tender and the technical that her work is most compelling. Her drawings seem at once satirical and analytical, depicting what can sometimes seem like nonsense with the utmost sincerity.

Perhaps it is the sincerity of this work, deftly rendered with color pastels, like velvet on soft paper, that steal the show: an antidote to post-internet art, which looks instead to nature. Perhaps this is what intrigues most: a drawing of a magnifying glass or prism instead of a technical photograph. The notion feels naive, but the expression is anything but.

Opposite: Pyro, 2021, soft pastel and colored pencil on paper.

Above: Feel Your Feelings, 2021, charcoal, soft pastel and colored pencil.

Bottom: Calliope Pavlides, photo by Nathan Jorgenson.

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Allison Janae Hamilton, Floridawater II, 2019, archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches.

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LAND AS WITNESS OF HISTORY The Activism of Allison Janae Hamilton

BY ANNABEL KEENAN

Land has been a constant throughout history. We bring to land our personal experiences, and land in turn acts as a witness to the people and events that come and go. For artist Allison Janae Hamilton, land is her most enduring subject. She describes land as a participant in and reflection of histories from the beautiful to the traumatic. Her works are haunting and inspiring, unnerving and captivating as she examines issues of social and environmental justice and unpacks narratives both personal and collective.

Hamilton’s work centers on imagery and folklore of the American rural South. She grew up in Florida, also spending time working on her family’s farm in Tennessee. Her upbringing instilled in her an understanding of issues involved with land. She explained as we connected recently over the phone: “Growing up, I was surrounded by family members, especially elders in my family, who were deeply involved in conversations around land from a political and policy perspective, as well as from an environmental perspective, in particular the changing environment.” From her personal connections and family experiences, land became a “main character” in her work. She continued, “I’m always mining my own experiences and referencing normal conversations from within my family and community.”

Hamilton addresses these topics through photography, film, sculpture and installation. In a photographic series from 2019 titled “Floridawater,” the artist appears, in character, in the Wacissa River. In the hauntingly beautiful images, Hamilton is in a white dress with her body partially submerged in dark water clouded by plants and algae. The viewer sees her from the shoulders down with her head above the water, lending a sense of control as she always retains the ability to breathe.

The Wacissa is part of a river system laden with history. In the first half of the 1800s, enslaved Black people were forced to dig

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a canal in the dense, swampy system to provide the cotton trade with a path for barges to reach the Gulf of Mexico. Called the Slave Canal, it was never put into use. By the time digging was complete, new railroads filled the transportation needs.

As a subject for this series and other works in Hamilton’s practice, the Wacissa carries this traumatic history. The series begins with Floridawater I, in which the artist floats calmly, hardly disturbing the river as small bubbles rise and little fish swim by. In Floridawater II, she kicks one leg forward with her toe pointed straight ahead. Her dress, shining in a bright light that penetrates the dark water, appears to slowly descend. The colors and orientation of her body recall Jean Honoré-Fragonard’s Rococo masterpiece The Swing (1767). Hamilton’s photograph is both beautiful and troubling.

The final works in the series are further unsettling as Hamilton stands impossibly still with her feet on a submerged metal grate.

Was this space once above water? Is this Florida after a devastating flood? There is a heightened tension between the softly rippling water and the complete stillness of the artist’s body, as if the entire scene is about to burst into motion.

Floridawater builds upon ideas that Hamilton explored in earlier works. “At the time, I was interested in these entities or figures as witnesses who watch over the landscapes,” she explained, “I imagined that they were haints, which is another word for ghosts down South, that took the form of animals or human-like creatures.” The figures connect the past with the present and act as witnesses to the people and events that used the land. Part of this witnessing, Hamilton noted in our conversation, includes events both good and bad. She elaborated, “The history of land is intertwined with so many other histories, like the history of brutal labor practices. Land can reflect traumatic histories while also repre-

senting something liberatory, such as healing and ritual practices involving nature. For me, this touches on a relationship between Black cultural practice and Black experiences.”

In her sculptures, Hamilton takes this idea of entities witnessing history further with figures like Blackwater Creature II, an otherworldly being that resembles a giant eight-legged, spindly reptile lying on the ground. The creature has metal feet and limbs, a long hairy tail, a thick band of feathers in place of a head and a torso of jagged sticks. The work feels both contemporary and ancient, existing in the present day, but appearing to be made up of materials from different generations. Hamilton explained that in creating these sculptures, she was interested in exploring the idea of history as something constructed by the powerful. The strange woodland creatures are what she describes as “neutral watchers” that are “in part spiritual, almost like ancestral apparitions or mythological beings.” Indeed, the disparate assortment of materials and objects make it feel as if the sculpture has just climbed out of a swamp with evidence of all the histories it has witnessed sticking to its body over time.

Hamilton brings these spiritual beings into her photography through masks and props. Her latest works, exhibited in the spring of 2021 at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, are part portraiture, part landscape photography. They feature Black women standing on the edge of a forest or marsh, perhaps along the Wacissa. The settings are lush and calm, but also eerie and even haunting. The women wear white dresses and adornments like wigs and headdresses. They face the viewer with dark sunglasses covering their eyes and expressions that seem at once stony and soft. In All the Stars Appointed to Their Places (2021), Hamilton’s subject holds two large broom-like palm fronds. Her bright white dress and white wig shine in a mythical, supernatural way.

Hamilton made these works in response to the political climate of the presidential election in 2020. From her home in New York, she watched the news leading up to the South Carolina primary and was alarmed by the way in which New York progressives referred to voters in the southern state as “low information voters.” Hamilton explained, “This didn’t sit with me. These were not low information voters. It felt like an attempt at erasure.” A few months later during the general election and at the height of the pandemic, she was back in northern Florida in an area right across the Georgia border. Being so close to the state, Hamilton saw the outpouring of ads during the Georgia Senate runoff. After the Democratic candidates won, the tone of the messaging suddenly changed away from “low informa-

Opposite page: Video still from Waters of a Lower Register, 2020. This page: Installation view, Blackwater Creature II, 2019, mixed media, 13 x 24 x 90 inches.

tion voters” to celebrating the Black women who were seen as having saved the day.

For Hamilton, the flip-flopping of messaging and unfair generalization of Black women was personal: “These constituents who were being tossed around, dismissed as low information and then celebrated as saviors, they’re like my aunts, my elder cousins, my community, and my family members,” she exclaimed, adding that her new photographs put Black middle-aged women at the center as a “jab at that dismissal” and a way to introduce other important conversations. She said, “When I go home, everyone is talking about issues related to sustainability and the environment because it’s a part of life there. I want the face and the voice of the movement to be closer to reality. The way we’ve come to talk about climate activism, Black women are not the face we are commonly encouraged to think of when we picture an ‘environmentalist’.”

Through art and climate activism, Hamilton is claiming space as a Black female environmentalist. Her show at Boesky included a thorough Climate Impact Report and was the gallery’s first carbon-conscious exhibition, in which they tracked the carbon output and donated to permanent, old-growth forest conservation. Hamilton’s works include a monetary climate contribution, a practice Boesky is now implementing with all of its artists. Hamilton often speaks on panels discussing sustainability in the arts and is a member of groups like Artists Commit that share resources on sustainable practices and tips on how to keep galleries accountable, including through the aforementioned Climate Impact Reports.

In December 2020, Hamilton’s immersive five-channel film installation Waters of a Lower Register (2020) was presented in Brooklyn Bridge Park along the East River. The film shows powerful, mesmerizing images of landscapes in northern Florida in the aftermath of a tropical storm and acts as a metaphor for the tumultuous events of 2020. The imagery, personal to Hamilton and her native Florida, presents a stark contrast to the urban environment of New York. And yet, as with all of Hamilton’s work, there is no one way to approach the film. It speaks to countless issues—climate change, social justice, politics—and the viewers bring to the work their own histories. Images of flooded landscapes might have seemed foreign in New York then, but as the climate crisis worsens, storms like Hurricane Ida that hit the city 10 months later are redefining how we see our infrastructure.

Hamilton constantly reminds us that our personal experiences and histories are more intertwined than we may think.

DEVOTED TO NATURE The Spiritualized Landscapes of Hung Viet Nguyen

BY GENIE DAVIS

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“Art is a universal language,” Hung Viet Nguyen says. “And when I came here as an immigrant, my English language was not that great. My strength was in painting. I slowly convinced people that my art is my language.”

Nguyen came to the US from Vietnam in 1982, with a background in biology and a lifelong passion for art. After making the move, he decided to make art his livelihood as well. A course in technical drawing led to a career as an illustrator and graphic artist while raising his children and pursuing his fine art. For seven years he stopped painting to experience nature both in solitude and with his family. “I absorbed the texture and the culture that nature taught me,” he says.

Pattern, color and subject all inform Nguyen’s narrative, spiritual art, the elements of which arise entirely from the artist’s personal experience and interpretation. “Artists balance what happens to them in life with their art,” he says. “When things were all good, sunshine—normal in California—my work was darker for a while, but when the pandemic hit, and it looked so bad, spirits were so down, I made my colors brighter. I wasn’t trying to escape but to balance what my art said with what was happening in the world.”

Regardless of the palette Nguyen uses, his work is always spiritual, and devoted to nature, as he himself has been since he was a child. “That is always in my mind from a young age. I had respect for trees, rocks, plants. It’s not religious, it’s spiritual in respect to everything surrounding me—after all, they’ve all been there longer than me.”

Nguyen is currently creating his fifth series of “Sacred Landscapes,” a body of work which average approximately 50 paintings per series. He viewed the cycle of nature through four previous series, titled “Cruelly Go Round;” “Coastal Sensibilities,” which focused on the sea; “Myscape,” referring to his personal landscape; and a more abstract series, “Symphony.”

“What led me to ‘Sacred Landscapes,’ was that we live in a city. I need to live here to work, to sell. But nature is a counterbalance. When I need to, I go to the beach or the trail. I call it going to the temple. Nature to me is closer to God than [I am] in a church.” He often travels the country and abroad to experience nature, with two areas in California most special to him, the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest near Bishop, and the Palos Verdes Peninsula near LA. Inspired in part by Asian scroll paintings, highly textured, intricately detailed and visually immersive, Nguyen’s work is created by both palette knife and brush. He runs through so many palette knives that he has collected the used ones on a long chain that hangs from the ceiling of his studio. “I wear out the stainless-steel painting on canvas, that’s how much I use them.

But I also use the brush when I want to create something more fluid.” He explains further, “For me the texture comes first, it’s part of my pattern. It can create anything, like a mosaic. When I am out in nature, I look, and I think, I can match that surface, I can recreate that. I think when you have a language, you have an alphabet. And with that alphabet, you can make anything, say anything, good or bad. When I am lucky, I can use my language well, and things like texture turn out as they should, smooth, or soft, or hard.”

Nguyen also sometimes incorporates actual words in his work. On his large-scale (48 x 84 inches) Sacred Landscape V, #32, his wife’s name and mother’s name are partially revealed within the grassy areas of the vast painting. “My wife understands me and lets me have the freedom to create. I also wrote in this

From series “Sacred Landscape V” # 31, oil on panel, 36” x 48”

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piece ‘into nature, open out senses, feeling/seeing, gentle and dangerous magnificent, ask no more, common, extraordinary.’”

The work itself is all that. To the left, a clear lake surrounded by a meadow, behind which a glacier rises, slipping into the sea; a steep, vertical volcano with hot lava still seething inside takes up the middle section; another volcano appears to have finished its act of tumultuous creation and adjoins a blissful series of waterfalls, ocean, and another lake around which two small human figures are poised under a rich burnt-orange sky. Both dream and fable, fairy tale and Adam and Eve–Biblical, this work is not just an alphabet of language but an entire novel.

While Nguyen doesn’t specifically see his Vietnamese heritage in his work, he realizes that “my painting looks different than Western painting in some ways,” in that he doesn’t work with perspective. “I create space that isn’t restricting. You can look down or up, as you do when you are in nature.”

Oil on panel, his large vertical work Sacred Landscapes V, #36 features a cavernous volcano, visually twinned with a cascading waterfall spilling into the sea; some smaller panel pieces such as Sacred Landscapes V, #27 feature glacial forms and sea, with the glacier cracking into the ocean; Sacred Landscapes V, #30 is a beautiful, sinuous tree. From an earlier series, Sacred Landscapes IV, #40, gives viewers a dark and transcendent night sky, with a mystical circle suspended above grey hills. In the foreground, a small figure and his horse cross this mysterious landscape.

His subjects in nature are limitless. “Nature taught me my style, which comes from a pattern,” he says. “I am just creating the language; it is a journey of discovery. I think I am going to keep painting for a very long time. I haven’t seen anything that limits me, yet. Sometimes a new element comes up, right now that has been volcanos.”

On days that his studio is too hot or cold, the artist has begun doing smaller pieces in his home, using old product tins such as small metal cigar boxes. He uses both inside panels to create two separate small works that are linked together. In one such piece, Stars Grazing, a couple lie on the grass, looking up on one side. On the opposite side, a filament of stars is strung. To create these he uses pencil, ink, watercolor and varnish. “I use different kinds of varnish—some look old, with a lot of crackle in them. That is something I’m experimenting with.”

Nguyen is prolific and sells approximately 50% of his work.

“When you sell, it stimulates you to work harder. Picasso once said he was a good collector of his own work,” he laughs. “It isn’t about selling for me though. I can’t control that. If I work honestly, I satisfy myself, and I believe that if you do honest work, the work will find a way to get out there. If my work is good but no one sees it, they don’t know it is there.”

See Nguyen’s work in March 2022, at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University Long Beach.

Top:: Nguyen in his studio, photo by Genie Davis; Bottom: From series, “Sacred Landscape V,” #36, 84” x 48.”

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UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS Leila Weefur’s Hymns for Other Voices

BY BARBARA MORRIS

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Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of Oakland-based artist and curator Leila Weefur—who identifies as transgender nonbinary—how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, “Prey†Play.” Presented in two separate and complementary incarnations, both in San Francisco, one is at Minnesota Street Project, as part of their California Black Voices Project, the

other at Telematic Media Arts. Many such twinnings and juxtapositions are found in Weefur’s work, who laughs and acknowledges, “Yes, I’m pretty interested in duality.”

We meet at Minnesota Street Project on one of the artist’s rare days away from their teaching responsibilities—this fall Weefur is a lecturer at both Stanford and UC Berkeley. Their own academic background includes an undergraduate degree in journalism from

Blackberry Pastorale: Symphony NO. 1, 2017, video still, courtesy of the artist.

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Howard University, followed by a degree in film from Cal State LA. Weefur then spent several years in the film industry in LA, working on music videos, independent films and reality shows.

It was during this time working in the film industry that Weefur decided to shift to fine art. In the 2010s, it was before the advent of the “movement around contemporary Black cinema” and their interests in any event lay outside the “formulaic structure” often found in Hollywood. Seeking out a liberal arts college, Weefur returned to the Bay Area, to Mills College, where their interests in cross-disciplinary exploration were satisfied by studies in the book arts, creative writing and music departments. The latter is where they met composers Josh Casey and Yari Bundy, who form the duo KYN, with whom Weefur has continued to collaborate on the immersive soundtracks for numerous projects, up to and including “Prey†Play.”

Weefur’s current work builds on earlier film installations such as Blackberry Pastorale Symphony #1 (2017), Noise and Thirst (2018), and Between Beauty and Horror (2019). The first references the phrase, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” a reference to the idea that darker-skinned Black women were somehow perceived as more voluptuous, sexier, in the context of “colorism”—racism against darker-skinned Blacks. Weefur, who never connected with the idea of the femme Black body, creates potent images of men and women interacting with, crushing and consuming, blackberries. Noise and Thirst evolved in response to the artist being accused of stealing from a market in San Francisco by a woman who described Weefur to the police as a “Black man.”

It functions as “an experimental sound collage expressing the cadences of Black masculinity.”Between Beauty and Horror “teases out the uncomfortable dynamics and violence that are present in racism” and, as the artist describes it, “performative Blackness.”

Drawing on their personal experience of the constraints and rigidity implicit in Black Christian churches, Weefur paints a picture that is nuanced and bittersweet, with the pageantry and allure of the church, it’s promise of salvation and the love of God, contrasted with the subtle and not-so-subtle ways religion has worked to control those under its sway. At Minnesota Street Project Prey†Play: A Gospel is set in a darkened space defined by three imposing arches. The video is set in Havenscourt Community Church in Oakland, where the artist was baptized, with red-upholstered pews and stained-glass windows. We hear a childlike voice speaking. “Stand up. Bow your head. Bring the palms of your hands together. Close your eyes. Talk to God.” As the narrator speaks, the actors perform

symbolic gestures. Weefur intends the nonbinary characters to act as a point of entry for many different people—a spectrum of LGBTQ and BIPOC, as well as many others.

The narrator continues, “Dear God, can you see me?… I come in afraid to show myself.” At a young age, perhaps 10, Weefur first became aware of gender discomfort, “I knew I was never going to give birth to a child,” and their parents eventually relented and allowed them to wear pants—rather than a dress—to church; they left the church after baptism at age 15. The narrator speaks, “Power is only power if everyone wants it, and no one has it. I used the only power I had, the power to remove myself from view.”

The actors hide within the pews, then reveal themselves, playing hide-and-seek, then peek-a-boo. These gentle games act as a metaphor for early experiences. The atmosphere darkens as a stern voice intones lines from the Black writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones, his “sermons” on themes common in Black preaching, and an image of his poem “The Judgment Day” appears on the screen. We see images of fire, candles burning, a charred sprig of blackberries.

This leads us into the work at Telematic Media Arts, Prey†Play: The Old Testament, where Weefur fills the screen with an image of a burning Bible.

Telematic, a much more compact space, sandwiches the viewer between the imagery as a burning book sizzles and snaps, gray flakes of ash curling up and blowing off: Turning, one is startled to catch their own reflection immersed in the video—this side actually a reflection. Weefur likes to catch one off guard, “seeing themselves implicated in the work structurally and conceptually.” Wax candles in the form of crosses lie heaped in a corner, the contribution of collaborator Sandy Williams IV. There are 506 of these, equal to the number of times the word “fire” appears in the King James Version of the Bible. A performance event was also held by Weefur in the nearby St. Joseph’s Art Society, with five other queer and trans writers invited to share “prayers” to be performed with ritual within the highly charged environment of this former Catholic church.

Winding down our conversation at Minnesota St. Project, Weefur reflects for a moment, then speaks, “ …it’s like a child wanting to run around on a field of grass, but there are sanctions that tell you you can only run so far. Like Jim Crow laws, it tells you there’s only one place you can go. That certain places aren’t for you.”

Addressing issues very much of this moment, Weefur’s fascinating work raises uncomfortable questions of how we see ourselves, and each other, on a very fundamental and intimate level.

Between Beauty and Horror, 2019, video stills, courtesy of the artist.

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A new experience for artists.

artlounge.co

Top Films of 2021

BY SCARLET CHENG

What a year, and what a year for films—many of them delayed in production or distribution due to COVID, but roaring back as the theaters reopened. Below is my list of top theatrically released films of 2021; films I have had a chance to see thus far.

I’m struck by how many were directed by women—a group which usually represents less than 10% of directors in the top 250 grossing films in the US, according to the long-running “Celluloid Ceiling” study. In my list, they are more than half. It’s also interesting that several super-hero/sci-fi films made my list—it’s not a genre I’m fond of, because they usually rely heavily on traditional and very tired tropes with white guys saving the world—but the ones below are not typical.

Drive My Car Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Black Widow Directed by Cate Shortland

Dune Directed by Denis Villeneuve

More blow-’em-up action from the Marvel franchise, but the backstory to Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and her foster sister (Florence Pugh) makes this a better than average superhero saga.

You see, both were raised to be spies and assassins by the nasty Patriarch to serve his nefarious ends.

True, this film is ponderous and bloated, but wow, is it epic! In adapting the sci-fi classic by Frank Herbert, auteur Denis Villeneuve creates a good ripping yarn about a hero’s journey on a faraway planet patrolled by giant worms. Young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) has to protect his family and save the enslaved people of this strange new world. The casting of hypnotic Rebecca Ferguson as his sorceress mother is brilliant.

CODA Directed by Sian Heder A coming-of-age film about Ruby, a 17-year-old living with her deaf, working-class family in Gloucester, MA. She’s discovered music, and yearns to leave and continue her studies, yet wants to remain part of that family. The film is anchored by a most winning performance

by Emilia Jones as Ruby.

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This quiet masterpiece takes its time unpeeling layers of the characters’ complicated and unhappy pasts. Trying to forget his wife’s untimely death, a stage director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) goes to Hiroshima, casting for and rehearsing a multi-lingual version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” while being chauffeured around by a young woman (Toko Miura) with an unexpected past of her own. Miura is mesmerizing, playing someone numbed by tragedy, and who survives by keeping a close watch on the world around her and filtering the truth from lies.

Clockwise from opposite page: The Velvet Underground, Dune, Black Widow, King Richard, The Power of the Dog.

The Power of the Dog Directed by Jane Campion Eternals Directed by Chloe Zhao Long ago 10 Eternals were put on earth to fight the Deviants whenever they showed up. This film has a slow burn, but at the end you feel the moral dilemma of the superheroes’ mission and the split in their loyalties to one another. Despite being handicapped with the need to tell too many stories, director Chloe Zhao has injected real heart into this increasingly eroded genre.

Campion returns to the big screen after a decade-long hiatus with this Western about the toxic masculinity that undergirds so many Westerns. Set on a cattle ranch in 1920s Montana, the movie has Benedict Cumberbatch playing a bullying Alpha male who decides to take his brother’s new bride (Kirsten Dunst) down a few notches— partly by training her “sissy” son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in manly ways.

Never Gonna Snow Again Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska

King Richard Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

This is a strange and strangely memorable fable about a kindly masseuse (Alec Utgoff) who works the homes in a wealthy gated community in Poland—entering lives filled with silence and sadness.

The story of tennis-dad Richard Williams, whose ambition for his two daughters, Venus and Serena, led to their becoming world-class tennis champions. Will Smith plays the dad, with charm and conviction.

In the Same Breath Directed by Nanfu Wang

Lamb Directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson A childless couple on a remote sheep farm in Iceland find themselves with a gift child—except is the child theirs to have? You feel their loneliness, you feel their joy, and you feel their deep fear of loss in this remarkable debut feature.

This documentary covers the unfolding of the COVID crisis in China —including government denial followed by the complete shutdown of Wuhan, the first pandemic city. The interviews with ordinary people who caught the virus, lost loved ones, and worked in hospitals are compelling. Wang shows how the crisis has been twisted to political ends, in both China and the US.

The Velvet Underground Directed by Todd Haynes The story of Lou Reed, John Cale and the band that created that pre-punk wall of sound against the backdrop of New York’s art scene in the 1960s. At one point they were the house band of Andy Warhol’s notorious Factory.

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F E AT U R E D

R E V I E W

Courtesy Spy Projects.

Disassembly Line

SPY Projects / Molly’s Garage

By India Mandelkern

Independence. Freedom. Unchecked mobility. We’re quick to attribute these qualities to the automobile: grand, sweeping, all-encompassing statements that turn the machine into an intractable, totalizing force to be glimpsed from the outside-in. We think less about the car as a collection of private spaces that each play singular roles: The war room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the sex den, the place you hide the body.

“Disassembly Line,” presented by Pietro Alexander, Sasha Filimonov and Gabriella Rothbard, investigates these interior, personal ways in which we’ve come to understand our cars. Riffing off the butchering and packaging processes of late 19th-century slaughterhouses that helped give birth to the Fordian assembly line, the curators set seven artists loose on a 1998 Oldsmobile 88––letting them gut it, manipulate it, and remake it from the ground up––in order to poke holes in the supposed intransigence of industrial systems, and obliquely, the role of the traditional gallery.

For the car is the gallery: Engine, windshield wipers, gas cap, door handles, antenna––all its functional features (except the parking brake) have been completely stripped away. A geometric floral skeleton––a ceramic signature for which Iranian sculptor Yassi Mazandi has built a reputation––blooms out of the steering wheel.

Sculptor Mannix Vega, who daylights as a mechanic, painted the exterior in a gold-flecked, black matte patina and sharpened the edges of the hood, not unlike the way you’d soup up a hotrod. Except it’s not a hotrod. The car no longer functions: a point underscored by the parking tickets strewn across the windshield. Constructed

by Daniel Healey, who copied, traced and duplicated real citations with vintage Letraset sheets and printer paper, the tickets combine real names, addresses, and phone numbers with snide, sarcastic comments (Terrible paint job! She lost control!) (2021) They’re so banal, so convincing in their stern straight edges and red-andwhite lettering, that you have to blink to remind yourself that they’re made by hand, and fall into the realm of art.

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Pop the trunk and lift it up; you find two additional artworks. Ivan Rios-Fetchko’s Trunk (Hood) (2021), presents a quadriptych of landscapes: A vacant overpass, a concrete ribbon, a solitary tree. Painted from found slides reconfigured in the shapes of rear view mirrors–– spare, lifeless scenes in oil and wax that we’ve all glimpsed from a moving car—they reflect on the automobile’s toll on our physical as well as our private mental landscapes. Reyner Banham’s ecologies come to mind. But there’s also something unsettling about roaming the open roads of radical self-realization that someone else has paved. Directly below it, Claudia Parducci’s Trunk (Body) (2021) also examines possibilities for disorder within larger systems. She has filled the trunk with playground sand; buried within it are resin-cast gas masks, shards of breathing tubes, and a single broken laptop.

Even the preppers didn’t make it. Entropy ultimately prevailed.

“Disassembly Line” is hardly the first exhibition to engage with the car. Artists (especially in Los Angeles) have been dissecting them, lacquering them, repurposing them and crucifying themselves on them for decades. Nor is it the first group exhibition to play outside of the gallery’s walls (although the fact that the car was shown in the Beverly Hills garage of legendary dealer Molly Barnes, who gave John Baldessari his first solo show, was lost on no one).

At times, the seven artworks therein failed to talk to one another, or conceptually meandered away from the theme. Perhaps that was inevitable, as the project’s experimental premise perfectly mirrored the title’s implied social critique. Labor was divided (none of the seven artists were really let in on what the others were up to). Workstreams were individuated (no one could anticipate how the finished product would look). Granting artists this kind of conceptual free rein was a challenge; until the last minute, the curators didn’t know what they’d be getting. “It was tough to write the press release,” Alexander said. “All we knew was that it was going to be a show in a garage with a car.”

R E V I E W S

Nancy Lorenz GAVLAK

By Max King Cap There is a single painting that dominates this exhibition, a painting—if one can describe it so—of such singularity that it renders the other works as experiments, exercises, considerations. All are lesser and unworthy contenders. Its only and quite distant challenger is a mere study, of similar technique but diminished comparison.

Titled “States of Matter,” this exhibition is a collection of decorative abstractions. They indulge in a melding of metalwork and painting, employing silver leaf and black clay or iron filings and jute, to produce a series of bas-relief ornaments that neither excite nor awe.

The materiality of the compositions is indeed striking, as the numerous works luxuriate in a game of periodic table hide-and-seek; palladium over here and silver over there, yet the culmination of all this alchemy produces distinctly less than the sum of its parts. The ingredients of its craft fair conjurings are even set on a display table to prove that only pure constituents were used in the production of these grand baubles, as lacquered hardwood blocks (Pour Box and Red Pour Box, both 2021) appear to ooze gold as well as puns that become distinctly less humorous mere seconds later.

A pair of grand vertical works slathered in gold leaf, Moon Gold Mountain (2018) and Lemon Gold Sunlight with Rain (2017) both measure 102”x72” and are less suggestive of works of art than the doors of a local house of worship. The artist no doubt employs the lavish use of gold leaf as a critique of consumerist indulgence— particularly in the art market—as gilded age impersonation is a gratification that never seems to go out of style, but such a conceit rings hollow in a commercial art gallery, where sticking it to the man is less a consideration that crushing one’s competitors.

the other works in the exhibition. It proposes the antique and the contemporary, the here, the now, the ever after.

Bernardo Fleming

Institute for Art & Olfaction

By Shana Nys Dambrot

An art show without images or really even objects, Dreaming in Smell presents a suite of micro-stories that express themselves not in pictures or shapes, but in scents. It includes a smell so cool it’s like a breeze on the skin; a face-crinkling assault of mold and hairspray; incense over Led Zeppelin; a non-binary cop trying to be his authentic self. Few experience scent while in dream states, but artist Bernardo Fleming does. As an industry professional with International Flavors and Fragrances, he also has uncommon access

Bernardo Fleming, Dreaming in Smell, 2021, photo by Shana Nys Dambrot.Courtesy Institute for Art & Olfaction.

Nancy Lorenz, Gold Pour Box, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles | Palm Beach.

The lone painting of import—a grand princessing of its stunted little sister Mercury (2021) that features mother of pearl inlay—and the worthiest of these works is titled Flight (2021) and hangs at the end of the hall, nearly filling the wall at 96” X 132.” It is the work to which one’s eyes are immediately attracted and appropriately so: nothing else approaches its scale, confidence, complexity or conviction. It is also the only work that delivers the elemental exuberance at which the other paintings swing and so badly miss.

Featuring ingredients that include gold leaf, lemon gold leaf, resin, iron filings, pigment, lacquer, and gilder’s clay on wood panel, it is materially complete and completely successful. The imagery is equally indulgent and complex, suggesting a cosmos richly envisioned, liquid and gaseous and full of elemental wonder. It is here that the members of the periodic table play hide-and-seek, combine and transform, and where the artist has most successfully captured the ideas that have been suggested but not fully realized in any of

to collaborators with whom to create the scents he’s jotted down in his dream journal. Even though few have experienced this kind of oneiric odorific, we are all aware of the unique power of scent to prompt à la Proust sudden cognitive shifts, visceral reactions and mysterious emotions. Don’t be surprised if you encounter a memory that diverges from the artist’s story, because although the dreams belong to the artist, olfactory perception makes its own special way through everyone’s brain and simply finds what it finds there.

The aroma delivery system is soft and clean pastel-colored bed sheets and pillows (gently evoking bedtime); as you enter, the gallerist darts ahead and spritzes each with its appointed scent. It lingers there for you alone. A printed handout gives titles and summaries of the dream which gave rise to each crafted smell. Dentista—May 2016 (with Ricardo Moya) presents clean and cool sweet mint and medicine like a dentist’s office, which Fleming readily admits may not be a calming memory for everyone. But for him, it’s about his mother, the after-work smell of her, and the comfort and safety she provided. Dýer Mak’er—18 September 2021, Nijmegen (with Meabh McCurtin) reminds him of his youth as well, but the teenage part of burning incense and listening to trippy rock music and figuring out who you want to be. It’s sweet like cocoa butter and musky like palo santo and there are other things too, sharp and sour notes that seem to change or flicker as you try to capture them. It’s a liminal scent for a liminal time of life.

Cana (Cop)—6 October 2021, Nijmegen (with Birgit Sijbrands) offers some curious humor. In the dream, a policeman pulls the artist over in his car, but as he approaches, he’s partly dressed and made up as a woman; his breath smells intriguingly of wine and cigarettes.

The scent does indeed evoke a kind of after-a-party-morning, but it also contains contradictory notes that the mind recognizes but can’t reconcile. Less pleasant but just as mysterious is Departures—23 February 2021, Nijmegen (with Anh Ngô Nguyen Viet), a meditation on old-lady perfume and moldy casino carpet. It’s pretty intense and

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R E V I E W S its own description admits it, promising “musky sillage” and “suffocating floral accords.” It’s hideous and marvelous and it repels but it cannot be ignored. This piece perhaps more than any other makes it clear that while not all scents are, strictly speaking, perfume, all scents do tell someone’s story.

Hank Willis Thomas Kayne Griffin

By Jody Zellen

For New York based multi-media artist Hank Willis Thomas, art and politics are intertwined. He draws from history, advertising (he made a series based on the Nike swoosh), and current events to create works that address issues of racial injustice, identity politics, and more recently, the meaning of freedom. With formal integrity and conceptual savvy, the impeccably crafted fabric pieces in the exhibition Another Justice: Divided We Stand are assembled from American flags and prison uniforms and literally “investigate the fabric of our nation.” Across the works, Thomas juxtaposes the red and white stripes from the American flag with prison garb in various colors. While works like A New Constellation and Imaginary Lines (all works 2021) separate and repurpose the stars and stripes, it is the text-based pieces carefully cut and collaged from prison uniforms and flags that are the most compelling.

The huge Land of the Free (orange), appears at first glance an intricate maze made from interlocking strips of fabric culled from prison uniforms and fashioned into a landscape of concentric shapes.

As the eye traverses the composition and begins to separate the red/orange from the white, letters and then words—Land of the Free—begin to cohere. Once recognized, (akin to the duck rabbit visual illusion), it is difficult to unsee the letterforms. Thomas plays with this and other dualities like the fact that while America is considered “the land of the free,” it also imprisons more people than any country in the world. The reference to prisoners is more overt in Liberty (blue) and Capital (green) where the word “INMATE” from the uniforms is included at different corners of the compositions. Yet the words “Liberty” and “Capital” slowly emerge from the graphic abstractions, and Thomas’ juxtaposition becomes more evident.

Hank Willis Thomas, Liberty (blue), 2021, photo by Flying Studio, Los Angeles.

Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles.

The words entangled within the stripes of these works explore the meaning of freedom and liberty, as well as issues of discontent within our so-called “land of the free.” The artist questions—who are “we the people” and what does “justice” really mean—as he dices prison uniforms and dismembers flags, a gesture some would consider sacrilegious, as well as a violation of the proposed Flag Desecration Amendment. That aside, in his carceral tapestries, Thomas draws parallels between prison bars and the stripes on the flag, calling attention to injustices and inequities within prisons as contradictory to the supposed freedom “America” offers.

The notion of conflict continues in the gallery courtyard with Strike, a polished stainless-steel sculpture depicting two giant arms

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that burst forth from the gravel. One arm raises a police baton ready to strike, as the other attempts to hold it back—referencing the 1934 lithograph titled Strike Scene by Russian-American painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick—as a gleaming, symbolic protest.

Thomas investigates and reveals how justice really works in this “home of the brave” where people of color are disproportionately imprisoned. In a tense and potentially change-filled moment in history—burdened by a pandemic, continued racial tensions, and the effects of climate change—the artist employs American symbols to undermine what they supposedly represent.

Laura Lima, Communal Nest #7, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

Laura Lima

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

By John David O’Brien

Diaphanous panels of fabric, suspended from the ceiling appear to float throughout the main gallery, yet upon closer inspection these tulle panels reveal some areas that have been tightly stitched while others are allowed to billow freely. Color is insinuated with a very light touch and often one side of a composition is a different hue than the other. At regular intervals small chunks of dry ice are added, creating fleeting white twirls that come from the bottom of the composition and waft outwards. Each work in this group is numbered and titled Levianes. This title underscores the contradictions that this artist explores in the opposed meanings of ‘light’ in Spanish and ‘malicious’ in Portuguese. With Levianes #8 (all works 2021), two triangular sections are grafted together with a larger plane of pinkish tulle. Vaguely suggestive of lingerie, the addition of dry ice in the downturned triangles vaporously activates the space of threads, cloth and the viewer’s perception.

In a darker chamber behind the main gallery, all the works play off a starker palette. The sizes of the black, white and gray meshes vary, causing the light to skim between the layers. In Levianes #4, the overlay creates a moiré pattern, counterfeiting motion. The deftness of the needlework is rich but not exaggerated. The surface of Levianes #9 is festooned with small black triangles and the material at the bottom of the panel is free flowing, reminiscent of a shawl or monk’s hood. There is something both palpable and vaporous about these works, suspended from the ceiling, both fragile and mobile, creating their own atmosphere—floating in the air, clouded by evaporating swirls of dry ice, the sense of transformation from a solid to an airborne element is quite palpable.

Anchoring everything at the center of the main gallery is another series that uses woven straw, wood and thread that antithetically mirror the Levianes, constructions of billowing cones that expand into space. These numbered works are titled Communal Nest. Richly folded upon themselves, they suggest that winged creatures might

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R E V I E W S soon come to stay in these exotically fashioned abodes. Communal Nest #7 is perched in a skylight and offers the same temporary habitat for the avian mind as the others, and offers a horizontal array of multicolored wood elements as its base.

Four other works from 2019 are in the front gallery. For these portraits, the artist hired professional tailors to translate drawings of various figures who inspired her. Each portrait depicts an individual personality in abstraction. Details about the specific identities of each are secreted in the back of the framed art and therefore unknowable.

Laura Lima explores materials that are flexible and undergoing constant transformations. Her poetic invention is founded in a softly framed but finely tuned sensibility that plays with the distinction of things pliable, those in which we may wrap and cloak our physical selves and the textiles that simply have their own materiality.

these mid-size panels are by far the most adventurous work exhibited here—not that they are uniformly successful. Air churns with indigo, cerulean, greens and scarlet, bisected by a green neon tube, but for all its technical prowess it feels more like a dress rehearsal for a section of one of the quasi-operatic mural panels—say, Below the Cliff—which makes sense if what we infer pictorially from this epic is a kind of myth composed of earth, water, fire and air; and, given that air and fire will assert their dominion on the beach and off, it does.

That the painting holds together as well as it does is almost miraculous. The similarly scaled Light Falling Like A Broken Chain; Paradise, which suspends two similar spirals, yellow and white, at the top-center of the panel, asks a bit more of the viewer, but seems to deliver less—as if buffered by a School of Paris restraint.

Weatherford includes two smaller panels with neon transversals (red and vertical for Signal; white and horizontal for Warm Weather), which both hearken back to the period immediately before and after her 2012 “Bakersfield Project” paintings (her first incorporating neon tubes) yet are clearly distinct from them—filling the panels, variegated yet slightly more monochromatic, self-contained yet richly evocative—masterpieces. Mountains and jungles are picturesque by definition; but as Weatherford knows quite well, from a cave wall one can make poetry.

Sanford Biggers

California African American Museum

By Bianca Collins

When one enters the massive gallery at California African American Museum occupied by “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” it’s easy to be seduced by the cacophony of bold color, textures and geometric patterns. Power symbols appear and disappear like a nickelodeon on fabric, communicating in code such blights on American Mary Weatherford, The Birds of Kilauea Point, 2021, Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Mary Weatherford

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

By Ezrha Jean Black

Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense.

The title of her current show is “Mountains Mud Prisms Air.” Whatever the inspirational specifics, Weatherford has gone in for a deep dive. The linen surfaces are covered nearly edge to edge. Yet movement seems to animate the work as much as color. In Through the Trees (all works 2021), streaky whites slash through greens and aquamarines as if opening a piece of the sky. Working with Flashe pigments, Weatherford takes a light hand, applying color in even, transparent layers. In The Birds of Kilauea Point, pigments and brush strokes indicate wild flight before exuberant color (local seabird populations are in fact not exceptional in coloration). Here, a tube of blue neon bisects the picture plane, casting more shadow than glow on a greige mid-section, making a kind of diptych.

Elsewhere, Weatherford evinces a keen sense of the way art narrates an experience of nature in terms of both chromatic layering and composition—the subtle redirection and inversions of line or contour and coloration; how the interstitial event or phenomenon becomes crucial, the ‘main event’ a footnote. In Yellow Sun, for example, the sun becomes a sinking yellow ball caught beneath a snarl of madder rose and cresting amethyst passages. Or—still more willfully abstracted—consider the sun as a mere pebble lost at the center of a blurred ‘grid’ of rosy loops, hooks and arches roiling over a blue ground (Yellow Sun Far Away). Setting aside the ambitious scale of the largest works (which are mural-sized—133” x 287”),

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Sanford Biggers, Harlem Blue, 2013, © Sanford Biggers.

history as lynching, blackface minstrelsy, and slave ships. In the hands of Sanford Biggers, quilts from the 19th century are desecrated, embellished and beautified, building up a material African American history within a conceptual framework.

In Sakura (2014), Biggers returns to his familiar meditation in the form of a tree (one of Biggers’ most well-known works, Blossom (2007) resides in permanent installation at the Brooklyn Museum).

While the work’s title and bright blue tree with pink cherry blossoms undoubtedly alludes to the artist’s years spent in Japan—appreciating the kimono textiles, banzai and Buddhism—it also references America’s dark history of lynching Black citizens.

Biggers’ iconic Cheshire smile appears again and again. At times it is obscured in the depths of texture and pattern, or turned on its side as in Chesire (Guapa) (2014), at first appearing to be an image of a woman’s genitals. While the Cheshire grin might be most often associated with the mischievous cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it also refers to the more sinister history of blackface minstrelsy.

Patches with lotus flowers are found on many of these quilt works. Look closely, and you may realize that each petal’s form is made from the image of an aerial view of a slave ship. These images have been reappropriated from slave-trading manuals directing how to best pack human cargo for a cross-Atlantic trip. Early slave trade abolitionists got ahold of these manuals and mass distributed posters to show the atrocities of the practice, creating some of the first graphic propaganda programs against slavery—a practice Biggers continues with these works.

In whence/wince (2020), one of the largest pieces in the gallery and one of two new works in the exhibition, two red-white-and-blue quilts are sewn together. The phallic forms of four Greek columns are cut from the cloth and lie flaccid and defeated on the ground. A negative void of sizable volume, subtracted from quilts made from the colors of the United States flag, might represent the decline of democracy—a visual tale that history is doomed to repeat itself and fall to ruin like great Greek temples dedicated to undefeatable gods like Zeus.

The contested history that quilts acted as signposts for enslaved peoples on the Underground Railroad is perhaps not widely known.

Such quilts are said to have contained secret messages that could only be deciphered by a community rooted in conversation, to direct their people to freedom. Through these new works in “Codeswitch,” Biggers becomes a late collaborator with the original creators of the quilts, continuing a long history rooted in orality and performance, shaped and defined by connections not always visible to everyone.

Brendan Lott

Walter Maciel Gallery

By Genie Davis

In his new collection of powerful figurative images and mysterious abstract photographs, Brendan Lott proves he is both “Looking In and Looking Out.” The exhibition is curated across two rooms at Walter Maciel, allowing viewers to move between intriguing and intimate images of individuals observed through windows and the photographer’s quiet abstractions. This work continues Lott’s exploration of life in a pandemic, originally seen at the gallery last year in “Safer at Home.” Both series are poignant, haunting and poetic in composition and subject.

As the pandemic greatly altered lives, initially confining people in their homes and changing busy lifestyles to those more restrained, Lott’s camera followed. The result is an intimate look at these isolating circumstances, and the expression of human longing for connection. Balanced on the knife-edge of the voyeuristic, Lott photographed inhabitants viewed through the windows of an apartment building across from his own. The result are candid shots composed in painterly, even formal styling; narrative work that grew from Lott’s own isolation. They capture loneliness, boredom and solitude, as well as small gatherings or couplings as the world began slowly, gestationally to expand. Body language is sometimes languid, sensual; always deeply personal.

Lott’s work reveals a wide gamut of human emotion, even without seeing the faces of the individuals he depicts. A bedroom embrace blazes with the vivid red of a woman’s dress bent over a figure hidden beneath white bed sheets for a sleepy hug in “September 12, 2021, 6:14 am.” The New Year, marked with glittering holiday lights reflects on a man holding a microphone, clad in silver spandex leggings in January 1, 2021, 1:57am. The party has just begun, or possibly ended. “April 20, 2021, 4:22pm” reveals two iPhones charging in a kind of technological intimacy, while a lone

Brendan Lott, April 20, 2021, 4:22pm, 2021. Courtesy Walter Maciel Gallery.

woman, apparently partially nude, is concealed behind a concrete post. Her hand holds a cigarette, drooping gracefully outside her balcony window. She appears almost subsumed by the concrete around her, held in by it, perhaps in need of personal recharging and companionship.

In one work, we see a lone figure sprawling face down, only legs showing, on a rumpled bed; in another, a woman leans down to tenderly kiss or whisper to a seated man in a bright jacket. She is reaching in, but he is immobile, closer to the green leaves of a house plant than the woman. Each image invites viewers to explore or imagine the story behind it; to relate, to remember both the feelings of anxiety and fear, and the growing sense of everyday comfort from others.

Exhibited along with these narrative visual stories are Lott’s closeups of urban streets, from the trash on the sidewalk to the fading and peeling advertisements plastered on crumbling walls. Human connection—and the longing for it—appears more resilient than these vestiges of city landscape.

David S. Rubin

California State University Northridge, West Gallery

By Peter Frank

It has been a while since David Rubin ended his long and distinguished career as an institutional curator, but he continues to write and curate—and continues to produce art as well. Rubin had put aside his youthful artmaking once his curatorial direction took over, but began drawing again about twenty years ago, when the stimulus of constant exposure to artists—especially postwar American artists and their spiritual quests—finally became too great to resist.

Since then, Rubin has concentrated on drawing media, sometimes subject to photographic documentation—intimate media indicative of the role, part creative, part intellectual, that he has played in the American art world.

Since moving back to his native Los Angeles Rubin has concentrated on his drawing, refining his approach so that his images consist entirely of myriad small bubble-like forms strung together in various tendrilous shapes. They suggest microscopic aquatic protozoan life, not least in their lyrical fluidity, but also concatenations of heavenly bodies—stars and detritus alike—into incipient galaxies.

This bridging of the micro- and macrocosmic is not accidental; such cosmological harmonizing comes naturally to Rubin in the wake of the metaphysical revelations provided him by the likes of Lee Krasner, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Al Held, and Clare Falkenstein. Even the seemingly mundane imagery of the late Martha Alf has informed Rubin’s transcendent insight, translating the monumentality of her humble subjects and use of light into linear form—what he considers automatic writing. In this regard, the overall title Rubin gives this series—“Pearls of Wisdom”—is not a boast but an homage; the

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R E V I E W S

David S. Rubin, Pearls of Wisdom (3), 2020, Courtesy California State University Northridge, West Gallery.

wisdom refined into pearlescent little beads is that of his influences and mentors.

Rubin’s Date Drawings—actually photographs of, among other things, drawings—take their cue from On Kawara, one of the earliest and “simplest” conceptual artists. Kawara’s ongoing project was the noting of date (“January 19 1967”) and/or time (“Today I awoke at 11:08 am”), refining existence into the perceptual system of temporal measurement. The Date Drawings are rather more voluble, posing the sprightly articulations of Rubin’s hand with hard and fast objects such as an alarm clock and a blood pressure monitor. Rubin marks every day with this photographed set-up, making sure to post each one on social media. In this way he both actualizes and obviates—and personalizes—the performative aspect of Kawara’s method.

Rubin also regularly posts his Pearls of Wisdom, but those works are not photographic or conceptually disembodied. There is pleasure and resonance to be gained by seeing them before your eyes.

Rubin’s touch is tender and exacting, like that of a manuscript illuminator, and his colors glow as they rest on paper. The small survey at CSUN provided a captivating IRL experience with these drawings. It also gave Rubin a chance to make prints of some of his Date Drawing photos, and, designed as they may have been for dematerialized media, they charmed even more from the wall.

Ruth Asawa

David Zwirner / New York

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.055, Hanging Asymmetrical NineInterlocking Bubbles) c. 1955. Courtesy David Zwiner / New York.

Curated by former MOCA LA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, “Ruth Asawa: All is Possible” at David Zwirner, New York expands our understanding of this remarkable artist by presenting a selection of lesser-known pieces together with her iconic sculptures. Asawa’s drawings, in particular, with their scenes of family members, chairs, flowers and plants, describe the rich life of creativity Asawa enjoyed despite the prodigious responsibility of raising six children.

These tranquil pieces reveal so much about Asawa’s practice, character and life. Initially, they may appear a departure from

Continuing to make art as the house filled with kids must have been exceedingly challenging. Asawa’s work lent itself to being made on the fly during stolen moments, using simple at-hand materials. She was ideally suited for this, having, in addition to her obvious artistic gifts, the fortitude and resourcefulness, forged in the internment camps she inhabited as a teenager, to make the best out of any situation. That this paradigm of inventive multitasking also achieved such transcendent beauty, shows us that for her, all really was possible.

By Sarah Sargent

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her sculptures, but line is the unifying element. Asawa’s crisp botanical sketches seem to emerge from one assertive line and the single wire from which each sculpture is created, evokes a line. Asawa embraced this, likening fashioning her sculptures to drawing in air. In her hands line becomes a dazzling filament that bends and turns to form a metal loop or glides boldly across a sheet of paper to render petals and leaves.

Suspended from the ceiling, Asawa’s sculptures evoke the organic—jellyfish bells or seaweed stalks, a cascade of ruffles. Asawa weaves the wire into her distinctive looping mesh to produce a continuous surface which includes interior and exterior shapes.

Eight sculptures hang together in one room. The interplay between the shapes and forms of the works commands the space.

One is drawn to how the sculptures inhabit the air, claiming the negative space around them and expanding beyond their physical boundaries to include the shadows they cast.

With her drawn meanders, Asawa takes a linear pattern and repeats it across the page in a similar manner to her sculptures, building upon a single motif to create, through repetition, something substantial. For Asawa, the repetitive nature of the work was possibly meditative, providing a portal into deeper concentration and taking her out of her busy maternal reality for a time.

Over 50 bisque-fired lifemasks of friends and family members confront you en masse from one wall. Beautifully rendered in terra cotta, white, bone and black, this assemblage of humanity is profoundly moving.

Asawa operated in the traditionally feminine realm of weaving and sketching domestic scenes, creating work of remarkable heft and muscle. She was no wuss. Her sculptural work required enormous patience and stoicism, as entwining the metal wire was a tedious process that shredded her fingers. She carved enormous doors from redwood planks that have such simple, yet imposing beauty, that they rival the most magnificent bronze versions.

You Are So Loved xoxo Sküt @inkedbyskut

Sküt Studio, TAG Gallery. 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 • inkedbyskut.com

IT’S A VINCENT VAN

BY NATASHA BOYD

Doubtless you’ve seen the billboards: the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit has shown in cities across North America, and now it’s Los Angeles’ turn. It’s Time To Gogh! commands the sign, and I oblige, stepping into the old Amoeba building on Sunset Boulevard, which will serve as the event space for the duration of its local run.

I pass through security and walk into the dark hallway that begins the “immersive experience.” Overhead, a voice actor murmurs lines from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters. This hallway opens onto a tunnel of empty gilt frames that ends at the main foyer, which has a mural of the Hollywood sign painted in the manner of Van Gogh. The voice actor is replaced by classical strings covers of Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” FIND BEAUTY EVERYWHERE is scrawled on one of the promotional leaflets.

The foyer serves as another hallway, and I follow the crowd to the projection rooms. With the lights on, it would be like standing inside an enormous blank cube. Now, however, the darkness is broken by projections of Van Gogh’s paintings. Heavy bass electronica thrums through the air, while farmland and flowers

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flow across the walls as if they painted themselves. The animated autonomy of Van Gogh’s works seems strangely fitting.

The first time I remember seeing a Van Gogh, I was an elementary school tot. My teacher wheeled out the projector and cast Starry Night onto the wall. I can still feel the nubby carpet under my hands when I remember this, how it is like the texture of the paint. It seems strange that a painter who found God in the world would have his work transformed once again into that least material of mediums—into light.

It’s impossible to know the first time most people saw his vision of the night sky over Saint Remy, though almost certainly it wasn’t the painting in New York City, hanging on MoMA’s 5th floor. Most likely it was a replication of the image on a poster, a phone case, fridge magnets, backpack or bed sheets, and now this “immersive experience.” Van Gogh reportedly painted many of his works through windows; the replications are now like thousands of miniature windows on his actual paintings, wherever they may really be housed.

A GOGH-GOGH!

I notice a sign near the bathroom advertising an app that allows you to write a letter to Van Gogh and receive one in return, inspired by his lifelong conversation with his brother Theo. “Hi Vincent,” I type, “How’s the asylum?” The loading wheel spins, and a moment later the bot replies, “My painting goes well, despite my worsening circumstances…”

The sense of the prophetic is too strong about his life to have any other relation to it. Each brush stroke brings him a step closer to his death, to the 7mm revolver in the wheatfield. I watch Bedroom at Arles dissolve into another wheatfield painting; Edith Piaf’s “Je Ne Regrette Rien” thunders through the speakers. He suffered exactly as he needed to so that we can experience his life after death, his pervasiveness in pop culture, his penetration into the deepest, oldest corridors of memory. A painted bird drifts against blue walls that were once the painted sky of Arles.

Across the world, his work and his words continue to swirl forward in countless repetitions like snow blowing through an open door.

Still, it’s nice to sit in the middle of the floor, as you’re encouraged to, and just look around. The room is filled with families, couples and young children with benches for people who might not have the flexibility to stand up and sit down again. “Irises” floods the wall, and the blue light of the painting washes upon the veined hands of an older woman, sitting quietly, holding her walker. Thankfully, the entire thing is rather hard to take a photo of—the projections are too large to capture anyway and the projections are a little grainy. Instead we sit and look. The whole video lasts about an hour and is on a continuous loop, but you can stay as long as you want.

It is no small irony that we can’t avoid the figure of Van Gogh as the archetypal impoverished artist. The lines of the Bedroom at Arles start to take shape: the bed frame emerges out of thin air along with the chair and the boots, then color splashes into it, and the famous painting looms on all sides; and his legacy seems suddenly, painfully inescapable.

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TALLY HO!

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

B U N K E R

What Really Happened to Baby Jane’s doll?

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V I S I O N

A friend who made his name in the world of queer underground theater often quipped that “Film is forever.” When he landed a featured role in a late Paul Morrissey film, he was confident that something he had done would outlast him. That film turned 40 years old last year and has long been out of print. It is trading in the grey market of collector DVDs, so it isn’t officially lost. But the number of lost films is staggering. It is estimated that 90% of silent films, and 50% of sound films made before 1950 are lost.

The first forays into film preservation go back to 1935, when the Museum of Modern Art started collecting and preserving important films. Not long after that, MGM tossed much of their back catalog onto a fire in Gone with the Wind because the film stock made for a good cinematic fire. UNESCO designated film as a part of the world’s cultural heritage in 1980. Despite this change in attitude, there are films made since then that are officially lost.

This is especially true with Queer Cinema. During the early days of the AIDS epidemic, whole collections were destroyed by mortified relatives.

Friends and lovers (gay marriage is a very recent development) were often excluded when it came time to settle estates. Families often ignored wills and promised donations to institutions. With the mainstreaming of gayness, historians who might have been depended on to preserve queer culture adhered to an agenda that left out the demimonde.

As nature abhors a vacuum, it was just a matter of time until queerness got its due. One of the highest-profile historians to tackle this world is Elizabeth Purchell. She is tracking down pornographic films from the mid20th century and finding in them a rich portrait of gay life in an otherwise lost era.

She provides the commentary on a newly restored print of What Really Happened to Baby Jane. This film was the product of a group that went by the name The Gay Girls Riding Club.

Formed in the late 1950s by a group of gay Hollywood-based professionals, their annual Halloween Ball was the stuff of legend. (There is a jaw-dropping video of their 1986 Halloween ball on YouTube.) Between 1962 and 1972 they made a series of underground film parodies (often compared to the Kuchar Brothers) based on Hollywood movies that were popular in the gay community. Their take on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was filmed a year after the original, using actual props from the Hollywood version. Because of their Hollywood ties, the cinematography and production values exceeded the usual underground fare. It is also likely that they had bigger budgets than their underground peers. Although some of their films are still considered lost, the five that remain have been given deluxe restorations. These were recently released on the Vinegar Syndrome label, which is also releasing a set of rare Fred Halsted films. (Halsted was the first porn director to be included in the MoMA collection.) Perhaps the era of found films has officially commenced. Giddy-up!

JANUARY 19-23 | 2022 LA CONVENTION CENTER | SOUTH HALL L A A R T S H OW.C O M

L A R A

J O

R E G A N ’ S

S I G H T S

U N S C E N E

Deinstalling artist Ning-Hsin Hu’s Pressure Test at Torrance Art Museum’s NOMAD show, Torrance, CA, 2021

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Cheer Stunt, 2020, The Weissman Family Collection

Through May 1, 2022 • Tickets at lbma.org

BCM Foundation

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Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective Extended though March 2022

Abstraction in MOLAA Collection May 2022 - December 2022

Gabriella Sanchez: Partial Pictures Closing January 30, 2022

Yvonne Venegas May 2022 - December 2022

Pablo Rasgado May 2022 - December 2022

Narsiso Martínez October 2022 - January 2023 Crack Rodríguez February 2022 - Juny 2022

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P O E M S

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The Mind Wanders

B A B S

BABY STEPS BACK TO NORMALCY

We pass 6th street at eight o’clock.

This is not remarkable but sometimes one can do something countless times and remain enchanted.

The colors aren’t the same.

Once blue, now purple, then red.

No two things are alike an hour later but they remain familiar.

We crossed 6th street at eight o’clock.

Or was it 7th?

It’s not important.

Neither detail nor description keep their shape in the wake of time’s authority.

—DANIEL CROOK

Courtesy of the Artist I have arrived at a restless standstill, in the heart of the heart of the slump, lacking the wherewithal to repine, skimming the torn pages of my mind, hoping to find some shred of myself.

Sometimes, all too frequently, it’s just not there, and it’s surprising to find I’m still here, in an insufficiently stifled reality. At long last, lost.

At long last, having left it too late.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

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Dear Babs, Back in the pre-COVID days, I didn’t mind going to art openings and events; they weren’t my favorite thing, but I knew it was essential to show up and meet people.

Now, after a year of not going out, I find these activities next to impossible to endure. I’m vaccinated, booster-ed, and wear a mask, so I’m not afraid of getting COVID. It’s just that I have this new anxiety I didn’t have before. I find myself unable to socialize; I feel paralyzed and just not myself.

What do I do?

—Awkward in Altadena Dear Awkward, At least you kinda liked going to openings in the “before times.” Most artists I know were happy to have a reprieve from obligated social functions during months of lockdown. But the fact is we all need to start showing up for each other—if only to rebuild social bonds and communities damaged by the pandemic. That doesn’t mean it will be easy.

After adapting to our isolation, getting out into the world feels like a shock.

You should know you’re not alone in your newfound anxiety.

The American Psychological Association published a report in March of this year stating that nearly half of all Americans they surveyed felt “uneasy about adjusting to in-person interaction.” So know that everyone else feels weird too.

Remember to take your time. You don’t have to be the same social butterfly you were before COVID. Socializing is a skill, and you must practice it just like anything else. Set a goal of going to one art event a month. If you feel overwhelmed with anxiety during the small talk that plagues all social functions, just come out and say how you’re feeling. Trust me; many people will be happy you did and will welcome the opportunity to talk about their own awkward social re-emergence.

After a few months, you’ll get more comfortable. Before you know it, your calendar will be so filled with openings and parties and fairs and other social functions you’ll be wishing for another

TH ANNIVERSARY

1982 - 2022

PORTALS January 15 - March 26, 2022

Opening Reception: January 15, 2 - 5pm Virtual Artist Talk: February 17, 6:30pm Erin Harmon, Erika Lizée, Elana Mann, Yevgeniya Mikhailik, Alicia Piller, Adam Rabinowitz, Esther Ruiz, Howard Schwartzberg, Svetlana Shigroff Curated by Stephanie Sherwood angelsgateart.org Lattice Supertemporal, Erin Harmon, 2017

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Summer Azure, 2020, Tourmaline. Dye sublimation print. Getty Museum. © Tourmaline. Text and design © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust