THE DIGITAL: NFTs Flood LA - by seth hawkins

NFTs are here, ushering in a new Golden Age in art. The flood of fiscal support into the NFT market has changed everything. This world has become very real and very serious, extremely fast. Investment firms are buying Degenerate Apes to flip! There’s a need to understand a new vocabulary, a new system of provenance, a new sales structure and the elimination of the historic gallery model.

My new column,“The Digital,” will be a place for elucidating the morphing digital art space, exploring crypto and NFT trends, understanding new verbiage, reviewing existing/upcoming collections, speaking with artists/developers, and shouting out my ridiculous advice in this space. —Seth Hawkins

NFTs Flood LA

BY SETH HAWKINS

THE DIGITAL

As the rain poured down and invaded Los Angeles on a recent Monday, so did the selfproclaimed NFT degenerates. There were representatives from both big NFT blockchains: mutant apes, nuked apes, boogles, money boys, cets on creck, and—did I mention that Sir-Mix-Alot was performing at the Magic Eden kickoff party shilling his own “Bit Butts” NFTs. What a night it was—I like “Bit Butts” and cannot lie! The attendees for NFT|LA, one of the first major IRL NFT events, was a mixed bag to say the least. Furries and crypto investors in their early 20s had on thousand-dollar shades, nerdy unkempt dev teams were huddled around laptops while gray-bearded old-timers tried to not miss the boat. The current state of affairs began to come into focus as I watched the Magic Eden keynote panel opening night. It included founders of some blue-chip Solana collections; Best Buds, Thug Birdz, Degods and for fun why not throw rapper Waka Flocka Flame into the mix. These are some of the heaviest traded collections on Solana—all in business for less than a year. To put this into perspective, the Degods is just about to pass the $25 mil in secondary market sales and they are only just hitting the six-month mark. What does that mean?

It exemplifies the fact that this space is so new and so rapidly changing that by the time this column has published, one of these collections may be out of favor. Even the whole Solana blockchain that these exist on is still said to be in beta. With much of the discourse at the conference being about NFT collections establishing and connecting communities, even noted musician and NFT enthusiast Steve Aoki was on stage vigorously yelling about how much comes from his online discord interactions.

I question what we are creating. Are these communities or investments? Do we ride the rocket to the moon and hop off with fiscal liquidity, or do we diamond hand for the community, as gravity inevitably pulls prices back to Earth?

Of the 20 blue-chip art collections that currently exist on Solana, will five still be around in a year’s time? How will this ecosystem change in the next two months as the world’s largest website for NFT secondary market sales—Open Sea—onboards the hottest new blockchain—Solana. We are days or weeks away from something big with this merger, but I am no financial advisor, just an enthusiastic onlooker.

When do you dip your toe in the pool? If you have taken the time to read this far, then you can invest $20 in crypto and feel like you vested in the community also. Invest a sushi dinner’s worth in an NFT if you are feeling adventurous. Get in the Game. Invest yourself. Show people the picture on your phone just like you would your firstborn.

The Question is: How do you even buy an NFT and what the hell is a phantom wallet?

Keep reading “The Digital.”

Deborah Roberts, The duty of disobedience, 2020. Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles;and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photo by Paul Bardagjy.

Deborah Roberts

Art + Practice

By Jody Zellen Deborah Roberts’ mixed-media works propose new ways to depict Black children. Her figures dominate an otherwise blank canvas (sometimes white, sometimes black) either filling most of the frame or resonating against the negative space. Rather than contextualize them in a recognizable setting, she alludes to their history through collage. Each figure’s face is composed from several different photographs, cut apart and recombined, juxtaposed with painted, as well as collaged fabrics with clashing colorful patterns. While the works have a Cubist aura, they also pay homage to Romare Bearden who explored the fracturing of spaces and faces in his collages from the 1960s. Roberts’ figures display both a childlike innocence and an awareness of the world beyond their years.

In The duty of disobedience (2020), Roberts presents three girls with collaged faces, patterned clothing and flatly painted skin augmented with pastel. One girl wears a tan tank top with three identical cartoony monkeys holding red balloons. She looks out at the viewer, as well as across the canvas. Her right hand flashes a horizontal peace sign. The T-shirt of another girl has a monkey and a weasel on it with the slogan “pop! goes the weasel.” The third girl is dressed in colorful geometric patterns—circles on her top and concentric squares on her skirt. The thin young boy in Cock-adoodle-do (2019) flexes his muscles and stares hard at the viewer. He wears striped shorts and a sleeveless gray shirt with a large decal of a red rooster in its center. The drawn and painted arms, socks and shoes contrast with the photographic face that is a composite of an unidentified boy and the actor Sidney Poitier. The Unseen (2020) depicts two girls with bright patterned jumpers and misaligned collaged faces. Looking out at the viewer from eyes culled from multiple sources, Roberts has once again constructed an image of innocence and knowing. That one of the girls holds a red Tootsie Pop in an oversized hand can be seen as an art historical reference to Pop Art and pop culture, as well as a nod to the sound made by a gun.

While Roberts’ quintessential mixed-media works against white backgrounds are situated in the front gallery, the back space offers works on paper, a video and sound installation, as well as images from Portraits: When they look back (2020), Roberts’ first series, where the figures are surrounded by black rather than a white background. This alludes, as Roberts’ states, to how “Black girls disappear into the background of life.” In What if? (2021), a mixed-media installation based on the two rooms of a Catholic confessional, Roberts memorializes the names of 400 Black women who have gone missing. Here she creates a haunting video and sound-work that poses the question, “What if she was not Black?”

As an installation, I’m is about empowerment. The works cry out: Look at me. I’m a person. I’m here. I’m important. In this exhibition, Roberts blends faces of children and grownups to suggest the trajectory toward adulthood and the fact that in today’s violent and racist world, they grow up too fast, if they get to grow up at all.

Vielmetter Los Angele

By John David O’Brien Colorful, peculiar and static, Arlene Shechet’s freestanding sculptures possess an animation. They cant and list in space, tilting precariously as if ready to tumble. On a plinth or platform, they are eccentrically placed, rarely centered. The spatial lilting is seen as the viewer walks around the sculptures, and as an unexpected transformation of forms and spatial lilting is accentuated, a sort of humorous chord is struck. The oddly anthropomorphic gestures of leaning, bending or turning seem wholly palpable yet all the works are obdurately abstract.

The orange-red drooping shape of Punch Line (2021) is hard to categorize. This curvilinear ceramic form has a hint of the functional about it and has been glazed so the surface appears as irregular foam. This alternately convex and concave figure wraps itself around the top of a spindly metal stand that has been spray-painted to match the sculpture above and grows darker until it reaches the ground. It delivers quite a punch without the literal qualities those usually carry.

The combination of glazed ceramic, painted hardwoods, and metals of various colors create a series of conundrums for the viewer. Should they be considered something like an externalized organ or are they discards from a melted and demolded industrial source? Surfaces are smooth or scored, fragments are cracked or carefully split open; there is a careful treatment of surfaces that the viewer can’t help but peer into. These aggregations appear to echo ex-

Arlene Shechet, Bright Sun Cloud, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo by Meredith Heuer. isting artworks (summoning vestiges of Lynda Benglis or Anthony Caro) but while traces of other works appear embedded in the collective whole, it is hardly the first thing a viewer perceives.

Just inside the entrance, the visitor is greeted by Bright Sun Cloud (2021) offset on a large floor plinth. Rising in piled chunks of wood and ceramic, these forms seem to spread out in a big yellow/ green embrace. Revealing itself only after a 360° perusal, the forms are masked from one side to the next and shifts in color provide new readings from one view to the next. The soft surface is replete with both cracks and textures and the only element less heated in the ensemble is the steel plate below which strikes a more plaintive, almost whimsical note. Along with the scalar shifts, it’s impossible to survey the entirety of the work, making viewing a literal discovery.

The viewer is treated to a joyful exploration of space while perusing the sculptures, further echoed in the wryly individual titles. Shechet is opting for subtle humor and invites us to explore the truly complex visual gyrations that colorful shapes in 3D can accomplish.

E.J. Hill

Oxy Arts

By Shana Nys Dambrot Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May in a beguiling, gestural and chromatically complicated suite of blossom paintings by E.J. Hill. They were undertaken during a recent residency that coincided with the interruption of life as we knew it, shaped by both the promise and threat of that life’s return, as well as an imperative reconsideration of the artist’s own priorities. These paintings represent Hill’s quest for peace of mind in the absence of peace in the world—or rather, their making embodies it.

The paintings themselves are beautiful but not pretty, troubled but not troubling. In the turmoil of their painterly color field foundations—tonalities of firestick, moss and dry grass, stormy lavender, luminous queasy pink, goldenrod and black—lies the physical evidence of the artist’s process of thinking things through with his hands. In the array of field and fancy flowers that inhabit these

grounds there is organic charm and uneasy lines, and a certain compelling dissonance between the bright expectations for a floral painting and the reality of persistent melancholy.

The explosive petals of the tiger orange bloom in Even the clouds are losing sleep (2022, acrylic and neon on wood panel, 60 x 50 ¾ in) and its entourage of puffy white clouds of which one is ringed in a neon halo, is made with darker tones and sharp, jagged lines that are gestural in the way of draftsman’s violence; while in Wherever we will to root (2022, acrylic and neon on wood panel, 61 x 50 ¾ in) the gentle aubergine folds of the velvety lily anchor the picture against the buffeting expressionistic tempest of the lavender sky. The rest of this garden of paintings carries on containing such multitudes; at the center of the room is a white baby grand piano titled Garden, that any who enter may freely play. Where the music should be there are photographs of people; because all of this is a metaphor for us, and how we’re coping.

Among the buzzwords associated with this time is self-care, expressed as the right and duty to treat oneself with kindness and respect, to commit to rest and nourishment of the body and soul. This is undertaken in pursuit of a more joyful life, which ultimately means more fully engaged and effective membership in society. Easier said than done, when everything from anxiety and disease to climate and capitalism works against us. But in that context, Hill’s self-assigned period of avoiding the rigorous durational performance works he’s known for—in favor of a year spent painting nothing but flowers—makes all the sense in the world.

Bradford J. Salamon, Monday at the Crab Cooker, 2016, Oil on canvas,The Hilbert Collection

Bradford J. Salamon

Hilbert Museum of California Art

By Liz Goldner The artist Bradford Salamon embraces his entire life in his artwork, from his childhood and teenage years—watching cartoons and films, surfing in SoCal, playing in bands, and engaging with friends— to the present. These experiences and influences are recollected and rendered in his current exhibition at the Hilbert Museum, a collection of 47 paintings and illustrations from the past four decades that include the artist’s friends, scenes from his life, and favored images from his childhood. These incorporate actual and fictional characters from the artist’s memory catalogue: R2-D2 from Star Wars, David Bowie, Gidget, Bob Dylan, Betty Boop, Andy Warhol, Alfred E. Neuman, and Walt Disney.

Yet his painterly subjects are often his colleagues as well. A series of portraits include California artists Don Bachardy (2007), Alex Couwenberg (2012), Tony DeLap (2015), and Mark Ryden (2015) demonstrate Salamon’s intuitive approach with Couwenberg and DeLap in intense poses but Bachardy relaxing. His empathetic portrait, Clare #11 (2015) portrays Clare Dowling, daughter of artist Tom Dowling, on the cusp of her teenage years. His domestic scenes bring viewers to intimate worlds of friends and family. Expectations (2009) also features art colleagues, a pregnant Julie Perlin Lee standing proudly in her living room, while her husband David Michael Lee looks on admiringly and a bit quizzically. An art history Easter egg is revealed in the title of the book the husband is reading combined with the vessels on the sideboard behind and between the couple.

In another domestic scene, Sinisi Family Holiday (2017), the artist and his friends, the three Sinisi boys, stand with their mother alongside a camper scheduled for a cross-country trip. Salamon enjoyed hearing stories of their adventures when they returned home. White Rabbit (2016) illustrates the artist’s wife Kathy, his mother-in-law, and daughters Lauren, Sarah, and Monet, with the smiling Lauren spanning a doorway, while several feet above the floor. The painting (including a rabbit referencing procreation) expresses the artist’s penchant to see artistry in amusing situations. Similarly witty is one of Salamon’s most important paintings, Dude Descending a Staircase (2019), depicting a disheveled Jeff Bridges walking down a staircase.

Yet another painting suggests Salamon’s devotion to his Southern California roots, his Monday Night at the Crab Cooker (2016). This illustration of Salamon, Mark Hilbert, co-founder of the Hilbert Museum, and Gordon McClelland who curated “Forging Ahead,” enjoying a meal, is resonant with Orange County associations, as the Crab Cooker is a long favored eatery. The painting also depicts an important aspect of Salamon’s life, as the trio often meets for dinner at the storied, demolished, and resurrected Newport Beach eatery.

Anne Appleby

Parrasch Heijnen

By Ezrha Jean Black

There was an almost respirational pacing to this show—taken from a slightly more expansive exhibition of the Montana-based artist’s work at the Missoula Art Museum—between variously light or darkness-drenched works on canvas (and/or panel) and the chromatically saturated luminosity of work rendered by photographic means. The Pond (2021), with a shimmer of silvery foliage whispering through the deeper grisaille of its depicted embankment and dark depths curving deep into the picture space around it, drew the view-

Anne Appleby, The Pond, 2021. Courtesy Parrasch Heijnen.

er into the subtleties of its rendering. Even the most determinedly monochromatic of Appleby’s canvases reveals abundant chromatic variation and considerable under-painting, however aggressively scraped or flattened. Here, however, the palette veered toward charcoal, slate grays and silvery whites. Foreground foliage, executed in quasi-pointillist style, turned its leaves in a late afternoon or early twilight, rendering the movement of leaves and branches as a kind of effervescence. As if to answer that whispering pond and its wooded embankment, the sound of water reverberated from across the gallery in a digital video loop with sound, Water Voice (2019–21), fading in from a black-and-white filtered gradient of grays and blacks to color, with the already vividly blue water deepening to sapphire. As the blue deepens, lapping waves are broken by children’s voices, splashing and diving, improvising water sports, and calling their dogs into the water to play fetch. Voices recede, dogs and children fade from view, and blue fades to gray, and finally to white, before fading in again.

The forest takes us further into the woods—a sloping view tumbling towards the viewer and into the right-most section of the (144 inches across) diptych, with pale light piercing the forest canopy to patches of the ground and the darkness falling towards us. Here the painting’s surface grisaille more readily discloses its complex underpainting, with hints of burnt umber or verdigris beneath charcoal black timber and pale gray foliage, and the palest blues where the sky peaks through the most distant trees. Directly across, Appleby’s triptych (215 in. across) The River (2013) flows not so much into our view as beneath and past us, with the turquoise of its surface scarcely suppressing its complex underpainting of both sunken riverbed debris and reflected woods and sky looming over it. Mounted on the rear wall of the gallery were four perfect squares (26 x 26 in.) from Appleby’s 2021 “First Light/Last Light” series. Their pleasures multiply on approach, both in the canvases individually and the transitions between them. Close up, the “light” of palest yellows and ambers seemed to seep from the edges while deeper amethysts and blues pooled into midsections. Directly opposite the First Light/Last Light canvases was a small kneeling figure in fired clay, Untitled (2021)—feminine in contour, but with articulation suppressed; conceivably reverential, but expressing acceptance and resistance in equal measure. Informed and inspired by the natural world, Appleby’s work is also suffused with latency, variation, potentiality—evoking a sinking world that may nevertheless rise and push back.

Ulysses Jenkins

Hammer Museum

By Richard Allen May III Ever had your memory moonwalk? Such a notion is possible after experiencing Without Your Interpretation, the Ulysses Jenkins multiverse at the Hammer Museum, a retrospective comprised primarily of video and performance art covering five decades. Putting soul in conceptualism, Jenkins interrogates the myopic paradigms and mass-media influenced understandings, reconfiguring prior knowledge related to Blackness and ultimately, humanness.

In his video, “Remnants of the Watts Festival (1972–73)” Jenkins interviews the late Cecil Fergerson, whose iconic arts activism led him to co-found the Black Arts Council (BAC) in the ‘60s while employed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Later promoted to assistant curator, he became the first African American in the history of Los Angeles to attain that position. The BAC exerted pressure on the museum to include programing that reflected and reached out to African American taxpayers. So, to watch Fergerson critically comment on how the control of the Watts Summer Festival was removed from community hands through the power of corporate funding revealed his visceral approach; he exposed how police presence at Black community events is rationalized by the state. Yet, to see footage of Black and Brown folk together at such a significant event echoed cultural solidarity. Its title, Remnants, signifies the relevance of knowledge of the past for informing the future.

Other video documentaries included King David (1978), a visit to the studio of artist, David Hammons, with LaMonte Westmoreland as commentator; and Momentous Occasions: The Spirit of Charles White (1977/1982, 19:41), a recording of his retrospective at the Los

Angeles Art Gallery and his role as professor at Otis Art Institute. To see the work of these master artists was revelatory but to hear them discuss their objects and imagery is a recommended master class. Further expanding videographic boundaries were the “Dream City (1983)” performances (1983, 5.19 min) that re-imagines a metaphoric ritual in time and Without Your Interpretation (1984, 13:53), a rite of social crisis and survival. Like the central Key Maker character in the Matrix Reloaded (2003), in both works Jenkins welcomes all to open the door to his imaginative art-making process.

Of additional significance are Bequest (2002, 9:32) and Planet X (2006, 6:19). While the former addresses the purging of negative imagery aimed at Arabic diaspora by the United States and global community, the latter juxtaposes Planet X mythology with the horrific disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Both video works demonstrate Jenkins’ ability to assault and deconstruct dehumanizing mass-media narratives. To be sure, Without Your Interpretation, with its unapologetic and intentional intersectionality, inspires belief in the parallel universe of ideas. Ultimately, Jenkins’ unflinching experimentation with video and performance makes this exhibition an enveloping experience, like playing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” (1971) over and over, and over again.

Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation rehearsal documentation, 1984. Color print. Courtesy of the artist

Dani Dodge

Black Rock Art Gallery, Joshua Tree National Park

By Genie Davis Suggesting both the afternoon desert sunlight just before it fades into dusk and the night black sky that makes Joshua Tree National Park such a stellar stargazing site, these images are as fragile and tough as the Joshua tree itself.

In “Embracing the Incarnate,” Dani Dodge’s artwork from her artist-in-residency period at Mojave National Preserve—a time extended both for personal family reasons, and the pandemic—is a long-form poem both sorrowful and triumphant, yet firmly rooted in the earth from which Joshua trees grow. The luminous mixed-media works reveal the resilience of the Joshua trees, their preciousness, and the need for their preservation. Stretching between 2018 and 2021, the works record the strength and longevity of the trees, the devastation that overcame them from the 2020 Dome Fire, and the hope rising from the recovery and restoration ongoing at the park.

The artist has called the trees “souls… Gods… nature incarnate,” and she expresses both her awe for them and an identification with their survival struggle. Beginning with her own photographs, and from a great trove of images, she selected those that best represented each period in the life of the majestic trees, and her own. The exhibited works are layered, giving them a shining, yet translucent depth, as if viewed through a camera lens, or through a clear prism of water. In a glowing golden sky punctuated by shadowed trees; the image of a young woman clad in a golden dress is seen running among them, hair flying. Figures populate additional

pieces; in Two-Thousand-Eighteen_3, a nude woman bends like a flower in a dance.

In 2019, when the artist was experiencing personal loss, there was a sense of quiet but sorrowful acceptance and perseverance in images like Two-Thousand-Nineteen_2, where gold and white clouds float ephemerally across a wide desert sky, the Joshua trees small but bold silhouettes along a ridge beneath it. In Two-Thousand-Nineteen_1 the sun, a paler gold circle slowly sinks down a golden sky, disappearing into the black hills below; trees stand sentinel, watching the coming dark. Images from 2020 are immersed in that same darkness; fallen trees, ashy ground, and fallen or bent trees appear to be weeping in Two-Thousand-Twenty_4. But in 2021, the work again grows more hopeful, as with the gilded trees beginning new growth in Two-Thousand-Twenty-One_1. Hanging from the ceiling of the exhibition space are several translucent pieces of clear plastic, painted with images of young golden plants, aching with hope. Each work here is infused with a sense of wonder and light, an all-encompassing light, ever more powerful for its ability to conquer darkness, glowing through it all.

Dani Dodge, Two-Thousand-Eighteen_4, 2018. Courtesy Black Rock Art Gallery.

Troy Montes Michie

Company Gallery, New York City

By Catherine Yang Mining tensions between the hyper-feminine and the fragile masculine, Troy Montes Michie continues his interventionist textile and collage practice with a body of work centered on the reappropriation of the Chicano countercultural figure La Pachuca. Dishwater Holds No Images, his second solo show at Company Gallery, investigates the commodification of the zoot suit, a once-radical fashion statement adopted in the 1940s by bicultural immigrants that resonated well beyond the wartime period.

Montes Michie employs the image of the zoot suit as a sartorial manifestation of marginalized communities’ desires to conform to America’s white middle class. His space-consuming work presents parallels between the acts of tailoring in fashion and collaging in art. Whether on bodies or on canvasses, both practices are defined by aesthetic interventions that express racial, gender or cultural identities. The collaged textile elements in Montes Michie’s canvas works are held together by paint and needlework and point to his efforts to create new meaning from a fragmented assortment of relics.

Beautifully expressing the intersection of tailoring and collaging in Was the Beautiful Woman in the Mirror of the Water You or Me? (2022), the artist’s 40-foot-long patchwork comprises garment bags, wire hangers, catalog pages, clothing scraps, belts, and zippers hand-stitched together. Hung Out To Dry, his 2021 sculpture series of resin-treated garments hung on steel drying racks is also interspersed throughout the gallery, culminating in Amanecer o Atardecer (all other works 2022) which features monochromatic shirt sculptures hanging overhead on crisscrossing wires.

The subversive quality of zoot suits is rooted in their blatant betrayal of gender norms, a fact to which Montes Michie fittingly pays homage. Most depictions of “Latinx” women are manipulated images of white models from 1970s magazine ads—their skin tone and lipsticks have been darkened, their formidable pinstriped suits and coiffed hair rendered in paint and graphite. The aptly titled Versatility, measuring 11 x 8 inches, perfectly captures the gender rebellion of the zoot suit with snapshots of a model whose drawn-on pantsuit becomes the basis for a visual pattern that Montes Michie liberally inserts into new contexts throughout the series.

Beyond provoking fear of female sexuality, the works also point to the destabilization of traditional class structures that the Pachucos represented. To see women of color donning the uniform of white men and flaunting their affluence in the face of the white majority implied the permeability of class categories and consequently stirred significant public anxiety. By projecting the politically wrought zoot suit, which functions as both costume and symbol, onto white female subjects, Montes Michie tactically inverts longstanding notions of beauty and femininity, and of what it means to look and feel American.

His tangible portrayal of the interrelationship between consumer materiality and cultural identity is not only incisive, but also unforgettable. In Montes Michie’s idealized version of the middle-class American Dream, women of color are, at long last, approaching the fore of the narrative. Yet his demonstration of how far we have come reveals how much more work is yet to be done.

See Troy Michie solo show in Los Angeles at CAMM through September 2022.

Troy Montes Michie, Versatility, 2022. Courtesy Company Gallery..

Umar Rashid Transformative Arts

By Ezrha Jean Black

For an artist who has deliberately cultivated a naïve style, Umar Rashid (who also occasionally calls himself Frohawk Two Feathers) appears to have calculated the exhibition’s title, “Per Capita” with almost labyrinthine deliberation—an amalgam of the coyly matterof-fact, ceremonious and slyly deceptive. Alternate readings might suggest for the head as much as the more commonplace, by the head. An impressive, blue painted ceremonial arch, titled 8th Wonder: Portal to Los Angeles Past, Present and Future (2021), greeted visitors to the gallery; yet the transfer prints that covered the structure—white cougar and bird-like silhouettes collectively titled, “All Power to the Women” (2017)—seemed slightly disconnected from both the triumphal aspect of the arch and the “Per Capita” drawings hanging at the rear of the gallery. But disconnection and detour seemed to be subsidiary themes of the show. Ostensibly the centerpiece of the show, the eponymous “Per Capita” pieces (2021)—one an acrylic-on-cowhide with rampaging toy-like horses and masked soldiers slashing at each others’ heads; the other, a suite of 12 acrylic-on-paper drawings (of women’s faces—subtitled “Hortense through Candy,” each captioned “PER CAPITA”)—could not by themselves encapsulate either the artist’s stylistic range or the exhibition’s scope which, in addition to serving as a mini-retrospective of the artist’s work (from 2013), amounted to an exorcism of colonialism past and present. Rashid achieves his exorcism not merely through stylistic means (though he is a practiced hand at this, borrowing from Japanese graphic work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian and Persian miniatures, Native American art dating from various periods of US colonial expansion, and Anglo-American folk art from the same period), but by revisiting—and aggressively messing with— the usual historical narratives. One example of this is a 2017 suite of unique zero graphic transfer prints (with ink and acrylic) on birch panels: an 18th-century “Shock Doctrine” scenography of colonial invasion, occupation, suppression and revolt. Women are depicted in full contention with their male counterparts, ready to take on leadership roles. Rashid has continued developing these interventions by historical reinvention, composing (in 2019) what is effectively a graphic mytho-satirical epic of colonialism in 40 panels (including a frontispiece), Views of Colonial Fabric Softener or, The Sidney and St. Marc Expedition to the Pacific, 1795. (e.g., panel 8, “Trappers/Sharpshooters or historical origin of Kool cigarettes”). It was perplexing that this ambitious series was not featured more prominently, but the gallery’s spatial limitations clearly impeded the show’s organization and installation. That said, not all of the work exhibited served Rashid’s overarching themes. Not to dismiss the totemic aspects of Rashid’s mythographic exorcism, but the “Yves Klein” garden totems could have easily been culled from the show. In addition to a surprisingly authentic-looking drum, Rebel (2013), Rashid showed an embroidered and appliquéd cape, Trickster (2019) bearing such insignia as a snake curling around an octagonal spider’s web (with Afro combs taking the place of classical Greek key and scroll-work for the decorative trim). Rashid also plays a trickster here, which is half the point. If colonialism’s legacies are still with us (on a “per capita” basis or otherwise), we continue to re-enact their ceremonies and traumas, even as we lampoon and subvert them.

Alexander Harrison Various Small Fires By Leanna Robinson Alexander Harrison’s aptly named exhibition “Midnight Every-

where,” is an exploration of the moods, tones and colors that the night brings. The paintings in the exhibition form a cohesive collection and tell the story of a solitary artist living in an old wooden house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by apple trees and rolling hills with only the stars and flowers to keep him company. The focal painting, Portrait of an artist in the penumbra of the moon, in hopes for a brighter future (all works 2021), gives insight into who the main character in this story is—a Black cowboy with a toothy grin gazing out the window, painting the midnight sky. In many ways this “artist character” gives the collection a meta quality. Although the paintings were created by Harrison, one could suspend their disbelief and instead infer that the paintings were in fact painted by this mysterious cowboy. The still life paintings of watermelons, apples and flowers are what he would paint after a long day, and show snapshots from his life, giving the impression that this cowboy could have simply looked around his environment and painted what he saw in his surroundings. The consistent color palette is effective: the deep blues and purples give the impression of moonlight spreading over each scene. It’s easy to visualize the quiet, secluded cabin in which all of this introspection and recording took place, and to fill in the blanks of who this artist is (the one in the painting, not Harrison himself). The cohesive story is echoed by repeating themes in the paintings, such as checkerboard cloth, or watermelon seeds from a windowsill in Midnight Picnic, which also make an appearance in The Moon. All of this storytelling elevates the show to a metaphysical level, and changes the context of the figurative paintings that contain subject matter that could be seen as elementary—how many art students paint fruit for their first assignment? This does have its downfall, however, as the pieces are stronger as a collection and some may not hold up as well as solo efforts. This is a show that is greater than the sum of its parts. Harrison’s interest in storytelling goes beyond the paintings’ content, and into his painting techniques as well. Many of the paintings have a trompe-l’œil effect, in which Harrison has painted frames around the composition. This strategy suggests a vantage point from within the painting, further immersing the viewer in the world artlounge.co he has created. The windows also tell another story, as sweeping landscapes and a sense of stillness are juxtaposed by imagery of one being trapped. In Counting Sheep, a face peers out of a tiny Umar Rashid, Trappers/sharpshooters or historical origin of Kool cigarettes Transformative Arts. , 2019. Courtesy opening, and in Why’d I have to Go n’ Dream so Big? the windowpane suggests a jail cell. This obvious longing that the artist in the paintings has is palpable, and from the solitary Light of Mine in the room of its own, it appears that the fire is still burning. Helen Chung Rio Hondo College By Eve Wood All good art has at its core an essential moment of transmutation, a point at which the object and the idea which informs it fully coalesce. The essence of the object—whether it’s a painting or a bag sculpture—versus the impulse to create it in the first place are the central questions that inform Helen Chung’s artistic process, and her recent solo exhibition at Rio Hondo College attests to these strange and often magical correlations. Working across disciplines is rarely easy, and we as viewers are constantly seeking visual threads that might lead us to some essential meaning. Neither Chung’s paintings nor sculptures correlate directly to her source material—shopping bags from high-end retailers that initially transfer expensive baubles, then are almost immediately downgraded to toting one’s dry-cleaning, then eventually to their sad end as rubbish themselves. The artist has exhumed what were Now showing artist Justin Prough essentially status chits designed to signal consumer spending ability in the Magic Box at the Mondrian Los Angeles Hotel and given these former upmarket signifiers a new life as art objects, as paintings and sculpture elevated to the gallery, a sic transit gloria mundi of market self-indulgence. The artist’s subjects are revived as

Jorge Albertella (Argentina, b. 1946) Ars Metálica 15 A, 2006 Mixed media on wood 24 x 16 x 2 ½ in. molaa.org 628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach, California 90802 Smithsonian A liate

May 2022 - December 2022