Yuri Yuan Presents "The Great Swimmer" @ Make Room in Los Angeles

In the past year, Yuri Yuan has often dreamed about water. Sometimes she sees a sinking ship, sometimes in a quiet ocean. Often, she finds herself on a diving board, perched over a blue swimming pool. Yuan’s latest body of work is titled "The Great Swimmer" after Kafka’s fragment of the same title. These limpid canvases explore different aquatic landscapes, but they most often return to the landscape of the swimming pool, with its diving boards, tiles, and changing rooms. Yuan tapped into her memories of swimming lessons she took at age 13, having just moved to Singapore from China. These classes were a minefield of linguistic, bodily, and emotional alienation– not unlike the alienation expressed by Kafka’s swimmer.

"The Great Swimmer" marks a watershed moment in Yuan’s practice. Working in a consistently larger format, the works showcase the influence of cinematic narrative on the artist’s practice. Fascinated by the intricate visual constructions of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Wong Kar Wai, Yuan’s new works seek to understand the innate connections between narrative and aesthetics. "The Great Swimmer" also takes influence from the deep ultramarine palettes of the Italian Renaissance, as well as the figural masterwork of French Romantics such as Géricault. "The Great Swimmer" presents a narrative in two sets of fragments, hopping between visions of the internal and external, the literary and the cinematic, the real and the dream.

Yuri Yuan is on view now through February 12 at Make Room 5119 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles.

Witch Women @ Thank You For Asking in Los Angeles

Witch Women, the first group show at Thank You For Asking, features 8 female artists and visually embodies the spirit of this unique gallery. The show was born out of a desire for connection and trust among women, to heal wounds from the past, and to rebuild the coven by listening to eternal female intuition. Each artist chosen for this show presents work that has a distinct, vibrant, and empowered feminine energy. Curated by and featuring works from Jade Wolf and Rebecca Holopter, Witch Women also features artists Deedee Cheriel, Nikki McCauley, Amanda Faber, Kim Baise, Samantha Wilson, and Jade-Snow Carroll. Thank You For Asking is the creation of artist Jade Wolf, a new kind of gallery and event space focused on art, spirit, and humor. Beyond featuring artists and creators, this space holds movie screenings, art workshops, and weekly healing classes, including Multi-Dimensional Breathwork, Kundalini Yoga For Creativity, and The Best Experience: A journey through movement, breath, sound, and meditation.

Witch Women will be on view through March 27th at Thank You For Asking 8663 Venice Blvd, LA CA 90034. Call or email for appointments. photographs courtesy of Cynthia Alexandra

Charles Ray Presents "Two Ghosts" @ Matthew Marks Gallery In Los Angeles

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Charles Ray’s first work in stone, Two Horses (2019), a relief carved from a single block of Virginia granite. The sculpture is ten feet tall and fourteen feet wide and weighs more than six tons. A smaller work displayed on a pedestal, Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2018), is a hypothetical scene from the hills around Ray’s home in Los Angeles. Each animal has been machined from a solid block of aluminum, producing a reflective surface that enhances the work’s finely sculpted details. Two Ghosts is on view through June 22 a Matthew Marks Gallery 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Willard Hill's Solo Exhibition @ Good Luck Gallery In Los Angeles

The intricate masking tape and mixed media sculptures of Willard Hill (b. 1934) draw from a lifetime spent in the small town of Manchester, Tennessee. Over twenty years ago, when Hill returned home debilitated after a hospital stay, the idea came to him to start making sculptures out of all the everyday detritus he had at hand. Primarily composed of masking tape, Hill’s sculptures also utilized plastic bags, wire, toothpicks, rocks and a plethora of other found materials. Whatever a piece reminded him of as he worked, that’s what it became and soon every surface in his small home was covered in evocative gems. The exhibition is on view through October 14 at Good Luck Gallery 945 Chung King Road, Los Angeles.

This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich & Many Other Artists @ Institute of Contemporary Art

This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich and Many Other Artists surveys an array of world-renowned artists and one indispensable assistant—the Los Angeles-based artist, sign painter, and fabricator Norm Laich. The exhibition will consist of paintings and graphic installations fabricated by Laich over the past three decades. Laich has been a key contributor to the production of many iconic works by a range of artists including Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Kruger, Allen Ruppersberg, and Jenny Holzer, among many others. The exhibition is on view through September 2 at Institute of Contemporary Art 717 East 7th Street Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Samantha Blake Launches "MAPS" @ Navel LA

On Saturday April 28th, Navel LA celebrated the launch of MAPS, Movement Art Performance Space. MAPS was founded by Samantha Blake and is dedicated to cultivating the contemporary and traditional arts of the Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diaspora in Los Angeles. The launch featured three dance performances by Samantha Blake, Chris Bordenave and Vera Passos (respectively), along with a film screening  by Nery Madrid, singing by Felicia ‘Onyi’ Richards, costumes by Gabrielle Datau + Jiro Maestu (Poche) and Desiree Klein, and still photographs by Russel Hamilton, shot during the film’s creation. You can read our interview of Chris Bordenave from our Winter 2017 issue here. Navel LA is located at 1611 S Hope Street Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Naudline Pierre's Solo Exhibition "Touch Not My Beloved" @ New Image Art

Depicting a strange and mysterious world, Naudline Pierre’s paintings cobble together a personal mythology full of characters paused in intimate scenes. The characters within these works play parts in this parallel reality flavored by the influence of Pierre’s puritanical Protestant upbringing. Touch Not My Beloved presents these scenes of protection and affection from a parallel reality, only accessible, the artist believes, through the act of painting. "Touch Not My Beloved" is on view through May 12 at New Image Art 7920 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Ammon Rost's Exhibition "Rudder" @ LTD Los Angeles

In the fallout of a broken heart, specific and at times odd provocations emerge to elicit bittersweet emotions- the smell of a candle, a cat food commercial, a house with a triangular window. It changes person to person, but our brains insist that we ascribe emotional significance to seemingly unrelated, otherwise trivial occurrences. Ammon Rost's paintings for Rudder document a production of unforeseen romantic narratives, where every inclusion, every stroke or line or erasure either comes directly from a real experience, or becomes a representation of one. Every mark a memory. "Rudder" is on view through May 5th at LTD Los Angeles 1119 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Fay Ray's "I AM THE HOUSE" Exhibition @ Shulamit Nazarian

I AM THE HOUSE continues Ray’s interest in the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochromatic photomontages and suspended metallic sculptures. Throughout this series, she situates the body as a vessel, one that carries life, physical memories, and emotional fortitude.

Employing a wide array of images and materials, these new works usher in various references to transformations that occur during the initial and end stages of life. Eggs, flowers, and desiccated corn signify the fragility of existence, while portals, crushed beer cans, and cacti complicate the references to beauty and luxury that have long been staples of the artist’s visual lexicon. 

The exhibition is on view through May 26 at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery 616 N La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Opening Night of Urs Fischer's "Fountains" @ Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills

Gagosian Beverly Hills presents an exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Urs Fischer. Constantly searching for new sculptural solutions, Fischer has an uncanny ability to envisage and produce objects undergoing psychic transformation in a bewildering range of materials. As its title suggests, this exhibition is conceived around fully functional fountains, “active sculptures” that transform the galleries into humid and energized places through which viewers can wander, as if in a town square. The lumpen fountains are cast in bronze from hand-built clay models; the rims of the water basins are powder-coated white, while the base is left as raw roseate metal. In one gallery, a sort of roughly formed, almost naturalistic blowhole spouts water, splashing merrily and drowning out all other sound; in the other, water hisses from a misting ball, and spills down over two tiered basins. A third fountain, also in cast bronze and delicately powder-coated in parts, is a human skeleton arched across a chair over which a draped garden hose gently flows—the latest in Fischer's lexicon of darkly humorous vanitas. Urs Fischer "Fountains"  will be on view until October 17, 2015 at Gagosian Beverly Hills.