Iiu Susiraja isn’t simply challenging the modus operandi of how we understand and perceive beauty. The photographer, born near Turku, Finland, is a private performance artist, a secret exhibitionist using her body as a versatile dress form to experiment with everyday props, like ladles, vases, plungers and other flotsam of the mundane. In one image, Susiraja lays in bed with a whole raw chicken resting on a silver platter, creating a sort of quotidian surreality. Ghebaly Gallery presented the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, which included her strange autoerotic still lifes and video work. The following interview was published in our Fall Winter 2018 issue, featuring a selection of the artist’s diffident self-portraits. Read more
Meriem Bennani's Guided Tour of a Spill @ François Ghebaly In Los Angeles
Meriem Bennani’s Guided Tour of a Spill acts as an interlude between her groundbreaking Party on the CAPS (2018), her pseudo-documentary set in the Moroccan quarter of the CAPS, and a narrative sequel set to debut later this year at the Renaissance Society and Nottingham Contemporary. The exhibition consists of the titular multi-channel video projected and displayed on sculptural, kinetic screens alongside new drawings of scenes from the world of the CAPS. One screen, broadcasting what could be an A.I.-generated children’s video, is topped by helicoptering ropes that slap the gallery walls. Inspired by the compilation structure and synesthetic drive of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Guided Tour of a Spill centers less on overt narrative and more on the visceral and sensorial pleasure of music, dance, athletics and humor. Throughout the exhibition, Bennani playfully blends humor and critique, weaving an expanded allegory for how media circulates through channels of digital and geopolitical power, both online and in the real spaces we inhabit.
Guided Tour of a Spill is on view by appointment through May 1 @ François Ghebaly 2245 E. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles
Liquid Dreams Group Show Opens @ Ghebaly Gallery, featuring Koak, Genesis Belanger, Dorian Gaudin, And More
Liquid Dreams is a group show featuring paintings and sculptures by Kelly Akashi, Farah Atassi, Davide Balula, Genesis Belanger, Neïl Beloufa, Lila de Magalhaes, Dorian Gaudin, Sayre Gomez, Patrick Jackson, Koak, Joel Kyack, Mike Kuchar, Candice Lin, Gina Osterloh, Philip Pearlstein, and Kathleen Ryan. Liquid Dreams is on view at Ghebaly Gallery through August 10th, 2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
Liquid Dreams Group Show, featuring Koak, Dorian Gaudin, Genesis Belanger, and more @ Ghebaly Gallery
Liquid Dreams is a group show featuring work by Kelly Akashi Farah Atassi, Davide Balula, Genesis Belanger, Neïl Beloufa, Lila de Magalhaes, Dorian Gaudin, Sayre Gomez, Patrick Jackson, Koak, Joel Kyack, Mike Kuchar, Candice Lin, Gina Osterloh, Philip Pearlstein, and Kathleen Ryan. Liquid Dreams is on view through August 10th at Ghebaly Gallery, 2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
Milka Djordjevich's ANTHEM Is This Weekend's Must-See Show @ Ghebaly Gallery
Milka Djordjevich’s ANTHEM, presented by Los Angeles Performance Practice, currently on a three-night run at Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles, is a pulsing kaleidoscope of movement that is difficult to label. Maybe disco dressage comes close, a choreographed disintegration loop, something akin to the rising and fading blips on a Soviet-era heart monitor, performed by a distant artificially intelligent species programmed only with 1.44 megabytes of 20th century cabaret instruction. In actuality the dance is performed by four human women named Laurel Atwell, Jessica Cook, Dorothy Dubrule, and Devika Wickremesinghe.
According to Djordjevich, ANTHEM utilizes “existing and imagined vernacular dance styles” to explore “labor, play, and feminine-posturing.” You could say that this trifecta becomes a first, second and third act by which to break down the performance, and break down it will. Within the hour-long performance, an innocent playground clapping game turns into a cocaine fever dream that reminds you of Sydney Pollack’s 1969 adaption of Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? It's about a Great Depression-era dance marathon the devolves into desperation, exhaustion, greed and death. ANTHEM is electric and existentially thrilling in the same context. It is a fragmented mirror reflecting an alternate reality that absorbs the viewer within Djordjevich’s enthralling matrix, helped maybe by the droning, undulating music of Chris Peck and theatrical communist bloc, discotheque-toned lighting by Madeline Best.
Each dancer, one with a full Petra Von Kant afro, arrive in a kind of centipede-like daisy chain, various lackadaisical rhythmic exercises turn into cavalier Saturday Night Fever dance moves performed with brilliantly stolid indifference. Soon, the dancers climb on top of each other, writhing double-deckers of velvet covered flesh. One chews gum, blows bubbles and makes awkward eye contact with the audience. Two of them lose their shoes. At points they all rehydrate and fix their hair as they fall into a hypnotic groove, one of which takes on a texture of movement that has a robotic, cool remove. Mascara, eye shadow and sweat glistens. The dancers slowly succumb to gravity and exhaustion, like bon vivants at dawn. They emerge from their stupor to return from whence they came. The fever has broken and no bitter tears were shed.
ANTHEM has three remaining performances in Los Angeles, Saturday 6/9 at 10pm, Sunday 6/10 at 3pm & 7pm. Ghebaly Gallery is located at 2245 E Washington Boulevard. photographs by Summer Bowie
Opening of Florian Meisenberg's The Taste Of Metal In Water @ Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles
The Taste Of Metal In Water is a body of new paintings in a sculptural sound installation. This show marks the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery and unspools like a vivid session of lucid dreaming. Metal pipes slice the space into particular trajectories. The pipes, extensions of the guts of the building, carry neither electricity nor water, but instead small and resonant hiccups that spread throughout the space. A series of new paintings operate collectively as a stream of memories. The show will be on view through April 14 at Ghebaly Gallery 2245 E Washington Blvd. Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock