an exit from this room and others like it: New Paintings & Ceramics By Hana Ward @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Hana Ward’s newest oil paintings and ceramic works offer a visual narrative for what the artist describes as “a liberation in the mind.” With so much time spent trapped in divergent states this past year, reading and reflecting, watching the news – vacillating between feelings of hopelessness and anticipation – Ward found herself thinking about the experience of transformation, of coming into one’s power – specifically about how this experience might unfold for Black women.

Taken individually and as a whole, Ward’s most recent paintings and ceramic works invite viewers to create more loving space within themselves, allowing for the potential to thrive during an otherwise unforgiving and isolating time. Each portrait relays a deeply personal inner metamorphosis that also manifests outwardly, through an individual’s outlook and approach to life, and even possibly, optimistically, as a society at large.

an exit from this room and others like it is on view through May 8 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles

 
 

Opening of Robert Yarber's Return Of The Repressed @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

“What’s returning and why was it repressed?” asks Ben Lee Ritchie Handler of Robert Yarber at the press preview for the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over twenty years. The double entendres abound and the disarming deconstruction of the artist’s psyche takes a crystal clear focus. The loss of innocence, the loss of control, the liberation therein, the empowerment in being ostracized by a professor, and the lasting impression left by witnessing the assassination of of President John F. Kennedy. The simultaneous flood of immediacy and nostalgia is disorienting and thrilling—his paintings are a cutting visual counterpoint to critical theory, anchored through dramaturgical events and eclipses of subjecthood. Backlit and reflecting a palette at once surreal and familiar, his forms summon those of Tintoretto on an acid trip, or maybe Titian on ecstasy. While his forbearers looked up to the heavens, however, Yarber’s is the iridescent chiaroscuro of nightlife long past the witching hour. Return of the Repressed is on view through October 20 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper