Between the minutia and the mirage of our fragmented contemporary existence, artists Darius Airo and Jon Plypchuk both create work imbued with a humorous and ironic darkness masked by playfulness. An inside joke, a half forgotten dream, a song lyric, abstracted figures caught between the waveforms of television static or the rain-drenched glass of a car windshield—our brains continually try to make sense of the world like an undecoded cypher. In Airo’s recent paintings and pastels, presented in the exhibition Mickey’s Mirror (opening May 25 at Abigail Ogilvy gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Josh White—whitebox.la), making sense of the world requires clever conceptual conceit of internal mirrors and the abstracted visages of iconic cartoon characters. In the following conversation, Airo and Plypchuk discuss how the world around them is absorbed into their work. Read more.
Find Infinitude in Callum Innes' Turn @ Sean Kelly in Los Angeles
Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles
Callum Innes’ Turn at Sean Kelly in Los Angeles is an escapade into the shape. The exhibition features his latest Tondo works, alongside his Exposed Paintings, Split Paintings, and Shellac Paintings. Innes utilization of shape and color seeks to reinvent itself repeatedly. There’s a sense of playfulness with how the traditional shape can be rendered, and how the manipulation of color can transform the space within a shape. This transformation of space is what makes Innes’ work so iconic; the hardness of his rectangular and circular figures are almost intimidating. There’s a sense of intense certainty around Innes’ work: square, circle, rectangle, line. The infinite history of these figures is perhaps what makes them so sturdy in their presence; they stand in themselves like sargeants in command. There’s something calming about this sense of complete certainty; the deliberate alteration of the traditional shape is uniform, mechanical, and familiar. The occupation of space within the shape itself is what forces Innes’ work outside the confines of all that we know to be the average circular or rectangular formation. The geometric display is pervaded with different intonations of pigment, while still steadfastly holding onto the robust structure that is quintessential of Innes’ work.
Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles
His latest exploration of the Tondo simultaneously catalyzed an experimentation with materiality. For this series of work, Innes’ circular figures are made of plywood panels. The sleekness of the surface invited a new methodology involving the application of color. This embrace of movement in process further enunciates the notion of time in Innes’ work. The infinitude of the shape is subliminally apparent; we are conscious of the fact that the standard shape is something that has always existed and will always exist. The notion of time becomes further warped across materiality, where the time spent making these forms varies and is dependent upon the surface of the work.
Turn becomes incredibly nuanced when it’s embedded within the context of time and shape. The rotation of a circular form is ubiquitous in its implementation. To turn is to move, and to simultaneously occupy time. Innes directly engages with the advent of motion, but does so in a way that is entirely unchaotic. The structure that he gives time can be comforting, but it’s more so reflective. The sturdiness with which Innes presents abstract concepts lies at the heart of this ability for reflection; the idea of turning becomes inseparable from the idea of shape. To turn becomes reminiscent of both the infinite and finite. The end of the turn finds itself at the end of the circle, which doesn’t exist.
Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles
Turn is on view through May 4 @ Sean Kelly, 1357 N Highland Avenue Los Angeles CA
Read Our Interview of Avery Wheless on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition with BozoMag in Los Angeles →
Avery Wheless is a Los Angeles-based painter who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. With her mother, a ballet instructor, and her father, an animator for LucasFilms, it’s no wonder she became a painter and video artist with a penchant for the theatrical. Her video works often depict movement artists performing choreography, and her painted portraits often depict everyday people engaging in the unconscious performativity of everyday life. Her current solo exhibition Stage, Presence on view at a private residence in Beverly Hills with BozoMag includes portrayals of the artist and her friends occupying glamorous spaces, caught in moments that subtly reveal the effort that comes with looking at ease. These acts are not celebrated or bemoaned. They just are. One friend reaches into the cocktail dress of another to lift and expose the fullness of her breast in anticipation of reuniting with an ex. Other figures unwittingly become subjects as they applaud an unseen performer or spy pensively on others while sipping martinis. The pageantry of hyper femininity is as vulnerable as it is manicured when you look at it from the right angle and Avery Wheless has a way of depicting it all simultaneously like an emotional lenticular on canvas. Read more.
Read Our Interview of Artist Tim Biskup On The Occasion Of His 4/20 Exhibition at Face Guts →
American visual artist Tim Biskup is a rebellious outlier in the shark-eat-shark ecosystem of the art market. His project space, Face Guts, is a testament to his anti-establishment ethos. Ceremoniously opening on 4/20, his exhibition Spring Collection will include a new suite of paintings and drawings with Biskup’s unique brand of psychedelia—a vision quest of intuitive gestures and symmetrical forms that play with pareidolia through abstraction. It’s an ayahuasca trip chased by a Freudian drip of haunted symbolism that harkens to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and maybe the brain scans of enlightened butterflies. Along with new art comes the release of a limited edition yearbook. “Face Guts Year Seven” is a 56-page document of exhibitions, installations, and “whatever else catches the artist’s eye.” Read more.
Read Our Interview of Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles →
Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.
“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects. Read more.
Read Our Interview Of Artist Jim Mooijekind On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition In LA →
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Read An Interview Of Kate Mosher Hall On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition @ Hannah Hoffman In Los Angeles →
Kate Mosher Hall, 31,556,952 seconds, 2024
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm)
I recently visited Los Angeles born-and-raised painter Kate Mosher Hall at her light-filled studio in a bricky industrial area of Glendale. With the 5 freeway buzzing nearby, she walked me through her complex and unique process, which involves silkscreening light-sensitive emulsion over gessoed canvas using anywhere from eight to thirty screens depending on the particular painting, Photoshopping, layers of collage, and paint. It’s a “choose-your-own adventure” as she says, to get the desired effect. To help organize things, she’s created a lexicon: box paintings, hole or mesh paintings, recursion paintings. Some paintings incorporate elements of all styles. Hall, a punk drummer, worked in silkscreen studios for several years before she began UCLA’s Fine Art MFA program. We talked about Never Odd or Even, Hall’s second solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, which is currently on view in Los Angeles and the way that the work employs both good and bad math, challenges modes of looking, and the infinite repetition within binary relationships. Read more.
Willfully Surrender to the Chaos of Nature in Tali Lennox's Tremors @ Nicodim in Los Angeles
In her first solo exhibition with Nicodim, artist Tali Lennox enlists erupting volcanoes, glowing forests and mystical landscapes to explore the pleasure of submitting to the chaos and the power of nature. Tremors finds a range of female bodies in varying states of capitulation to an onslaught of mother nature’s harshest elements, finding common ground between internal and external states of disorder.
Originally inspired by the German anthology of illuminations Das Wunderzeichenbuch: The Book of Miracles, this collection takes the lead from the book of Renaissance paintings that depict both biblical and folkloric tales with a decidedly apocalyptic flair.
Shells and oysters proliferate the canvases, appearing sometimes as ominous hallucinations and at other times morphing directly into the features of the painting’s subjects, symbolising a surrender and a fusing to nature.
Tremors is on view through April 6 @ Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue #160 Los Angeles, CA 90021
Intimacy, Intensity and Sensuality Are Magnified in Zoë Ghertner's Held in the Palm @ Zodiac Pictures in Los Angeles
Installation view courtesy of the artist and Zodiac Pictures.
Zoë Ghertner’s Held in the Palm dutifully maintains a level of intensity with all of her subjects, exploring and releasing their associative experiential qualities within the still image. With such a meticulous focus, rippling patterns or grainy textures become revealed in places where these qualities might otherwise go overlooked. Using color, texture, and light, Ghertner emphasizes the formal properties of her medium and exploits its immediacy. In some photographs, the artist toys with her compositions to soften and distort the final image—imparting a hazy, gooey, or warming sensation upon the viewer of the finished work. In these final photographs, time is ultimately suspended as each subject becomes an abstraction. Read more.
Held in the Palm is on view through March 23 @ Zodiac Pictures, 145 Bay Street #9 Santa Monica, CA
Brody Albert’s “Empty, Except for the Ghost” @ Hunter Shaw Fine Art
text by Hannah Sage Kay
An art deco jail turned squat, turned rave venue, turned arts organization, turned youth boxing club has sat abandoned for the better part of the last half century at 421 N Avenue 19. Broken glass and graffiti mark its facade of 16 pane windows, through which it seems idle riders walking to the bus stop across the street passed the time by throwing rocks. The composition that’s resulted has been documented and recreated by Brody Albert in a series of seven windows cast in white polymer gypsum which now hang across a warm gray wall at Hunter Shaw Fine Art. Supported by the clamps one might expect to find in some archeological display of a looted plinth or section of fresco ripped from its site to instead conjure the aura of times past for museum goers on the other side of the world, the windows on which these sculptures are based possess an indexical relationship with their city: a record of passing time, of resentment for its deplorable public transit, of ghost hunters in search of a troubled past and haunted present, of willful abjection that somehow passes for charm.
Proximity to the divine, the ancient, the supernatural, the famous seems to be a shared aspiration. Los Angeles undoubtedly draws those in search of the latter, and so it is a city marked by mundane lore wherein Hollywood bus tours will show you where celebrity lived, died, ate, and shat. But what about a bus tour for the city’s most desecrated spaces: abandoned buildings, vacant lots, discarded suitcases?
A bird drinks from a small puddle of rainwater on the sunken surface of one such suitcase. Encountered by Albert on a morning walk—recast in epoxy and fiberglass and equipped with a hidden fountain to create a gurgling pool of water—the suitcase now sits at an odd angle on the gallery floor: a bird bath minus the bird. Absenting all signs of life, the suitcase and the windows together posit a future in which the desecrated is all that remains to represent our present—monumentalizing those banalities we try our best to ignore. Will anything else remain of the lives lived on N Avenue 19—except perhaps, the ghosts?
Brody Albert: Empty, Except for the Ghost will be on view at Hunter Shaw Fine Art until December 17.
WhiteBox.LA Presents Tim Biskup: EMERGENT @ Face Guts Gallery In Los Angeles
For the past 15 years, Tim Biskup has been perfecting a style of monochrome graphite drawings on paper that has come to define his artistic practice. The abstract images he creates with a single block of graphite draw on modernist forms simultaneously reminiscent of the Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore, but are executed with the whimsy and humor of contemporary flat field artists like and Joe Bradley and Jonas Wood. Biskup has garnered tens of millions of views of his live drawing videos posted to his @tbiskup account on Instagram. Many of the works created live on this platform will be exhibited as part of EMERGENT. Culled from thousands of finished drawings and studies Biskup’s Face Guts exhibition examines the process and breadth of this body of his work and includes works created throughout the 2020 pandemic and some as recently as the day of the opening event. Face Guts Gallery will also host a series of live drawing events that will allow the public to witness the spontaneous birth of Biskup’s graceful lines and will be integrated into the show as they are created. EMERGENT will be on view at Face Guts Gallery from December 9 to January 7 2024 with an opening reception on December 9th 5-8pm. 4136 Verdugo Road Los Angeles 90065
Curt LeMieux "Heroes" @ White Box LA
WhiteBox.LA, renowned photographer Joshua White’s curatorial project, presents its second exhibition, Curt LeMieux: HEROES at The Desmond Tower from November 18 through November 30, 2023. A group of minimal, puerile paintings of classic LP albums, including the iconic album cover art from artists ranging from Dusty Springfield to Frank Sinatra, Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones, and Black Sabbath.
The works speak of LeMieux’s adolescent obsession with Rock & Roll imagery and his own teenage sexuality as he came of age on the outskirts of the rust belt on the late 70’s “Growing up working class on the outskirts the rustbelt, I had no access whatsoever to fine art. I had no idea that art existed. Nor did I relate much to regional expressions of culture. Large Green Bay Packer themed snow men littered every other yard. I first saw the cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Outta Hell while in a waiting room at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. I remember the experience with vivid detail. As a bored and impetuous child, this artwork excited me to my core. It was pop of color in an overwhelmingly drab setting. It was life and it was death stuffed together in one horrible little scene. It was dramatic and forceful. The paintings in Heroes paintings pay homage to the role music played in my development as a visual artist. I do not want to capture an exact likeness of a given album cover or a given artist. The forms are deliberately exaggerated. The characters are somewhat gawky and jovial; reflecting the ostentatious and campy attributes of the source material,” says LeMieux.
The exhibition incorporates live music, with a performance by Randy Randall of No Age Mark at the opening event on November 18 and a closing event featuring musician Ian Svenonius in conversation with LeMieux.
Noah Dillon New Works Is A Beautiful REM-State Dream
Pio Pico, LA presents New Works, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Noah Dillon curated by Noemi Polo. Noah’s unique trajectory as an artist is key to understanding his perspective and mission. Dillon spent his formative years in Durango, Colorado, a town situated upon the ‘ four corner’ of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. His upbringing in a rural environment, liminally positioned both nowhere and everywhere, inspired a fascination with the American imagination and landscape; how our internal landscapes are cathected onto the material world. Contrasted by his cosmopolitan career as a fashion photographer in Los Angeles, his perspective tensions the old west and the new gods of Americana. New Works explores the corporeal body and its relationship to the engineered landscape. Featuring a series of photographs captured from trail cameras installed across disparate parts of Los Angeles— a Whole Foods, Griffith Park, and MacArthur intersection— Dillon has amassed nearly 1 million images, of which a selection of ten are featured. The anonymous, mechanized capture of the trail cameras is imbued with a delicate attentiveness, one that Dillon uses to construct a non-linear narrative of space and time in the City of Angels. Within this microscopic attention to detail, there’s a discrete pathos in the imbuement of human touch to a camera that functions without it. Moments where the camera had been covered by someone’s thumb have been compiled to form “Untitled - Red Collage”, an experiment in color and form. Centered in the middle of the exhibition is “Untitled - White Dome” that acts as a gravitational center—turning the god-sized hole of late modernity into a reflective pool in which ‘the self’ is simultaneously implicated and alienated. On view until August 26 at Pio Pico.
Thania Petersen Constructs A Cohesive Identity From Her Malay & South African Roots in ZAMUNDA FOREVER @ Nicodim Gallery
Thania Petersen, Cake, 2023. Image courtesy of Nicodim Gallery.
ZAMUNDA FOREVER is Thania Petersen’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition divides Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles into three bodies of intricately embroidered narrative textiles, covering her family’s history, their present-day life as seen from the outside, then finally portrayals of their familial dynamic in more personal settings. Juxtaposed against one another, the three series are an honest depiction of how the journey that brought the artist’s people to South Africa resulted in a separation of selves that exist symbiotically to construct a new cohesive and contemporary identity.
Zamunda is the fictional African nation from which Eddie Murphy’s character hails in the 1988 film Coming to America. In these large-scale works, the artist reckons with the hyper-commercialization of her native continent, and the semi-truthfulness of the signifiers both Westerners and Africans use to market themselves to one another. ZAMUNDA FOREVER, like Petersen herself, embodies the plural histories, spiritualities, sonorities, and cultures of the Afrasiatic Sea. Also everpresent: the universal and readily identifiable signs of a family and community that lives, laughs, and loves with one another.
ZAMUNDA FOREVER is on view through September 9 @ Nicodim Gallery, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021
Witness Allen Ginsberg's Intimate Chronicle of the Beat Generation in Muses & Self @ Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles
Arthur Miller, William H. Gass, Hotel Royal Elevator, Copenhagen, November 1985 ©Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg is an exhibition of Ginsberg's personal photographs balances our understanding of the public, outspoken poet and most prominent figure of the Beat Generation at Fahey/Klein Gallery. At his core, Allen Ginsberg was a witness and chronicler of the world; his profound admiration for the beauty of the vernacular, intense observation, and celebration of the present moment guided his photography and poetry. The photographs included in this exhibition are joyful, often tender, sometimes profound while at other times humorous—and capture Ginsberg’s numerous meaningful relationships.
Muses & Self is on view through September 23 @ Fahey/Klein, 148 N La Brea, Los Angeles
how swift, how far Explores our Environmental Woes @ Wonzimer Gallery
All images courtesy of the artist and Wonzimer.
how swift, how far—opening August 18 at Wonzimer Gallery—is a group exhibition of 9 artists that engage environmentalism beyond the realm of “documentary” images, creating transformative and metaphorical works about the various ecologies we inhabit in media that includes painting, photography, sculpture and video. While issues like climate change are always in the forefront, this show seeks to acknowledge the multiple issues that our environmental woes as a society interconnect with: concepts of identity, class and other cultural resonances that are relevant in our current discourse.
how swift, how far is on view through September 20 @ Wonzimer Gallery, 341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031
Alexis Soul-Gray Peers Through the Looking-Glass in Immutable Fragments @ Bel Ami
Images courtesy the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Paul Salveson.
Bel Ami presents Immutable Fragments, Alexis Soul-Gray’s first solo-exhibition in the United States. Like Lewis Carroll’s journey through the looking glass, Soul-Gray shows how curiosity and experimentation peel back hidden layers, revealing the emotional life of childhood and how it conditions our perceptions and responses into adulthood.
Appropriating photographic imagery of mid-to-late 20th century family life from popular British magazines and books, Soul-Gray finds clichéd tableaus of women and children, choosing them for their artificial quality, “where family is often faked but also, somehow felt.” She then delicately draws out eerie moments that seem unexpectedly real, for example, a backward glance or a playful gesture. For this exhibition, Soul-Gray sources illustrations from fairy tales and the nostalgic imagery of advertising, designed to invoke in the consumer their own desires and fears. These images function as screen memories, referring to Sigmund Freud’s concept of a falsified image that stands in for an experience too disturbing to recall.
Immutable Fragments is on view through September 9 @ Bel Ami, 709 N Hill St. #103 & #105, Los Angeles
Jean Nagai Invites You to Enjoy the Present Moment in "Midst Seizen" @ Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles
Jean Nagai
Jean Nagai’s Midst Seizen at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles bears witness to the artist’s work as a landscape painter in that his practice is a direct reflection of the world around him, wherever that happens to be. In the title of his exhibition Midst Seizen, the Japanese American artist’s play on words has a simple yet powerful message for humankind: enjoy the present moment. According to Nagai, the word “midst” refers to layers of reality and is a riff on “mid” and “mist” while the word “seizen” is a play on “season” and “seize.” With the climate rapidly changing, Nagai believes that our seasons have become less defined, and our lives are more unpredictable than ever as a result. His latest body of work serves as a reminder to pause and celebrate the connectedness of everything, to embrace science and the supernatural, and to honor both life on Earth and the otherworldly.
Midst Seizen is on view through August 12 @ Sow & Tailor, 157 W 27TH ST. LOS ANGELES, CA. 90007
Hermès Presents A Spectacularly Oneiric Poetic and Cinematic Performance In Los Angeles
Hermès invites audiences travel to an imaginary universe created for the house by Belgian duo, director Jaco Van Dormael and choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey, together with the Astragales dance company. The performance is an invitation to take flight and see your dreams take shape in an ode to oneirism. This work metaphorically illustrates the lightness that is omnipresent at Hermès: in the delicate hands of the house’s craftsmen sewing with two needles at once; in the elegance of materials, and in the subtle notes of a perfume. It is an experience which sparks the imagination, designed by artisans of dreams,” says Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès Artistic Director. Click here to book a session.
NKSIN Presents REVIVAL @ albertz benda in Los Angeles
NKSIN, S60, 2023. All images courtesy of albertz benda.
In his first solo exhibition, REVIVAL, with albertz benda, Japanese-Filipino artist NKSIN will present a paintings that offer a sardonic examination of the human experience through the lens of the artist’s signature greyscale figures.
NKSIN’s monochromatic paintings tackle universal emotions — desire, envy, joy, and grief — in the age of information overload. Bombarded with an overwhelming amount of news through social media and the internet at large, NKSIN and his figures reject the adversarial effects of technology to restore the capacity to reflect and function effectively. Favoring internal reflection and exuding a sense of serenity, these figures plug their ears with headphones and defiantly shut their eyes and mouths. These works offer a message of hope and resilience, countering the despair endemic to our modern moment.
REVIVAL is on view through July 8 at albertz benda, 8260 Marmont Ln. Los Angeles
