The Act of Ornamentation is Centered in Adorned Self @ Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles

Alli Conrad

Adorned Self is Sow & Tailor’s first group exhibition of the summer, showcasing six emerging women artists of the same generation, whose work explores themes such as nature, sensuality, gender, and ornamentation. They share a unique perspective as artists who grew up in the 1990s: an epoch characterized by multiculturalism, globalization, self-reference, environmentalism, and technological advances. With these cultural, social, and political shifts, came new forms of self-fashioning.

Adorned Self explores ornamentation as an act, both outward and internal, that opens the self to enlivenment; how we fashion ourselves in order to attract others, make a statement, or express individuality. The artists probe the way our internal landscapes are expressed and communicated onto the world, even in things as banal as a tattoo, jewelry, makeup, or a luxurious fabric. Adornment can also be entirely internal—achieved through cultivating deep self love.

Adorned Self is on view through August 12 @ Sow & Tailor, 157 W 27TH ST. LOS ANGELES, CA. 90007

 
 

"New Paintings of Ordinary Incidents" Captures the Curious in the Quotidian @ Timothy Hawkinson Gallery in Los Angeles

Paul Pretzer, The Downfall, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Timothy Hawkinson Gallery.

New Paintings of Ordinary Incidents is a group exhibition presented by Timothy Hawkinson Gallery. The six artists in this exhibition make paintings that closely scrutinize the ordinary, a process that can be unnerving. We take for granted the way things are as they are; the patterns our days fall into being organized, the manner in which household products were designed, the shapes and features fruits and vegetables evolved into. Disturbing oddities and unexpected beauty can be found lurking.

One by one, days go by. Turning into weeks, then months, eventually years and decades. In this inevitable march of time it is nearly impossible to not fall into routines, to get accustomed to surroundings without giving them a second thought. Despite being mundane, these spans are often still busy, yet things become expected. That is the starting point for this exhibition: the overlooked, interstitial passages, where the bulk of life takes place.

 
 

New Paintings of Ordinary Incidents is on view through September 16 @ Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, 7424 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Everything is Alive: SHRINE Los Angeles presents Ross Simonini's "Tales"

Ross Simonini, The Ties, 2023, milk paint on muslin in walnut frame. Image courtesy of SHRINE.

Ross Simonini’s Tales is currently on view at SHRINE Los Angeles. In his work, Simonini completely intertwines art with life. He uses every body part to write, draw and paint—eradicating the divide that often lies between the artist and the canvas. It’s this corporeal process that begs the hidden unconscious to appear.

All of Simonini’s beings signify and relate to an understanding of the world through animism—a universal concept that every single thing is alive and animated. The confounding narratives that drift into focus in his paintings include virtually all beings from the animate to inanimate. Simonini sees and feels the life inside everything.

Tales is on view through August 19 at SHRINE, 538 N. Western Los Angeles, CA 90004

 
 

"Are You a Friend of Dorothy?" @ Hashimoto Contemporary

Justin Yoon, At Midnight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary.

Justin Yoon, At Midnight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary.

Hashimoto Contemporary presents Are You A Friend of Dorothy? a group exhibition featuring new works by Santiago Galeas, Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Juan Arango Palacios, Carlos Rodriguez, and Justin Yoon. Each artist explores their identity and sexuality in emotive, figurative painting to create depictions of joy, belonging, and queer intimacy.

Rooted in personal narratives and lore, all five artists have created their own visual languages to imagine queer utopias filled with safety, community, tenderness and serenity. As the Cowardly Lion said while making his way through the Land of Oz, “Any friend of Dorothy must be our friend, as well.”

Are You a Friend of Dorothy? is on view through July 8 at Hashimoto Contemporary, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd. Suite B - Los Angeles, CA

 
 

NKSIN Presents REVIVAL @ albertz benda in Los Angeles

NKSIN, S60, 2023. All images courtesy of albertz benda.

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

 
 

Njideka Akunyili Crosby's "Coming Back to See Through, Again" @ David Zwirner Los Angeles

 
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens, 2021. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens, 2021. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

 

David Zwirner presents Coming Back to See Through, Again, an exhibition of new and recent work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. This will be Akunyili Crosby’s first solo exhibition with David Zwirner. The exhibition will travel to David Zwirner’s New York gallery, opening in September 2023.

 
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Potential, Displaced, 2021. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Potential, Displaced, 2021. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

 

Born in Nigeria, Akunyili Crosby moved to the United States as a teenager in 1999, and her work reflects her hybrid cultural background and experiences. In her methodically layered compositions, Akunyili Crosby combines painted depictions of people, places, and subjects from her life with photographic transfers derived from her personal image archive as well as Nigerian magazines and other mass media sources.

The works that will be on view in Los Angeles, where the artist works and lives, bring multiple places and temporalities together within single compositions. In these works, Akunyili Crosby uses doorways, screens, posters, and windows as devices that open to other worlds, such as private interior spaces, lush external gardens, and bustling Nigerian markets.

Coming Back to See Through, Again is on view through July 29 at David Zwirner LA, 616 North Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA, 90004

Stan Douglas @ David Zwirner Los Angeles

 
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023. Photo by Elon Schoenholz. Courtesy of David Zwirner.

Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023. Photo by Elon Schoenholz. Courtesy of David Zwirner.

David Zwirner is exhibiting Stan Douglas’s major two-channel video installation ISDN (2022), along with a group of related photographs, which will be his first solo presentation in more than twenty years in Los Angeles.

In the two-channel video installation ISDN, the viewer finds themselves in the middle of a call-and-response jam session that unfolds across continents, literally positioned between the two screens. Set in 2011, the work pairs MCs in improvised studios, one in London and the other in Cairo, who trade free-styled verses, transmitted between them on ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network) lines, a technology that has become largely disused as it has been replaced by faster broadband and fiber optic connections.

The video presentation is complemented by five photographs that recreate specific moments from 2011 in four global cities: London, New York, Tunis, and Vancouver. To create these panoramic mises-en-scènes, Douglas digitally stitched together imagery, utilizing a variety of sources to reconstruct the events as accurately as possible.

Stan Douglas’s work is on view through July 29 at David Zwirner LA, 612 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90004

 

Danie Cansino's "This is My Blood" @ Charlie James Gallery

 
Painting of a Chicana woman with a foot on the knee of her kneeling lover, brandishing her fan. Painting by Daniel Cansino courtesy of Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Yubo Dong.

Images are "Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Yubo Dong/ofstudio."

Danie Cansino’s work is a mix of Baroque realism and Chicanx aesthetics; where one might expect to find historical or biblical heroes, Cansino inserts her own friends and family. Through a commingling of time periods and the conflation of the spiritual with the real, Cansino builds upon a legacy of Mexican painters and the realismo magico that is a part of Mexican spirituality. In her latest solo show This Is My Blood, Cansino takes us into the world of magical realism, wherein she installs her friends and colleagues in a Mechica pantheon, subverting the traditions of Western art.

Text by Leah Perez

This is My Blood is on view through June 17 at Charlie James Gallery, 969 CHUNG KING ROAD

 

Matthew Hansel's "My Inner Demon Never Sleeps Alone" @ The Hole in Los Angeles

 
Matthew Hansel, Selfie, 2023. All images courtesy of The Hole and Matthew Hansel.

Matthew Hansel, Selfie, 2023. All images courtesy of The Hole and Matthew Hansel.

 

The Hole presents Matthew Hansel’s My Inner Demon Never Sleeps Alone, which is a body of work that has been developing over the course of the last three years.

The main gallery features a bestiary of demons, pixies, and nude men and women in all kinds of entanglements, poses and rituals. The human figures are painted from clippings of 1960s and ‘70s brochures for West Coast nudist colonies, while their demons, with scaly bodies, attenuated snouts and poulaine-toed feet, recall the morality paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Hansel’s allegorical twist: instead of admonishing the viewer, he aims to enchant them, conjuring a universe in which, he says, “people are able to live beside and enjoy their demons in a way that they can’t in the real world.”

My Inner Demon Never Sleeps Alone is on view through June 24 at The Hole, 844 N La Brea Avenue Los Angeles

Hana Ward's "HOW TO BUILD UP WORN OUT SOILS" @ OCHI

 
HANA WARD, The Deed, 2023. Photo credit: Courtesy of the Artist and OCHI. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber.

HANA WARD, The Deed, 2023. Photo credit: Courtesy of the Artist and OCHI. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber.

OCHI, a gallery located in Los Angeles, is now presenting How To Build Up Worn Out Soils, an exhibition of paintings and ceramics by artist Hana Ward. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Borrowing from George Washington Carver’s pamphlet of the same name, How To Build Up Worn Out Soils speaks to a theme Ward has been mining in her work for years: self- determination and transformation despite limited resources. In the wake of those overlapping pandemics—Covid, climate anxiety, and the resurgence of old rage about persistent systemic racism, Ward reached for books to help gain perspective. Her study found her at the intersection of Black land justice and spirituality.

Like many of Ward’s titles, this one is polysemous—worn out soils refers to both our minds and our environments. Ward considers the ways subsistence farming has historically provided a path toward Black socio-political self-determination, and that self-determination, a catalyst for self-possession. Ward extends this practical labor of place-making and turns it inward to the ethereal, our minds and internal worlds: nurturing the seeds of divinity within each of us, cultivating our energy fields, and enriching our lives in the process.

Text by Bethel S. Moges

How To Build Up Worn Out Soils is on view through June 17 at OCHI, 3301 W Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, California

 

"Facing South: Mythical Mindscapes" @ Rele LA

oil paintings on the wall of Rele Gallery for Facing South: Mythical Mindscapes

COPYRIGHT © 2023 RELE GALLERY

Rele Gallery Los Angeles presents Facing South: Mythical Mindscapes, the first in a series of group exhibitions featuring works by artists from Southern Africa. Exploring ideas of hybridity, spirituality and the metaphysical as well as critiquing entrenched forms of Western ideology, the exhibition — running from May 6 to June 3 — presents works from the Tendai Mupita, Quamani Bangani and Kay Gasei. 

8215 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles CA 90046