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

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

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville, A Group Exhibition Curated by Devendra Banhart @ Nicodim Los Angeles

Curated by Devendra Banhart, “A prayer for my four-to-six nuclear families, for my ever-expanding universe of friends and lovers, for consciousnesses that may or may not exist beyond our postmodern El Dorados and Shangri-Las where dead dreams go to die twice:

May this sea moss gel cool the fire within in me that burns with unfiltered desire for epiphany in a pornographic desert;

May we all find a Six Flags for our unmet oral and spiritual needs;

May we all discover a Cartier diamond bracelet in the Bloomin’ Onion we snuck into the hot yoga session at the Cheesecake Factory;

May we all find comfort within our own place in Margaritaville—that sacred temple, that archetype for a freedom that exists somewhere between legitimacy and artifice that urges us to leave behind the very sacred temple that is selling us the dream to leave it all behind;

May we all attend the vernissage for Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville and bask in the ordinary magic, this orgy of authenticity buried in the most profane of structures.”

–Adapted from Out of Body: The Bortz Metzger Memoirs, R. Driblette, editor. Penguin Books Ltd, 2002

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville is the top floor of the romantic wing of the capitalist nightmare, a fever dream manifested during a midday nap on a bed of ashwagandha-tipped nails with an ecstatic, honest, and truthful international coterie of artists, many of whom have never shown in the United States before.

In celebration of the closing, noted, lubricated, hole-istic tantric gurus Devendra Banhart and Ben Lee Ritchie Handler will lead the gallery in a guided meditation. Please bring a yoga mat and a clear head. The event will double as release party for a limited-edition t-shirt for the exhibition. July 29 from 3–6. Space is limited, please arrive a bit early.

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville is on view through July 29th at Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Moffat Takadiwa: Son of the Soil @ Nicodim In Los Angeles

Son of the Soil is Moffat Takadiwa’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Takadiwa reassesses his own Korekore craft culture through the appropriation of garbage from the West, elevating found objects into sculptural forms that engage with issues of cultural identity, language, social practice, and the environment. All of his artworks are composed from the discarded remains of consumer waste, woven together in the language of traditional Zimbabwean textiles. Macrobiotic in his approach to material, his repurposed objects tell stories of each piece’s past lives to viewers brave enough to confront their own ecological and colonial legacies. Son of the Soil is on view through October 19 at Nicodim 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock and courtesy of Nicodim

Group Show 'TRANS WORLD' Opens at @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

According to multiverse theory, every decision a person makes causes a split in the universe, wherein an alternate version of one’s self continues to exist in an alternate universe, living with the consequences of an alternate decision. There are an infinite number of variations of ourselves existing throughout time and space, having made an infinite number of differing decisions. BUT WHAT IF AN INDIVIDUAL IS ABLE TO OCCUPY MULTIPLE UNIVERSES SIMULTANEOUSLY? Trans World is on view through August 10 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Mi Kafchin Presents "Chemtrails" @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Born only a few months after the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986, Romanian artist Mi Kafchin was inundated as a young child with fear-driven remedies that would help to cure the invisible but pervasive radioactive toxins that enveloped her region and in effect her being. Trust in aspirational progress or the security of big government would dissipate into that same air. The chemtrails that crisscrossed the sky above represented a direct and constant communication of this reality but banalized into a sublime of the everyday. This toxic cocktail of aluminum, barium and strontium militaristically seeded into our atmosphere successfully keeps society under control… at least, that is, until the EMF from 5G begins to vibrate our delicate bodies. This legacy of trepidation from sources governmental, paranormal and extraterrestrial has festered into a menacing ideological vortex of possibility, one looming large in the work of Mi Kafchin and mapped out here in her second solo exhibition at Nicodim Gallery.  Chemtrails is on view through June 1 at Nicodim 571 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Agathe Pinard

Katherina Olschbaur Presents "Horses" @ Nicodim Gallery Los Angeles

The horse, to Katherina Olschbaur, is a banner of freedom, but also one of constraint. Some of her subjects are galloping unbridled, powering through surreal, fluorescent landscapes as the ground bows, its surface giving willfully to the weight of each hoof. Other equines are restrained, bound to human figures—occasionally draped over human figures—erotically reinterpreting dressage as fetish play, begging the question: who’s riding whom? Horses is on view through August 18 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

The Eye Sees Not Itself Opening @ Nicodim Gallery

The Eye Sees Not Itself arrives from conflicting encounters with the Eurocentric academy, burgeoning metropolitan cultures and spaces, and indigenous histories as forms and concepts, systems and processes, to approach the metaphysical context of artistic practice and production. The exhibition includes works from artists Umar Rashid, Moffat Takadiwa, Charles Dickson, Lavar Munroe, Simphiwe Ndzube and Buhlebezwe Siwani. The Eye Sees Not Itself is on view through June 16 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Omul Negru Group Show @ Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles

Spanning forty artworks, Omul Negru is an anthropological occurrence, one comprised of both cultural enactment and ritual embodiment, invoked to explore the varied notions of the Boogeyman. It is a celebration of civilization’s most important character, a figure that has transcended in the 21st Century into a monster of ever-expanding applications. This spectrum of visual culture’s darkest corner is traced through artists, martyrs, serial killers, madmen, and monsters; to explore the many faces as well as the facelessness of the Boogeyman. It traverses the origins, stereotypologies and embodiments of the Boogeyman through contemporary, historical, and archetypal lenses - staging an ominous atmosphere of summoning and possession. Omul Negru will be on view until August 20, 2016 at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles. photographs by Sara Clarken