Brian Wills Presents New Wall Works @ OCHI Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

In his first solo exhibition with OCHI Projects, Brian Wills presents twelve new wall works intentionally placed throughout both galleries. Building upon the artist’s unique visual vocabulary of thread, paint, and wood, Wills’ new work evokes experiential understandings of line, color, space, and object as he aligns his practice with minimalist abstraction, the subversive history of the monochrome, California Light & Space, and other art historical paradigmatic shifts. Singular strands of thread are delicately wrapped around wooden substrates, eventually creating surfaces that appear to vibrate and shift depending on available light, thread density, the architecture of the panel, and the motion of the viewer.

Wills is acutely aware of how a viewers’ brain will react to his work. The visual cortex interprets received visual data—color, motion, texture, and depth—precisely the fundamental properties that Wills engages. When exposed to pattern, the brain extrapolates as it habituates, for example when assuming that a vertical line of brown thread will repeat as it did thousands of times in a row—the works in OCHI Aux exemplify these principles. Deliberately skipped threads or a shift from warm to cool red thread are intended to reveal moments of intuition and intention, while indicating methods of construction. Expectations are constantly at play. Engaging with one’s own perception is always a gift, offering moments of joy, wonder, and self-reflection—in other words, investments in observation are rewarded handsomely.

Brian Wills is on view through March 12 @ OCHI 3301 W Washington Blvd Los Angeles.

After Touch: Portraits Of Caring Connection In The Face Of Global Fracture @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

How do you decolonize the art of portraiture? How do you strip away the traditional signifiers of status and hierarchy so that the essence of one’s character can properly supersede all notions of taxonomy? Marcel Pardo Ariza’s solo exhibition, After Touch, at Ochi Projects Los Angeles is one example of how this is accomplished. Born in Colombia and raised by theater artists, Ariza’s multidisciplinary practice challenges institutional pedagogies and opens the floodgates of perception regarding the constitutions of performance, portraiture, and installation. Portraiture’s customary status symbols, such as professional costume, Delsartean postures, and meticulously curated mises-en-scenes have been eschewed, leaving subjects nude in flat, empty spaces of warm, fleshy colors where they don sparing accessories and undergarments. These gloves, flogs, durags, masks and ropes play a much different role in describing their subjects. They texturize moments of intimacy, acting as signifiers of a hungry haptic drive, wholly bereft of social status. Digital watches provide chronological context for bodies that are in a constant state of transformation. Bodies emerging from a year in isolation. Bodies whose grooming and scarring are consequences of both biology and agency. Bodies that relate to one another based on personal histories, pheromones, and physical absence. They engage one another at times without acknowledging the camera, allowing for a moment of intimate connection that is unaffected by outside influence. At other times, they do engage the camera, affording the viewer a certain privilege in the process of perception. The caveat of these eye-contact-giving portraits is their adherence to the gallery walls—an act that irreversibly restricts their salability, thereby reifying the self-determination of their subjects. Bringing the role of mutual support sharply into focus, Ariza portrays the strength of their queer, Bay Area-based community of creators by describing the qualities of their connections, rather than that of their individual accomplishments. In this sense, After Touch, can be felt as a soothing balm for the isolated ego following a global catastrophe that left many of us wondering what lies behind our veils of desire.

After Touch is on view through October 23 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Ring Down The Curtain Group Show @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Ring Down the Curtain is an idiom borrowed from theater that marks the end of a performance. After more than a year of isolation and lockdowns, digital surrogates and Zoom fatigue, this group exhibition signals a return to embodied optimism by offering works that embrace materiality and empiricism.

The show includes artists working to parse the complexities of gender, sexuality, identity, and power through a dedication to labor, design, and craft. A carefully considered intersection of ceramic, textile, paint, video, and installation engages sensory perception, creating somatic markers that challenge histories of cultural performativity, particularly as they apply to women. Each artist expresses their unique interests in the relationship between tactility and the significance of elicited bodily experience.

Featured artists include Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Oona Brangam-Snell, Trulee Hall, Isabel Yellin, Sarah Zapata, and Bari Ziperstein. Ring Down The Curtain is on view through June 19 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles.

 
 

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

 
 

Tanya Brodsky: Tongue Tied @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Kaiser Permanente sends me generic nature stock photos, accompanied by recommendations for something called “forest bathing.” In a blur of communication and advertising, image and text are flattened, co-opted, coded, re-coded, and ultimately digested, leaving behind traces of mutated half-meanings. The eye’s focus oscillates between looking through, and looking at: a scattering of sight and attention, a breaking apart of the singular. When I saw an ad stating that the Behr Paint color of the year is a green hue called Back to Nature, all I could think was, damn the 90’s really are back. Sometimes, I want to yell emojis across the room. Bears do supposedly still shit in the woods, though. Tongue Tied is on view through November 9 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd Los Angeles. Images by Josh Schaedel courtesy of Ochi Projects

Group Show 'The Shape Of Content' @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

The Shape of Content is an exhibition of works by Thomas Linder, Erica Mahinay and Andrea Welton. By definition, form is the essential nature of a thing as distinguished from its matter. In his book from which this exhibition takes its title, Ben Shahn expanded on this definition by writing that “form is the shape of content” and argues that form cannot exist without content. The Shape of Content contextualizes three artists, who each use distinct materials, in their exploration of relating content—experience, memory and idea, to form—gesture, color and material.The Shape of Content is on view through July 13 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Claudia Parducci Presents 23 Columns @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

The central focus of Claudia Parducci’s exhibition consists of twenty-three 16’, hand-knit jute pillars spanning from floor to ceiling. Arranged in a staggered grid measuring approximately 14 feet square, they reference the twenty-three interior columns of the Parthenon that surrounded the monumental statue of Athena. Over the two years Parducci spent knitting these pillars, she considered the gendered aspects of labor, and the symbolic significance of the physical remnants of Western history. Appearing, but failing to be structurally supportive, Parducci’s knit columns, along with related sculptures and drawings, address the dual nature of societies that build, and then ultimately destroy themselves. Through the substitution of a traditionally feminine craft as the means of production, Parducci considers these recurring cycles in history and wonders about the possibilities of a society built from a female perspective. 23 Columns will be on view through April 27 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Claire Colette & Nassim Hantezadeh @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Claire Colette’s Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by the Los Angeles based artist. Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is an investigation into darkness, light, time, and mysticism. A series of quiet, abstract landscapes consider concepts of interconnectedness relating to land, the cosmos, and the self. Like the Transcendentalist painters of the 20th century, Colette links external and internal realities, and infuses her paintings with influences from tantric symbolism and elements referencing nature.

As I Travel is the title of Nassim Hantezadeh’s exhibition. “Since I moved back to the United States from Iran, making daily works on paper where I draw my everyday emotions and sentiments is a way to deal with the isolation and the alienation that the situation initiated to my body. Sometimes the outcome of those drawings is abstract and may prevent a read based on the semiology of the visual system that our eyes are educated with. Other times it is direct enough to make links to familiar forms, such as objects, body organs, and figures.” The exhibitions are on view from September 15 to October 27 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Ochi Projects Presents 'Soft Pretzel' Group Show @ Vacation Gallery In New York

Soft Pretzel features works that investigate sculptural forms and perceived tactility. Evaluating our ability to anticipate sensory experiences as they are conveyed through visual cues, each work explores implied softness, rigidity, dimension, weight and movement. The exhibition includes works by Tanya Brodsky, Rives Granade, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Lilian Martinez, Daniel McKee, Erin Morrison, Claudia Parducci, Ben Sanders and James Seward. Soft Pretzel is on view through October 28 @ Vacation Gallery, 24A Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002. images courtesy of Ochi Projects

Young Joo Lee @ Ochi Projects

Young Joo Lee combines inspiration from her dreams with personal and political histories to create drawings, sculptures and films. On view in the downstairs gallery, Paradise Limited is a three-channel animation based on Lee’s year-long project about the nature sanctuary at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Lee documented her research as a 25-meter scroll drawing, a reference to traditional Korean landscape painting, and created a sculptural scroll display to house the work, which provided the background for the film. In the upstairs gallery is Song from Sushi, an animated music video, written from the point of view of a sushi woman served on a sushi conveyor belt. She sings about the stereotypical depiction of Asian women as exotic sexual objects in media and cultural representations. Lee’s work is a glimpse into how our environments are not only outside of us, but how they truly alter our perception and inform our personal identities. Mine is on view at Ochi Projects through July 21st. 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock. 

Lilian Martinez's "Woman and Women" Opens @ Ochi Projects

Woman and Women expounds upon Martinez’ interest in exploring alternate histories where women,  particularly women of color, are not excluded from specific cultural narratives typically  associated with privilege. Through her paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, Martinez  blends past with present and future, combining classical architectural elements with  contemporary pop cultural references to create the settings for her portraits, landscapes, and still lives. Her flat, bold style recalls iconic predecessors like Matisse, while her subject matter  prioritizes brown bodies that have been heretofore omitted from these kinds of images. Woman and Women is on view through June 9 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Baron Von Fancy "I'm Over Here Now" @ Ochi Projects in Los Angeles

Ochi Projects presents "I’m Over Here Now," a solo exhibition featuring Baron Von Fancy (aka Gordon Stevenson) – the first in Los Angeles. Over the years the name Baron Von Fancy has become synonymous with a stylized lettering and a clever sense of humor. Interested in activating relationships between words, objects and places Von Fancy explores the nature of communication by expressing his short and declarative statements via a recognizable font reminiscent of vintage ad signage. Often bordering on cliché and always witty, Von Fancy invites viewers to re-evaluate their understanding of any given context, or any given phrase. Baron Von Fancy "I'm Over Here Now" will be on view until July 30, 2016 at Ochi Projects, 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA