Read Our Interview of Folk Artist Justin Williams On The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition @ Roberts Projects LA →

Oil painting by Justin Williams of his wife, Jade, reclining on a sofa behind a fortune teller.

Justin Williams
Major Arcana, death watching over Jade (2024)
Acrylic, oil, raw pigment and gold pigment on canvas
77.25 x 84.75 in (196.2 x 215.3 cm)

In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day. His work carves spaces, ranging from cozy to claustrophobic, in which dead and living strangers coexist in moments of imagined connection. Williams’ world is seen through a kaleidoscope of childhood trinkets, native flora, and mythologized fauna, from goats to dogs to horses. The artist collects moments and mementos alike to collage in these quiet yet fantastical dreamscapes, mining through Westernized memories of suburban Australia and hitting rich veins of ancestral Egyptian aesthetics. Williams embraces the awkwardness of outsider life, and his work embodies the comforting realization that even outsiders create their own exiled community. To mark the occasion of Synonym, he discusses stories and people, which echo throughout his life and strangers whose moments of grief have shaped his work. Read the full interview here.

Jeffrey Gibson's It Can Be Said of Them @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition, It Can Be Said of Them, features new work exploring themes of identity–as it relates to diversity and inclusivity–to uplift the unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the current fight for LGBTQIA visibility. It Can Be Said of Them takes its title from a print produced by Sister Corita Kent in 1969. Kent’s print was part of her “Heroes and Sheroes” series, undertaken after she formally left the church as a serving nun, and depicts images of Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. The men are surrounded by a quote by author E.B. White that reads, “It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not turn his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”[1] A strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Kent viewed these four figures, among many others, as modern day martyrs, especially during a time of aggressive political and social unrest.

It is in these works and others on view, that Gibson expands on how gender, as identity, is a liminal space; one that occupies and explores the in-between, the threshold, the reconfigured and the temporal. As a transitory space or state, it is characterized by ambiguity, hybridity and fluidity, with the great potential for subversion and radical transformation. Writing about anti-structure, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argues that this liminal state is “a conceptual space where the ordinary world falls away, and the hierarchies of everyday life are no longer applicable.”[2] It is in this sublimation of surrender where joy can be found; where one re-articulates a new identity beyond the restricted spheres tied to tradition, geography, or social construct, and lives openly after abandoning the constraints of the everyday. Gibson’s most recent work is a reaffirmation of this profound and total freedom.

It Can Be Said of Them is on view through February 27 @ Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City. photographs courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe Presents Black Like Me @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s lush and luminous oil paintings of black men and women, some strangers he streetcasts or encounters on social media, many others who are friends and colleagues, stand as visual testaments to the resilience, power and strength inherent in African culture, as articulated by the artist. His portraits reveal the complexities of human experience with both a boldness of line and a depth of color, allowing the viewer to experience their uniqueness and vitality simultaneously. Black Like Me is on view through March 7 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Wangari Mathenge: Aura of Quiet @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

In this current body of work, Wangari Mathenge, draws her inspiration from “The Danger of a Single Story,” a 2009 Ted Talk delivered by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this vein, Mathenge takes as her subject complex human beings and situations, focusing her attention on those liminal moments that are rarely distinguished or registered but are essential to the narration of an unabridged existence. Aura of Quiet is on view through November 16 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Blvd, Culver City. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lenz Geerk: Mixed Blessings @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Lenz Geerk is a figurative painter whose subjects of portraits, landscapes and still-lifes are portrayed in exceptional intensity and luminosity.He manipulates traditional techniques to bring distinct render to every figure through soft acrylic color. The nearly monochromatic palettes, only occasionally warmed by other colors, add an aura of heightened emotional tension. Geerk’s new series is an insightful examination into the undercurrent of the threat, uncertainty, and fear of the current day. Unlike “The Table Portraits”, Geerk’s first solo show with the gallery, there is no formal link between the individual works of this show. What ultimately connects the works on view is an underlying feeling of domestic suspense, fueled by an unsettling lack of faith in larger institutions. Mixed Blessings is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Celeste Rapone: Future Amateur @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Through her paintings, Celeste Rapone invokes the willing suspension of disbelief and the engagement of suspicion aligned along particular interests or ideas communicated to us by the characters she portrays. Initially conceived as coping mechanisms for a future as a failed painter, Rapone’s portraits now tap into consequences of exposure: humiliation, vulnerability, self-doubt and self-deprivation. Her autobiographical characters –most often women–are proxies to her discomfort felt at new ideas and approaches, the doubt in her own representation and object-making, her inability to mediate attention once exposed to it, and the abstract possibilities opened up and emphasized by these failures. Future Amateur is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Ed Templeton's "Hairdos of Defiance" opens at Roberts Projects in L.A.

Resembling a bedroom, Ed Templeton's new photo installation Hairdos of Defiance explores historical context and social moment of the mohawk. The images shown come from twenty years of chance-encounters with people who have mohawks in the U.S. and Europe. Hairdos of Defiance is on view until April 21st at Roberts Projects (formerly known as Roberts & Tilton) 5801 Washington Blvd, Culver City. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper