Tori Wrånes Presents Mussel Tears @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

 
 

As a synesthete, a person with a condition of combining senses such as seeing color and form in sound and language, Tori Wrånes visualizes sound into a sculptural and physical dimension. This experience allows the artist to use sound to dictate the form of painting and sculpture and, in turn, she also visualizes objects through vocal projection. Mussel Tears premiers sculptures, paintings, sound, and performance together to evoke dream-like narratives, where the familiar becomes fantastical. The exhibition has developed from the artist’s ongoing observation of what she describes as “the quiet outcasts of society,” referring both to elements of nature and personal relationships. The works in the show visualize a sensory experience of the world.

Wrånes’ unique method of communication, using sound and form to convey primal emotions and truths, bypasses the structural hierarchies of language and rational thought. The result is a wide-ranging, experimental, and ritualistic practice that guides us outside of our known world. The works in Mussel Tears situates the self in relation to other beings, both human and non-human, and illustrates how our understanding of the world is constantly mediated by our own bodies. Throughout her practice, Wrånes sews together our senses, asking us to consider how we might privilege the overlooked in any form.

Tori Wrånes is on view now through March 12 @ Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles.

Michael Stamm Presents "so super sorry sir!" @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

The paintings in Michael Stamm’s “so super sorry sir!” revel in their idiosyncratic, contradictory attitude toward morality, sexuality, mental health, and contemporary cultural politics. They feature an unlikely cast of characters—ranging from the Devil to an anthropomorphic hand—whose disparate senses of virtue and spirituality often clash with societal convention. At once clinging to life and hurtling toward annihilation, the artist questions what self-actualization looks like in the face of an overly righteous and emotionally precarious world.

The Devil appears as a surrogate for various archetypes—a conspiratorial friend, a scorned enemy, or at times, the artist himself. He is at once a foe to be vanquished and a sly, picaresque hero, providing an infinite set of entry points for the viewer to project their own definitions of “right” and “wrong”. In the titular painting of the show, “so super sorry sir!”, the Devil takes the role of a hysterical martyr, at once offering his patriarchal tormentor a flower, while stabbing himself with a sword. The painting reimagines a memory of a forced apology extracted from the artist by a homophobic teacher. Instead of flatly submitting, the Devil flamboyantly and sibilantly disobeys. Deploying icons of the Virgin Mary interspersed with images of historical gay villains, the work indulges both the aggression of sarcastic defiance and the kinky masochism of self-flagellation. Throughout the exhibition, the Devil, ever at odds with his environment and always nude, exuberantly plays out the iconoclasm of being a queer person. This dissonant, ever changing position associated with queerness may deny an easily resolved identity or moral stance but, ironically, is exactly what allows for the possible reconciliation of conflicting desires.

so super sorry sir! is on view through March 6 @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 616 N La Brea Ave

Cammie Staros's What Will Have Being @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

Over the past decade, Cammie Staros has investigated the ways in which classical antiquities have come to represent an origin story of Western art history. While continuing to address the historical narrative surrounding these objects, the body of work in What Will Have Being focuses more on the prescience of ancient artifacts – how their treatment might foretell a possible future of today’s objects. Relics and ruins, which outlast the societies that made them, emphasize both the achievements and the hubris of humanity. But by shifting our contextual understanding of these objects, by considering how meaning is made, we can begin to understand an alternative narrative. The works in What Will Have Being not only question our understanding of contemporary political and environmental instabilities, they also poignantly consider how our current moment will be remembered, and what kind of world it will produce for tomorrow.

What Will Have Being is on view through March 6 @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 616 N La Brea Ave

Naama Tsabar Presents Inversions @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

The exhibition title, Inversions, refers to a new body of work that is installed directly into the existing architecture of the gallery. Utilizing the shallow space behind the gallery’s walls, Inversion #1 and Inversion #2 assumes an overlooked space as a site of importance or a platform for action. Fusing together elements from guitars, harps, banjos, and violins, Tsabar creates an inverted instrument that relies on the contortions and penetrations of participants’ bodies for its activation. Inversion #2 includes a singing chamber, with holes and voids in the architecture for the voices of performers to fill. Inversions is on view through February 22 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

"Roommates" Group Show @ Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles

Shulamit Nazarian presents Roommates, an exhibition of works by Chris Bogia, Woody De Othello, Rachel Granofsky, and Michael Stamm. These artists investigate the domestic space as a psychological, and at times psychedelic realm. Drawing from a variety of sources and forms that evoke a sense of home, these artists embed objects and environments with the peculiarities of living beings, illustrating our relationship to possessions that share our most intimate spaces. Like the dancing furniture in Disney’s Fantasia, subject and object wiggle back and forth with a magical realism. The home dweller melts into the sofa, while objects begin to take on a life of their own –all achieved through means similarly found in cartoon animation: flatness, movement, and artifice.

Roommates is on view through August 31 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036. photographs courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

Wendy White Presents "Racetrack Playa" @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

Wendy White’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Racetrack Playa, features new paintings, sculptures, pigment prints, and a site-specific installation. The exhibition takes its name from a three-mile dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park where sliding rocks or “sailing stones” have inscribed mysterious linear imprints on the landscape. Using this scarred landscape as a metaphor for our current times, the works in Racetrack Playa explore power, entitlement, and imperialism via the aesthetics and evolution of American car culture. Racetrack Playa is on view through May 25 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Read Claressinka Anderson Pugliese's Poetic Response to Fay Ray's "I Am The House" @ Shulamit Nazarian →

I AM THE HOUSE continues Ray’s interest in the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochromatic photomontages and suspended metallic sculptures. Throughout this series, she situates the body as a vessel, one that carries life, physical memories, and emotional fortitude. Read Claressinka Anderson Pugliese's poetic response here. See additional photographs from the exhibition here. photograph by Lani Trock

Fay Ray's "I AM THE HOUSE" Exhibition @ Shulamit Nazarian

I AM THE HOUSE continues Ray’s interest in the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochromatic photomontages and suspended metallic sculptures. Throughout this series, she situates the body as a vessel, one that carries life, physical memories, and emotional fortitude.

Employing a wide array of images and materials, these new works usher in various references to transformations that occur during the initial and end stages of life. Eggs, flowers, and desiccated corn signify the fragility of existence, while portals, crushed beer cans, and cacti complicate the references to beauty and luxury that have long been staples of the artist’s visual lexicon. 

The exhibition is on view through May 26 at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery 616 N La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

"By the Lights of Their Eyes" Group Show at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present By the Lights of Their Eyes, an exhibition featuring six artists whose works employ tropes from fantasy, mysticism, science fiction, and horror. Informed by diverse sources from religious stories to contemporary cinema, the artists in the exhibition draw from personal experience to create fictional narratives that examine social and political issues. The show features works by Juno Calypso, Katie Dorame, Sara Issakharian, Naudline Pierre, Roni Shneior, and Ilona Szwarc.  By the Lights of Their Eyes will be on view from March 3 through March 31. photographs by Oliver Kupper

A Visit To Artist Theodore Boyer's Studio Before Art Los Angeles Contemporary

Los Angeles-based artist Theodore Boyer's new works will be on view at Shulamit Nazarian's booth at Art Los Angeles Contemporary,  along with work by Sarah Meyohas and May Wilson. Through their respective media each artist explores the notion of infinite space and the physicality of the unknown. Booth D16. Art Los Angeles Contemporary will be on view from January 26 to Jan 29 at the Barker Hangar, 3021 Airport Avenue Santa Monica, CA. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper