Join your hosts Lev Abramov, George Jensen, Asaf Murdoch, and Hunter Shaw for a vinyl-only listening session celebrating ECM Records (Editions of Contemporary Music).
Visitors are invited to luxuriate in the atmosphere of the gallery's current exhibition Alan Shields: Tweaking The Grid, while enjoying a tasteful selection of Jazz hybrids from the iconic German label.
Fine beverages will be served.
Evangeline AdaLioryn : The Pearl Eater
September 12 - November 7
Opening reception
Sunday September 7, 6-9pm
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90019
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to present The Pearl Eater, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Evangeline AdaLioryn. The Pearl Eater is comprised of recent sculptural works, ritual objects arranged as a shrine, a sanctuary inviting quietude and contemplation. The Pearl Eater is a myth of transformation, a sacred drama of light and shadow unfolding at the center of empty space.
"People think we lure humans into the sea, seduce them into their own destruction. But we were humans once, too, and the sea lured us. The ocean offered us the possibility of perpetual recreation, so long as we were willing to lay our old vessels to rest.
In the water we are always swimming and always new. The incarnation of transformation, the eternal object of idolatry. It seems like we were always here, this way, in these waters. Like there was never any water without us. But we came here. We chose it.
Part of why we left is because the old forms got tired, reached their limit. Too much effort, too much resistance. We wanted the next dimension. We wanted recuperation for what we had been.
What happened to our old vessels, the other bodies? Some of us let them disintegrate and decompose, become particles in the water. Some of us tucked them away in the depths, covered them up with rocks, sand, and shells to hide and protect them. Some of us stayed close by, guarding the old vessels like they were our children.
She made her vessel visible, forever venerated and armed. Rather than obscure or obliterate her, she cast her face in plaster in its final days. She gave the face a body, a matrix of crystalline ceramic spines and horns, with pink silk wrapped around her organs, hidden pearls and hair from horses. She gave her bones and a structure, so she’d never break. She took her out of the sand and put her on the wall in the front of a room, where people would stand underneath her looking up, where bees and flies would land on the folds of her torso. A symbol of herself, floating forever, getting the rest she never got when she was her and her's."
- Cyrus Simonoff
Rollin Leonard : About Face
July 11 - August 15, 2021
Thursday - Sunday 11am-5pm and by appointment
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90019
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to present Rollin Leonard’s first solo show in Los Angeles, About Face. Leonard’s four giant portraits face off inside the gallery, like gods or demons at their mythic scale and with their beguiling expressions. In a time of constant surveillance, global mapping, and video conferencing where we regularly become floating heads, About Face considers the human face in all its variability, and ultimate unknowability. Through Leonard’s trippy cartographies of the face, which oscillate perspective due to flattening, scale and resolution, the viewer’s visual field is simultaneously challenged and seduced, the perspective jumping and shifting as their gaze moves over the work. These constant perceptual fluctuations evoke shifting possibilities within the portraits themselves, hinting at latent potentials in what it is to be human. They remind the viewer of how our faces are always in flux, due to ageing and daily living, but also in a grander sense, considering deeper time, our evolution from blob-like multicellular creatures to rat-like early mammals to our human faces today.
Two of the works in the show, Color From Three Vectors, and Self Portrait with Blobs, are from Leonard’s ongoing “Flat Face” series. These Flat Faces push the artist’s method of “unsculpting” the face, creating a skin more skin-like than skin. This uncanny quality is reiterated by the works’ monumental scale and high resolution, which allow the viewer to see every hair, pore, and streak of makeup. Leonard’s two “Water Portraits,” from another ongoing series, Rainbow Demon and Smile Demon, appear on the walls like talismans. Created by shooting hundreds of expressions from grins to grimaces through droplets of water, the demons smirk at the viewer as they quite literally possess our myriad micro-expressions and mercurial moods in the many resin drops that make up their features.
Leonard’s work is often understandably mistaken as being created via the “magic” of Photoshop or Cinema 4D. While he does utilize these programs in specific ways, his time-intensive photography and other analogue methods are essential to his work’s ultimate effect. Whether shooting hundreds of photos through the prism of a real water droplet, or painting his own face with high pigment makeup to create intense rainbow colors, Leonard keeps his processes rooted in tangible methods, in the constraints of physics and chemistry. Following strict physical rules established by water, scale, and optics, subtly defines the images and creatures Leonard invents, making them appear both biological and highly idiosyncratic.
Rollin Leonard lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of the Moving Image NYC, biforms NYC, Postmasters Gallery NYC, Haus Der Elektronischen Künste Basel, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, SFMoMA, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the CMCA Museum in Maine, the Whitney Museum NYC, and elsewhere.
Sessa Englund : Fool’s Errand
May 16 - July 4, 2021
Thursday - Sunday 11am - 5pm and by appointment
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles 90019
Hunter Shaw Fine Art presents Fool’s Errand, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Sessa Englund. In this selection of sculptural works, the artist explores impermanence through a visual language of domesticity and the body. Sites of somatic intimacy - furniture, food, jewelry - are abstracted into hybrid forms suggesting a liminal realm in which the body has merged with its surroundings. The sensitive materiality of these objects further conveys a state of intermediacy: rusted metal, burnt marzipan, latex, and dried flora inhabiting an entropic ontology of continuous flux. At once vulnerable and austere, Fool’s Errand elicits the melancholic pathos of a time-distorted memory.
Throughout the exhibition, Englund incorporates a generic adolescent iconography: trolls, hearts, flames, and butterflies mass produced in endless variation and sold to signify identity. The artist often deploys these motifs through techniques of body modification, adorning objects with piercings and stick-and-poke tattoos. As an ethos, the practice of body modification acknowledges the transient nature of the body while asserting agency over its material and form. Recorded in altered flesh, memory is made visible. This is evident in a series of floor-bound sculptures resembling rugs of skin. Augmented with custom body jewelry and tattoos, their biomorphic surfaces are raised in furcated patterns suggesting roots, veins, or mountainous topography. Cast in latex, they have the texture and appearance of weathered dermis, and like the biological material they evoke, are in fact encountered in a state of slow, continual aging and disintegration.
A suite of rectilinear constructions recall a spartan living space. Cabinets, sofas, dressers appear fragmented and reduced, as if in a state of materialization or disassembly. Stripped of their functionality, these skeletal forms frame empty space, pointing to the void within matter. Intrusions of cast glass in tones of foggy white and spectral green punctuate the edges of the wooden structures. These blocks conceal murky impressionistic forms at once luminous and vague like years of memory embedded within a household object. This uncanny domesticity imbues Fool’s Errand with a psychological climate of tenderness and dread, while expressing the existential reality of impermanence underlying all that is manifest.
Sessa Englund holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY, Purchase NY (2013). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include All made of tender flesh, all put together, Haul Gallery, Brooklyn NY (2019); Wild Objects with Alicia Adamerovich, Project Pangée, Montreal Canada (2019); A suspended state in last, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute Gallery, Baltimore MD (2018); Sympathy for trolls (artist in residency presentation),, East of Elsewhere Gallery, Berlin Germany (2018). Recent group exhibitions include From Dallas to Baum Bridge curated by Anna Frost, LA River, Los Angeles (2020); Beast On Its Back curated by Anna Frost, Canyon Canyon, Los Angeles (2020); Games of Ceres, King’s Leap, Brooklyn NY (2018).
Tarik Garrett
March 19 - May 2
Extended opening hours Friday March 19, 11am-6pm.
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Tarik Garrett. Across a range of media including sculpture, sound, and collage, Garrett’s work excavates the history of America’s deepest wounds, uncovering resonances between the past and future state of the Union. Through a process of research, appropriation and recontextualization, Garrett investigates notions of ownership, authorship, labor and value within the historical framework of racial inequity in the United States. Many works are assembled from objects that have been acquired as resale, abandoned, seized or appropriated property. What these items have in common is that they are encountered in a state of decay on two levels: their materiality and original monetary value. These degraded commodities are repurposed as sculptural materials and subject to further manipulation in the artist’s studio or combined as readymades. Chain Link fences and discarded sweatshirts are distorted in a manner that appears to be an eerie effect of natural decay but is in fact the result of the artist’s labor and intervention. Elsewhere, salvaged metal is etched with appropriated images and texts: Southern state flags which visually perpetuate the Confederate legacy, alongside declassified documents from the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting organizations like the Black Panthers and SNCC. Together these works comprise an incisive history of propertized human life, from chattel slavery to modern tresspassing laws.
Throughout the exhibition the artist calls attention to sites of delineation between inclusion and exclusion. Frames, fences, laws and architecture are alike in determining what is physically and conceptually allowed “in” and what is kept “out.” Challenging these distinctions, Garrett’s work exposes a racialized attitude toward ownership that permeates our culture at every level. In an ongoing collaboration with Kevin O’Neill, texts are collated from extensive research into the idea of property and the laws that surround it. A key reference in this series is the essay “Whiteness as Property” (1993) by critical race theorist Cheryl Harris which posits that whiteness entails the same qualities, privileges, protections, rights of exclusion and value as our concept of property. Harris argues that the formation of racialized identity was done in the name of white supremacy and allowed for a system and ideology not only to seize and appropriate black labor, but to create a “form of property contingent on race - only Blacks were enslaved and treated as property, [and] the conquest, removal and extermination of Native American life and culture were ratified by conferring and acknowledging the property rights of whites in Native land.” In Untitled (2020 / 2021), Garret and O’Neill juxtapose excerpts from “Whiteness as Property” alongside documents from foundational cases of American property law and transcribed depositions. These texts are overlaid with polaroids documenting Garrett’s performative interventions among casualties of capitalist ideology .
In a pair of recent sound works, Garrett adapts two historical sources which together depict the fallacy of the American Dream and how it has been used to manipulate disenfranchised groups since the founding of this country. In one work the artist reads a speech originally delivered by Andrew Johnson in October of 1864 to a black audience announcing emancipation in Tennessee. A slave owner and outspoken racist, Johnson orates in language that is charged with emotion but totally devoid of sincerity - an obvious and disingenuous attempt to secure his position as Vice President in the election coming less than a month later. In this strange and disturbing speech, Johnson makes great effort to appear sympathetic and relatable, delivering promises and sentiments that are contradicted by his past and future actions - a hollow and performative allyship sadly still prevalent in politics today. A plaintive chorus made from the wailing tones of brass rebut the dry recitation while tracing sonic lineage from Albert Ayler and John Coltrane to the spirituals and work songs of enslaved Africans. This dirge responds to the rift between sorrow and jubilation that characterizes the history of black experience in the Americas.
This duality is further articulated in a sound work adapted from W.E.B. DuBois’ rewrite of “My Country Tis Of Thee.” Recognizing the patriotic song to be a white fantasy of revisionist history, DuBois adjusted the lyrics to reflect a more honest depiction, both painful and resilient. “Thy woods and templed hills / My heart with rapture thrills / Like that above” is reworked into “And o’er thy hate which chills / My heart with purpose thrills / To rise above.” While DuBois’ resolve still resonates today, so too does his critique of the settler colonial mentality evident in the original lyrics. DuBois famously described the “psychological wages” whiteness pays its own, amounting to an attitude of universal entitlement. Over the past decade we have seen whiteness pay out in familiar ways, from the occupation and appropriation of indigenous land to the ways in which Central American refugees are refused their legal protections. Non-white life is still subject to disproportionate commodification and juridical violence under a racialized ethos of ownership that has been enforced over centuries. Acknowledging these truths about the world can affect change by generating emancipatory aspirations.
Don Edler: Devil You Know
January 10 - 24, 2021
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to present Devil You Know (2020) by Don Edler, the artist’s second feature-length video. Devil You Know will be screening on www.huntershawfineart.com January 10 - 24, 2021. Through a hybrid of political satire, experimental documentary, and speculative horror, Devil You Know reflects the dangerous absurdity of the contemporary American media environment. Equal parts video essay, staged interviews, and found footage collage, Devil You Know highlights the inherent biases underlying the aesthetics of credibility - and the credibility of aesthetics - in the post-truth media landscape.
Devil You Know is based on a script Edler co-wrote with GPT-3, an advanced deep learning-based language model developed by OpenAI. Popularly referred to as “Artificial Intelligence”, GPT-3 is known for it’s uncanny ability to generate believable natural language. To develop the shooting script, Edler fed the model prompts and content derived from an extended period of immersive research into the highly-biased information environments of radical online political spaces. This experiment was intended to exploit some of the biases within the AI’s knowledgebase in order to identify and extrapolate underlying normative, ideological qualities within the extreme input text. As a result of this process, the generated script, and ultimately the video itself both reflect the hypermediated ideological macro-culture of American Capitalism. While GPT-3 does not have a political agenda per se, it has assimilated the biases of the vast datasets on which it was trained. One example of this is the anti-Russian sentiment prevalent in the texts generated by the AI. Edler did not explicitly or implicitly direct this sentiment, but it’s repeated appearance suggests that Russophobia may be a dominant bias in the datasets GPT-3 learned from. In Edler’s experiment, the extreme input returned language that was passionate and politically charged in rhetoric, yet ambiguous in position and elusive in meaning: the type of pseudo-intellectual word salad that would not be out of place on AM talk radio, in a DIY conspiracy theory documentary, or an overly-complex press release.
The GPT-3 texts were adapted to screenplay format and interpreted by professional actors and Amazon Polly text-to-voice speech synthesis. These performances expose the presumed credibility of “nonfiction” aesthetics. Sampling from a wide variety of formal tropes, Edler investigates the authority and validity ascribed to nonfiction archetypes such as the bespectacled expert, the YouTube influencer poet, the corporate news anchor, and the posh-accented voiceover. These representations are further complicated by the influence of race, gender, class, affect, and character upon the messaging and politics of images, articulated here through Edler’s casting and art direction, and equally through the stylistic choices of the performers.
Devil You Know declares its own artifice from the first frame and repeatedly reminds the viewer that they are watching a performance - or more precisely - a document of a performance. There is no solid footing here. Edler drops the viewer into a disorienting freefall through unreliable narrators and unreliable perspectives cloaked in the semiotics of authority. The subjectivity of image is further exploited through the video’s stylized editing and graphic layering of text and image. These elements come together to create an overall meta-narrative around contemporary time-based media, and the structural factors that influence how it functions in the mind of the viewer. This shifting kaleidoscope of fractured subjectivities is ultimately incoherent, creating a cognitive dissonance which grows in magnitude as the video unfolds. Eventually this distrust crystalizes into a lens through which the viewer may examine their own subjectivities, biases, and worldviews continually throughout the process of viewing the work.
Devil You Know delivers a potent form of psychological horror through its subversive play with verisimilitude. The inclusion of several “deepfake” videos casts a shadow of doubt over the entire work, and point to deeper, more sinister fabrications: the manufacture of consent which permeates our culture at every level, assisted by the machinery of technocapitalism. The video comes to a crescendo in a sequence narrated by Amazon Polly, explaining pareidolia - “the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music.” At this point the viewer may recognize how the video itself has engaged their own pareidolic tendencies, seeking patterns within the chaos presented thus far. Devil You Know is a shattered reflection of ideology - myriad adjacent fragments none of which, nor the sum of which, produce an accurate representation of the whole. The effect is both chilling and absurd as information becomes abstracted and the lines between fact, fiction, opinion and propaganda are blurred, distorted or erased entirely, leaving the viewer to question their own biases, and the credibility of their influences.
Don Edler was born in Bremen, Germany and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Edler attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an MFA in Studio Art from New York University, as well as a BFA in Sculpture from University of Florida. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Two Minutes To Midnight, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2019); 6871 California Ave, Five Car Garage, Los Angeles (2018); The Father The Sun and The Holy Road, San Diego Art Institute, San Diego CA (2016); COBRA DESTROYER, Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles CA (2016). Recent group exhibitions include XX:XX, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2020); Ecoshamanism curated by Ian James, Leroy’s Happy Place, Los Angeles CA (2018); Mile To Mile, Roger’s Office, Los Angeles CA (2018); To Have or To Be, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles CA (2018); Corpus Alienum, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles CA (2017); The Useful and The Decorative, The Landing, Los Angeles CA (2017); Memory Room curated by Andrew Ross, Outpost Artist Resources, Queens, NY (2016). Don Edler is also the founder and curator of ELEVATOR MONDAYS, a social exhibition space in Los Angeles founded in 2017.
NADA Miami 2020
Adam de Boer: Itinerant Vistas
December 1- 5
5538 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles, CA
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to participate in NADA Miami 2020 with a solo presentation by Adam de Boer. Itinerant Vistas includes recent works exploring the visual textures, cultural minglings, and socioeconomic realities of Downtown Los Angeles. For the past several years de Boer has created artwork investigating his family’s Dutch-Indonesian ancestry, apprenticing with master craftsmen in Java and cultivating a deep relationship with the techniques and materials indigenous to the area of his family’s origin. In particular, de Boer makes frequent use of batik, an ancient textile dyeing process in which an artist draws on fabric with molten wax to delineate outlines between objects and colors. Utilizing a prehistoric technique to depict scenes of contemporary urban life, de Boer adapts batik to the visual lexicon of present day LA, generating images befitting the cultural hodge-podge of this particular setting while maintaining a strong connection to his own immigrant heritage. These compositions draw connections between the depicted environment and the figures that inhabit it, integrating social awareness into observational landscape painting to articulate a vision that is both critical and compassionate. Itinerant Vistas uncovers a vibrant and unexpected beauty within quotidian urban scenes, depicting the LA cityscape with magical realism at once sublime and familiar.
Adam de Boer was born in Redlands, CA. He received a BA in Painting from College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006, and a MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art, London in 2012. De Boer was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Indonesia in 2017, where he researched indigenous crafts in Central Java. Other grants include those from Arts for India, The Cultural Development Corporation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Santa Barbara Arts Fund. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Facing New Axes with Tammy Nguyen, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2020); Traveller’s Palm, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018-2019); Legacies Real and Imagined with Jumaldi Alfi, PT Jakarta Land and ISA Art Advisory, Jakarta, Indonesia (2018); Jungle Flame, Redbase Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017); Night Swimming, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2016); Bend Sinister with Sinta Tantra, Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, (2014).
XX:XX
Alex Nguyen-Vo, Commonolithic, Don Edler,
Huntrezz, Molly Surazhsky, Tarik Garrett
Opening: October 31 11am-6pm
On view October 31 - December 20
Hunter Shaw Fine Art presents XX:XX, a group exhibition reflecting on the themes that have shaped 2020. This year has been characterized by contradiction, presenting states of extreme polarity: connection and alienation, acceleration and stagnation, hope and hopelessness. A pervasive cognitive dissonance has emerged as we attempt to make sense of our place at the threshold between the historic and the unprecedented. Society is confronted by the emanant consequences of compounded traumas which have been mostly ignored or repressed for decades: colonialism, capitalism, climate change, white supremacy. It is hard to ignore the intersectional nature of these problems any longer. The pandemic spawned from the confluence of these forces and has brought into sharp focus the dire fact of our interconnectedness at every level: socially, economically, biologically, existentially.
The pensive months of lockdown injected new urgency into the studio practice of many artists. The pain and uncertainty of the pandemic and social uprising have generated artworks which reflect the conditions of a rapidly changing world. Many of the works on view in XX:XX were created in quarantine and have not yet been seen outside of the studio. Although the subject matters respond to specific events of this year, the underlying themes have been present in the past works of the participating artists including interrelated topics such as property law, housing, healthcare, police violence, ecological collapse and systemic racism. Together these works articulate the zeitgeist of 2020: widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Throughout XX:XX this dissatisfaction is transmuted into an attitude of defiance and resistance through a diverse range of strategies including painting, textile design, witchcraft, research, graffiti, sculpture, social media, and animation. Across the exhibition, stress is manifest in both content and form with materials pushed to their limits. Yet this strain refuses a collapse into apathy, pointing instead towards breakthrough. This exhibition recognizes that the issues at hand won’t be solved by any single election, but rather through a sustained and multifarious effort to dismantle and transform the systems and institutions that reinforce a toxic and hierarchical worldview. In the words of Octavia Butler, “Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed and, if we’re as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.” *
* Butler, Octavia E. “A World Without Racism,” NPR, September 01, 2001
Molly Surazhsky
PPE • People’s Power Enhancement
Begins October 12, 2020
View interactive locations map here
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to announce PPE • People’s Power Enhancement, a series of public artworks by Molly Surazhsky. Appearing simultaneously on 10 billboards across Los Angeles this October, PPE is an image campaign intended to engage the public in political action and social justice. Each billboard features an individual or duo wearing artist-made facemasks emblazoned with slogans such as “Care For All,” “Redistribute Wealth,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Vote Nov. 3.” Surazhsky cast the campaign to represent a diverse spectrum of genders, ages, races and orientations, including an ex-Sandinista freedom fighter and his daughter, a local witch and her familiar, along with notable figures from LA’s community of artists and activists such as Barbara T. Smith, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Harry Gamboa Jr. Visually the campaign explores the relationship between advertising and propaganda, employing a pop sensibility to illuminate a link between fashion, politics and the body at a time of unprecedented social upheaval and corporate control of public - and private - spaces.
Throughout the series, Surazhsky incorporates numerous art historical references which speak to both the political nature of the project and her own heritage as a first-generation American of ex-Soviet descent, bringing PPE into conversation with Agitprop and Social Realism. The bold, graphic patterns of the backdrop and facemasks are appropriated from textile designs by Constructivist artist Varvara Stepanova who during the Russian Revolution designed aspirational clothing and accessories for citizens in revolt. PPE is also in direct dialog with the tradition of artist-made billboards in the United States such as the celebrated Guerilla Girls campaigns, or more recent projects like For Freedoms’ controversial 50 State Initiative spearheaded by Hank WIllis Thomas. However, Surazhsky subverts the text-heavy approach of those predecessors, focusing instead on the current political implications of the facemask. The mask has become emblematic of today’s compounded public health crisis of pandemia, police brutality, systemic racism, class disparity and environmental collapse. Because of this, Surazhsky’s progressive messaging upon the masks functions as a type of closed-captioning articulating the subtext of the object itself. In this way, PPE exhibits an affinity to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled billboard from 1991, which also associated a specific object with a public health crisis: the image of an empty bed as a stark commentary on the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 90s.
Since COVID-19 reached Los Angeles in March of 2020, Molly Surazhsky has applied her practice to the pandemic relief effort, producing and donating facemasks to medical personnel and other members of the city’s most vulnerable populations. A limited edition of the masks featured in the People’s Power Enhancement billboards will be available to purchase at Hunter Shaw Fine Art through the remainder of the year. All proceeds from these sales will be donated to RAC (Revolutionary Autonomous Communities) and M.A.A.L.A (Mutual Aid Action Los Angeles) in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles.
Molly Surazhsky received a BFA from California Institute for the Arts, Valencia CA (2019) and attended Mountain School of the Arts in Los Angeles, CA (2017). Recent exhibitions include Mashacare: Home of the Freaks, Misfits & Weirdoes, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2019); Death Show, Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles (2018); EX NIHILO, Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles (2018); CO/LAB III, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2018); and El Acercamiento, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, CU (2017).
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PPE models include: Barbara T. Smith, Blakesley King, Carlos Largaespada, Courtney Coles, Derek Perry, Fiona Rose Casper-Strauss, Harry Gamboa Jr., Herbert Mendoza, Hunter Shaw, Izzie Swan, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Saida Largaespada, Taehee Kim, Tiana Brinton, Vicky Adams
Photography by: Courtney Coles
Colleen Hargaden
Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet
September 12 - October 25, 2020
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is proud to present Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Colleen Hargaden. Utilizing the forms and techniques of contemporary “survivalist” culture and the DIY “maker movement,” Hargaden’s work responds to ongoing developments in technology, as well as the systemic social, ecological, and economic pressures that prompt their creation. Each project involves full participation in the collective knowledge base of one of these developments, be it the tiny house phenomenon, model rocketry, open source 3D modeling, or doomsday prepping. Underlying these subjects is the central question of our ability to create objects which will help sustain or obtain basic human necessities of shelter, land, food, water and medicine. In this way, Hargaden’s sculptures and videos exhibit what theoretician Stephen Wright refers to as “double ontology,” describing something which contains a primary ontology as whatever it is, and a secondary ontology as an artistic proposition of that same thing. In Hargaden’s practice, each project is, or contains within it, work possessing the ontology of sculpture, video, or installation, and simultaneously, that of tool, kit, or learned skill.
This dual modality highlights the latent utility of Hargaden’s works: they are static in the role of artwork or proposed system, but ready to be actualized as survival tools if needed in the future. Capsule One: How To Grow Sprouts (2018), is a resource kit which provides all of the necessities to perform the work’s titular task. Inside a weather-proof Pelican case, a seed packet and manual are found alongside an instructional video which plays on a solar-powered monitor and media player. Installed on an industrial utility rack, the lower shelf displays the fruits of the process: sprouting trays lush with microgreens at various stages of growth. This work exemplifies the artist’s practice at large, engaging the viewer in an open loop of pedagogy and meaning-making. Each project provides a take-away artwork which invites the viewer to re-make the work themselves: a step-by-step demonstration of a skill, a downloadable manual, a packet of seeds, or a diagram. This exchange is about sharing resources, and presents materials and methods that can equip the viewer and aid them in the making of things, returning knowledge back to the collective source it originated from.
The twin aspects of proposition and duplication are also evident in the two-channel video Reproducing “H2O” (2019), a twelve minute shot-for-shot recreation of Ralph Steiner’s H2O (1929), one of the earliest cinematic documents of water, its surfaces and forms. In the current installation, a small monitor plays Steiner’s original synchronized with a nearby projection of Hargaden’s remake. Throughout Hargaden’s version, the sequence is occasionally interrupted by moments of imageless darkness corresponding to scenes she was unable to recreate due to lack of access to certain bodies of water or infrastructural updates to waterways in the 90 years since Steiner filmed H20. These absences reiterate the theme of technological development and poetically underscore the precious finitude of water as a resource.
This subject reappears in Water Brick (Furniture) (2019), a series of seats and benches fashioned from stacks of interlocking water-storage jugs. Their monochromatic, rectilinear forms recall Minimalist sculpture while performing the dual function of furnishing and stockpiling the hypothetical doomsday bunker. This gesture slyly draws a connection between the possessive and macho attributes present in both survivalism and boys club Minimalism. Although the water bricks are exhibited full, the installation uses zero waste / recycled water, avoiding dead-end resource hoarding, instead acting as a conduit of redistribution. For this exhibition, the water will cycle back into use at local Los Angeles farms, Alma Backyard and Moonwater Farm.
Throughout Hargaden’s practice a simultaneity of position arises from the contradictory nature of the subjects she pulls from. These paradoxes, despite their complexities, contain an unyielding drive to push forward and try again. In this they are possessed of the unique and generative qualities of the prototype. Hargaden’s projects, in their ability to be shared with and remade by others, have the possibility to reach outward beyond individual use and autonomous boundaries of the studio, the gallery, or the institution. The production of meaning in Hargaden's work often manifests in unseen ways beyond what is physically in the installation, most concretely in her role as an educator. During the school year, Hargaden teaches middle school girls how to build rockets, design aqueducts, and other skills that could potentially shift the percentage of women working in engineering fields. Despite proposing ideas of what the future may look like (and what tools may help us prepare for it) Hargaden’s work ultimately reflects conditions of the present, including our relationship to space, materials, energy, and resources. Hargaden’s Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet question the ontological boundaries of art: what it is, isn’t, can be, or may look like tomorrow given the economic and ecological circumstances of today.
Colleen Hargaden received a MFA in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College (NY) in 2019, and a BFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design (CA) in 2015. Recent exhibitions include Say Ever Moves, Bard College Exhibition Center, UBS Gallery, Red Hook NY (2019); Los Angeles Notebook, Jacob’s West, Los Angeles CA (2018); Pilot, Elephant, Los Angeles CA (2018); Belly Flop, Pool Party, Palm Springs CA (2018); Built-In, NAVEL, Los Angeles CA (2018); Tiny House (End of Build) solo exhibition, Deep End Ranch, Santa Paula CA (2016). Hargaden is co-founder of Roger’s Office, an artist-run gallery in Highland Park, Los Angeles (2017-2019).
Bruhn, Katherine. “Review: Adam de Boer’s ‘Traveller’s Palm’ at Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles CA,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures And The Americas 6, 2020, pp 184-186.
In today’s global contemporary art world, perhaps more than ever before, artists have the ability to traverse borders, deconstructing and (re)creating identities that are rarely bound to constructs such as nationality. The processes of negotiation that occur as a result of such lived realities are in turn, central to the production of artworks which, in line with the thinking of Homi Bhabha, enunciate from a Third Space: culture’s hybridity. In doing so, they demonstrate Bhabha’s argument that “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” and that “signs can [and should] be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and [constantly] read anew.”1 Taken as a framework through which to read Adam de Boer’s hybrid practice and recent mixed media body of work, Traveller’s Palm, Bhabha’s oft-cited aphorisms ring true. They are exemplified by de Boer’s ongoing exploration of his own hybrid identity as a first-generation Indo-American or Dutch-Indonesian-American raised in Southern California, and what he refers to in his practice as the (mis)appro- priation of cultural forms.
De Boer’s father was born in the Central Java town of Purwokerto to Indo parents who shortly after his birth were forced from Indonesia and into a precarious search for a new “homeland;” a situation that confronted numerous populations who were repatriated to Europe following the independence of Europe’s colonies in Asia and Africa. Eventually settling in the environs of Los Angeles, part of a miniscule Indo-American diaspora, de Boer’s grandparents set aside their tropical roots. Because de Boer’s father was too young to remember his time in Southeast Asia, his memories of this place were not transmitted to his children. The result was what de Boer describes as a decidedly American upbringing. It was not until 2010, during a surfing trip to Indonesia that de Boer’s own interest in his Eurasian roots was sparked. Since this fortuitous journey, de Boer has spent considerable time in Indonesia, most recently as a Fulbright Scholar in the cosmopolitan artist hub of Yogyakarta. As revealed by works like Riana as Ontosoroh (above), this experience has given de Boer the space to develop his knowledge of Javanese craft traditions as well as his own understanding of what it means in the global era to stake claim to identities and create legacies that are both real and imagined.
As is the case with each of de Boer’s works, the final product is the result of a process of layering both in terms of materials and the historical references they point to. In Riana as Ontosoroh, the viewer is presented foremost with the image of a young woman who is at once central to, yet subsumed by, the patterned backdrop that she is placed on. A recurring theme throughout de Boer’s work, these geometric motifs are our first reference to de Boer’s unique play with cultural signifiers. Called “tegel tiles” such brightly coloured cement tiles are prevalent in contemporary design today. In Yogyakarta, especially, they are used to decorate the innumerable cafes frequented by Indonesia’s ever-growing middle class. However, they are not Indonesian or even Dutch despite the fact that tegel is the Dutch word for tile. Rather, they are English in origin and were introduced to Indonesia via Portugal by the Dutch in an effort to bring hygienic surfaces to the colonies. Further transformed by de Boer, they are remade through his use of the Indonesian craft tradition batik, or wax-resist on linen cloth, that, instead of premade canvases, serve as a base for many of his mixed-media paintings.
Returning to the figure that rests on top of these tiles, varied interpretations are no doubt possible. The model is positioned in a way that portrays a certain vulnerability: lying on her side with one arm opened, Riana is exposed to the viewer’s gaze. Yet, staring directly at the viewer she is unapproachable, thus becoming Nyai Ontosoroh, the protagonist in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind (1980). Written in jail when Toer was a political prisoner, the epic novel, set in 1898, is about the Native wife of a Dutchman during Indonesia’s colonial era. Although Nyai Ontosoroh is a concubine, she is self-made, tough, and most significantly, turns notions of female subjugation on their head. In conversation with de Boer, he explains that while he uses models who he does in fact know, like Riana and even himself, he is not interested in the mere depiction of an individual’s likeness. Instead, he is concerned with the ideas, or in this case the archetypes, that such representations might portray. In this way, Riana as Ontosoroh is intended as a comment on the resilience of Indonesian women specifically and Indonesian society generally, themes that arguably can be extended and reapplied to varied contexts globally.
As such, despite what is de Boer’s explicit reference to Indonesian culture and its colonial past, it is unsatisfying to draw simplistic conclusions as to the intent or function of any one work part of his repertoire. Riana as Ontosoroh is no doubt a reflection of de Boer’s ongoing interrogation of his own hybrid identity while it also functions as a commentary on the appropriation of aesthetic and material traditions. Through his unlikely synthesis of seemingly contradictory elements like oil paint on batik, de Boer successfully produces objects that challenge what we expect from contemporary art. While some have accused de Boer of exoticizing Indonesian tradition, we must ask, who in fact has the right to these traditions? To conclude where we began, I reaffirm the idea that “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity”2 and thus de Boer either through his identification with his Indo heritage or simply because he like many others has travelled to Indonesia, has a right to claim or read anew the symbols that constitute a contemporary global culture.
Katherine Bruhn
University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
katiebruhn@berkeley.edu
Katherine Bruhn is a PhD candidate in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines connections between the positioning of Minangkabau artists in Indonesian art history and ways in which they have negotiated contradictions related to local custom and Islam over time.
Reference
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
1 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 37–38.
2 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 37.
Adam de Boer Riverwalker (2019), wax-resist acrylic wash and oil paint on linen, 22 x 54 inches
Tammy Nguyen & Adam de Boer
Facing New Axes
Opening reception Sunday March 15, 3-6pm
On view March 15 - April 26, 2020
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to announce Facing New Axes, an exhibition pairing recent works by Tammy Nguyen and Adam de Boer. Incorporating themes of diaspora and resilience, Facing New Axes uncovers beauty and integrity within the challenges of current and future class and climate realities. Nguyen and de Boer address their contemporary subjects employing materials and formal strategies traditional to their respective heritages, articulating a continuum from the ancestral to the eventual. Integrating social awareness into observational landscape painting, these works articulate a vision that is both critical and compassionate.
For the past several years, Adam de Boer has created artwork investigating his family’s Dutch-Indonesian ancestry, apprenticing with master craftsmen in Java and cultivating a deep relationship with the techniques and materials indigenous to the area of his family’s origin. In particular, de Boer makes frequent use of batik, an ancient textile dyeing process in which an artist draws on fabric with molten wax to create outlines between objects and colors. Pushing the limits of traditional Indonesian iconography while combining it with Western modes of oil painting, de Boer has generated a distinctive body of work which examines the legacy of colonialism within his own identity as a first generation Asian-American.
In current works de Boer further explores batik while turning his focus to new vistas, namely the landscape of downtown Los Angeles where the artist currently resides. Utilizing a prehistoric technique to depict scenes of contemporary urban life, de Boer adapts batik to the visual lexicon of present day LA, generating images befitting the cultural hodge-podge of this particular setting while maintaining a strong connection to his own immigrant heritage. In Riverwalker (2019), a young man crosses the graffitied and litter-strewn LA River at daybreak. His stuffed knapsack and canteen allude to transience - perhaps he has been on the move for ages. Regardless, he pushes forth on his journey, walking with dignity and purpose. Monday Evening Studio View (2020) presents a 1:1 rendering of the view from de Boer’s studio window in downtown’s Flower District. Within it a summary of Los Angeles can be found: palm trees, a sunset, warehouses, graffitti, flower shops, the tips of luxury lofts hanging above a skyline peppered with homeless encampments. Yet the image achieves a quality of magical realism, blending specific local detail with subtle, symbolic exaggeration: a pentacostal revival takes place in a box truck-turned-altar beneath an impossibly large canary palm. While the revival is an actual weekly occurrence in the neighborhood, the massive palm is both iconic of the city, and representative of colonial legacies and the sometimes unexpected beauty of finding things out of place in a Modern World.
A complimentary blend of fantasy and social critique is also evident in a recent series by Tammy Nguyen which imagines future weather seasons as the Earth recalibrates into new climates: dust season, volcano season, flood season, and fire season. Each painting is comprised of four vertical panels, a direct reference to East Asian and some Southeast Asian multi-panel paintings depicting the four seasons mankind is currently familiar with. Nguyen’s imagined seasons are inspired by bizarre weather events she has witnessed first hand and on the news including the dust storms and bushfires that have ravaged Australia, the floods that have engulfed the Mekong, and the eruption of Taal in the Philippines. It is estimated that the planet will exist for another 1.75 billion years regardless of humans instigating - or surviving - the 6th mass extinction. Based on our current and past behavior, it is reasonable to assume that future humans will adapt to their conditions for as long as possible, even finding comforts along the way. In these paintings ducks are roasted in the flames of a forest fire; feet relax on a bed of grass overrun with ladybugs as a volcano erupts in the distance; people sleep as pollen swarms around their sinuses; others wade at leisure enjoying a new flood.
As one gazes at these propositions, it becomes clear that the historic four-paneled paintings Nguyen draws upon emerged from a time when humankind could rely on a cycle of four steady seasons year after year after year. Likewise, de Boer’s use of batik draws attention to the handmade quality of his work, posing questions of obsolescence and tradition. Throughout the works on view, Nguyen and de Boer examine the slippery threshold between adaptation and erasure, yet there is a softness and relatability in the humanity evident in these images. This exhibition aims to emphasize solidarity and compassion for the ways in which people respond to the eternal force of change, finding humankind forever Facing New Axes.
Tammy Nguyen was born in San Francisco, CA and lives and works in New York CIty. Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The following year she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked for a ceramics company for three years thereafter. In 2013, Nguyen received an MFA from Yale, and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, the Bronx Museum, and is included in the permanent collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include, The Ship Named Atlast, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA (2019); Necessary Fictions with Ha Ninh Pham, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2019); The Ship Named Atlast, Lightwell Gallery, University of Oklahoma, Norman OK (2019); and One Blue Eye, Two Servings with Nicole Won Hee Maloof, CRUSH Curatorial, New York NY (2018). Tammy Nguyen is also the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press addressing geopolitics, science and identity through visual art and writing.
Adam de Boer was born in Redlands, CA. He received a BA in Painting from College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006, and a MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art, London in 2012. De Boer was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Indonesia in 2017, where he researched indigenous crafts in Central Java. Other grants include those from Arts for India, The Cultural Development Corporation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Santa Barbara Arts Fund. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Traveller’s Palm, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018-2019); Legacies Real and Imagined with Jumaldi Alfi, PT Jakarta Land and ISA Art Advisory, Jakarta, Indonesia (2018); Jungle Flame, Redbase Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017); Night Swimming, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2016); Bend Sinister with Sinta Tantra, Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, (2014).
The gallery is closed through January 11
Happy new year - see you in 2020!
Adam Higgins
Flatfish
Opening reception Sunday January 12, 6-9pm
On view January 12 - February 23, 2020
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to announce Flatfish, an exhibition of recent paintings by Adam Higgins - the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles. On view are selections from a current body of work in which Higgins approaches a single subject - the California halibut - as a generative source for optical and compositional exploration. Uniform in subject and scale, each canvas articulates a variation of theme, culminating in a deep engagement with shape, color, light, perspective and technique. Energetic and studious, Flatfish exemplifies the ancient human impulse to explore abstraction through the depiction of animals.
The fish featured in this series were caught by the artist and photographed on his cell phone before their return to water. This documentation sets in motion a rigorous and layered study of compounded flatness: the flat markings on a flat fish, laying on a flat ground, flattened as a jpg, and finally painted on a flat surface. Higgins simultaneously emphasizes natural, photographic, and painterly phenomenon: lighting, framing and resolution extract visual particularities from the subject and its surroundings. These qualities are translated to the canvas as pointilist clusters or streaky motion-blurs that flicker between abstracting and describing.
A dry sense of humor compliments the series’ aquatic themes. Comedic aggression is apparent in the treatment of edge - each composition intensely self-aware of its own perimeter, cropped uncomfortably tight to create an amusing visual tension. Certain images defy their boundaries appearing to loop: the subject simultaneously exits one side of the frame while entering the other. Elsewhere, a single fish is presented in two contrasting lighting conditions within the same picture plane. A sincere charisma is amplified by Higgins' enthusiasm for his craft and its potentials: throughout the series, meticulous formal inquiries generate intimate portraits of compressed moments shared by the artist and his slippery subject.
Adam Higgins received a MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art (2018) and a BFA in Painting from Memphis College of Art (2012). Recent solo exhibitions include Big Empty, Gallery Luperca, Nashville TN (2016) and Cloud Castle, Material Art Space, Memphis TN (2013). Recent group exhibitions include Heads/Tails, Next To Nothing, New York NY (2018); Way Out Now, Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles CA (2018); Tiny, David Lusk Gallery, Memphis TN (2015); IT’S A MISTAKE, Glitch, Memphis TN (2014); Heavy Nothing, Glitch, Memphis TN (2013); Chronos and Cairos: A Show About Time, Hyde Gallery, Memphis TN (2013); Material Anthology, Crosstown Arts, Memphis TN (2013).
"I'll see you in the ether"
curated by Jonny Negron
Cécile di Giovanni, Nina Hartmann, Benjamin Kellogg,
Jonny Negron, Lisa Signorini
Opening reception:
Sunday November 10, 5-8pm
Exhibition on view:
November 10 - December 22
“I’ll see you in the ether” brings together five artists whose works engage an esoteric dimension within the context of contemporary life, connecting timeless symbols, archetypes and iconography to the present world. The esoteric worldview functions as a lens through which each artist gains a unique view into realms of inner mystery. When perceiving the material world through this lens, the artist may observe emergent narrative resonances, and discern a level of symbolic meaning or archetypal significance within the unfolding of current events and daily routine. In this way, it is revealed that meaning is in the mind of the beholder. The significance of a fire, or a tree, or a triangle depends more upon the sensibilities of the perceiver than the inherent qualities of the thing itself. The mind is the limit of reality, the imagination its forge. What can be perceived in the imagination can be brought into reality if permitted by the mind of the perceiver. These artists work from this knowledge to create objects and images encoded with allegorical connotation and charged with symbolic intent. Apprehending the eternal power play between the primeval forces of darkness and light, these works emphasize the threshold between realms, the liminal zone exemplified by the infinitude of imagination, the astral plane, or virtual space.
Jonny Negron is a self-taught artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, now living and working in Los Angeles. “I’ll see you in the ether” is his curatorial debut. Recent solo exhibitions include Small Map of Heaven, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2018); and Heavenly Threshold Companion, Farewell, Austin (2014). Selected group exhibitions include A Cloth Over A Birdcage, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2019); Paper View, The Hole, New York (2019); You Are Who You Think I Think You Are, American Medium, New York (2018); SPRUNG!, Hunter Shaw Fine Art (2017); Mould Map 6: Terraformers, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham UK (2016); Maren Karlson, Jonny Negron, Matt Lock: Formative World, Farewell, Austin (2016).
Cécile di Giovanni is an artist and art director based in Paris FR. She attended Ecole Nationale Superieure D’art, Villa Arson, Nice FR (2012). Her art direction and set design has been featured in the lookbooks, showrooms, and presentations of major fashion labels including OFF-WHITE, Leo by Leo, and Casablanca Paris. Recent performances and exhibitions include La Manutention, Palais de Tokyo, Paris FR (2019); Le Lucky, HVW8 Gallery, Berlin DE (2019); Internet Psychoanalysis, HEAD, Geneva SUI (2018); Au Revoir Mon Visage, Do Disturb, Palais de Tokyo, Paris FR (2018); Aztech, Material Art Fair, Mexico City MX (2018); La Fureur Du Dragon, Centre Pompidou, Paris FR (2018); Porter La Peau De Sa Victime, Palais de Tokyo, Paris FR (2017).
Nina Hartmann received a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013), and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include A Meeting with Erna Schilling, Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York (2019); Eat the Sun, Insect Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); Defanging Recovery Manual, In Lieu, Los Angeles (2019); Ex Nihilo, Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles (2018); Subcurrent, Gallery Manque, New York (2016); Keys Open Doors, Boyfriend Gallery, Chicago (2015); Under Heavy Manners, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen DK (2015); Limit-Experience, Farewell, Austin (2014).
Benjamin Kellogg attended The Cooper Union. Recent exhibitions include The Prophecy Club, MX Gallery, New York (2019); The Child Show, MX Gallery, New York (2018); Desert Pour Toujours, Collection Libéréé, Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas NV (2018); The Window of the Breath Which Lets in the Divine; Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2018; August and Everything After, Plymouth Rock, Zurich SUI (2018); THE PERFECT STORM, Societe, Berlin DE (2016); Kiss The Ring, Macie Gransion Gallery, New York (2014); Afterlife Are Belong To Me w/ Bunny Rogers, Sandy Brown Gallery, Berlin DE (2014); Pathways to Cineland, Sandy Brown Gallery, Berlin DE (2013).
Lisa Signorini received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2012), and now lives and works in Paris FR. Recent exhibitions include Lisa Signorini, LA PAIX, Paris FR (2019); SUPERHUMAN, Fisher Parrish Gallery, New York (2018); La Revue Innocente, Kabinet, Bruxelles BY (2018); Daydream Nation, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, New York (2017); LE 4EME SEXE, Galerie Le Cœur, Paris FR (2017); In The Mood For Doom, Marcy North, New York (2016); Tie His Hands Gently, ROMEO, New York (2016); We Discussed In Disgust, Galerie Seven, Paris FR (2016); Baby I’m A Star, ROMEO, New York (2016).
Don Edler
Two Minutes To Midnight
Opening reception
Sunday September 8
Exhibition on view
September 8 - October 27
In Two Minutes To Midnight, Don Edler examines the urgency, horror, and absurdity of the current political environment in the United States, and by extension, the utter precarity of global systems essential to the survival of our planet. Focusing on the weaponization of information in the contemporary political arena, Edler uses sculpture, video and print to examine the semantics and semiotics of propaganda. Two Minutes To Midnight takes a critical look at how information is manipulated into ideology and materialized in forms such as bronze monuments and campaign speeches.
The exhibition title refers to the current setting of the “Doomsday Clock,” a symbol created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to illustrate mankind’s proximity to terminal disaster. Midnight represents terminal disaster. Since 1947, when the clock was established, the time has moved closer or further from midnight as determined by intersecting factors such as the international proliferation of nuclear weapons, and more recently, climate change. For the last two years it has been set at two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever been to the symbolic point of annihilation.
In the official 2019 Doomsday Clock Statement, the authors refer to “a new abnormal” which characterizes the international geopolitical infosphere at “a moment in which fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction, undermining our very abilities to develop and apply solutions to the big problems of our time.” †
Edler addresses information warfare in post-truth politics with the multi-channel video “The Production of Information” (2019). Focusing on the language of political persuasion, Edler created a group of scripts adapted from a diverse range of texts appropriated from across the political spectrum, from Milo Yiannopoulos to Noam Chomsky. These scripts were then performed in cold readings by professional actors in a commercial casting call staged by the artist. Intercutting between different actors performing the same scripts, Edler decontextualizes the language, allowing the voice and affect of the actors to highlight the role of both context and representation in the production of ideology. Text is superimposed over image, implicating the viewer as they read each script in tandem with the actor in a kind of ideological karaoke. Careening from the earnest to the ridiculous, the staging suggests outtakes of TV pundits rehearsing their talking points. “The Production of Information” eerily reflects a media environment in which distraction, sensationalism, entertainment value and corporate interests spin and obfuscate facts - Stay tuned for less information.
Edler investigates the potent objecthood of ideology in sculptures such as “Learning from Monuments (Durham, NC, August 14, 2017)” (2016-2019). Inspired by the actions of protestors in Durham, NC who in August of 2017 tore down a confederate monument outside the Durham County courthouse, this work questions the persistence of these emblems of oppression within contemporary public space. In the wake of Durham, Edler’s understanding of figurative monuments evolved, causing him to re-evaluate an earlier work of his own, “Learning from Balzac” (2016), a sculpture based on Rodin’s iconic 19th century bronze “Monument to Balzac.” Realizing that many monuments function as enduring symbols of oppression, and his own sculpture’s implicit relationship to perpetuating Patriarchy, Edler destroyed “Learning from Balzac” and reconfigured it into “Learning from Monuments.” Compositionally and conceptually the remix resembles the defaced and deflated confederate monument: toppled and pierced with tubes of light, the fragile framework and hollow interior are illuminated.
Near the gallery’s entrance, a portion of drywall has been removed to reveal “The Watcher” (2017-2019). Installed one year ago during the gallery’s initial remodel, this low-relief carved tablet bearing the visage of the current US President, has been concealed within the gallery walls, lurking and invisible. On one level, this locates “The Watcher” within an ongoing body of work in which Edler has physically buried his sculptures either in the ground, or within existing architecture, excavating them a year later. As a conceptual gesture, this particular installation comments on the insidious nature of toxic ideology which can fester unseen below the surface, even in areas where it is least expected.
“The New White Hood” (2019) is a hyper-realistic silicone reproduction of an official MAGA hat the artist sourced from eBay. Unceremoniously cast aside on the gallery floor, it faces the corner like a dejected ghost, pathetic yet dangerous. Rendered in white platinum silicone, it’s apparent structure is illusory and proves flimsy and spineless upon inspection.
Across the exhibition, Edler applies an aesthetic sensibility which encapsulates the maddening polarity of “the new abnormal,” presenting an environment that is at once chaotic and austere, laughably absurd and deadly serious. It is not a comfortable state. Highlighting an extreme ambivalence, the artist brings into focus the urgency of the current political moment. Occurring as the 2020 presidential race unfolds, Two Minutes To Midnight reminds us that in a landscape of manipulated facts, we all must think critically about how and from where we gather information, lest we hasten our own self-destruction. In the words of the 2019 Doomsday Clock Statement:
“This new abnormal is simply too volatile and dangerous to accept as a continuing state of world affairs. Dire as the present may seem, there is nothing hopeless or predestined about the future. The Bulletin resolutely believes that human beings can manage the dangers posed by the technology that humans create… But threats must be acknowledged before they can be effectively confronted. The current situation — in which intersecting nuclear, climate, and information warfare threats all go insufficiently recognized and addressed, when they are not simply ignored or denied — is unsustainable. The longer world leaders and citizens carelessly inhabit this new and abnormal reality, the more likely the world is to experience catastrophe of historic proportions.” ††
In conjunction with the exhibition, Edler has produced a new editioned silkscreen print, inspired by the Doomsday Clock, which is to be sold in support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.) One hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of this edition will be donated to the ACLU. Please direct inquiries to hsfa@huntershawfineart.com.
Don Edler was born in Bremen, Germany and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Edler attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an MFA in Studio Art from New York University, as well as a BFA in Sculpture from University of Florida, Gainesville FL. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include 6871 California Ave, Five Car Garage, Los Angeles (2018); The Father The Sun and The Holy Road, San Diego Art Institute, San Diego CA (2016); COBRA DESTROYER, Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles CA (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Ecoshamanism curated by Ian James, Leroy’s Happy Place, Los Angeles CA (2018); Mile To Mile, Roger’s Office, Los Angeles CA (2018); To Have or To Be, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles CA (2018); Corpus Alienum, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles CA (2017); The Useful and The Decorative, The Landing, Los Angeles CA (2017); Memory Room curated by Andrew Ross, Outpost Artist Resources, Queens, NY (2016). Don Edler is also the founder and curator of ELEVATOR MONDAYS, a social exhibition space in Los Angeles founded in 2017.
SOURCES:
† Bronson, Rachel PhD. “Statement from the President and CEO,” A New Abnormal: It Is STILL Two Minutes To Midnight - 2019 Doomsday Clock Statement, The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, January 24, 2019.
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
†† Mecklin, John, editor. A New Abnormal: It Is STILL Two Minutes To Midnight - 2019 Doomsday Clock Statement, The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, January 24, 2019.
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
Molly Surazhsky
Mashacare: Home of the Freaks, Misfits, & Weirdoes
Opening reception and fashion show:
Sunday July 14, 6-9pm
On view:
July 14 - August 18
Gallery hours:
Thursday - Sunday 11am - 5pm and by appointment
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90019
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to present Mashacare: Home of the Freaks, Misfits, & Weirdoes, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Molly Surazhsky. On view is the culmination of a multi-year project which utilizes sculpture, sound, photography, textile design and handmade garments to articulate a detailed science fiction narrative involving themes of healthcare, identity, survival and global warming. Channelling Varvara Stepanova and Lyobov Popova, the artist’s heroes of the Constructivist movement, Surazhsky uses textile design and garment-making to envision the inhabitants of a new world. While the Constructivists were working to reimagine their society within the pretext of a hopeful revolutionary spirit that shook their entire nation, Surazhsky produces work in more cynical times, therefore choosing to invent an entirely new place: the floating city of Mashacare, a tiny utopia adrift in the dystopian seas of a post-melt waterworld.
Mashacare’s internal narrative begins in the present as the Earth’s rising sea levels coincide with the rise of corrupt, right wing governments worldwide. Around this time, Masha, a Russian Babushka in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn begins holding free healthcare and wellness training sessions for women in her community, a service that will grow in popularity and necessity as the poor are gradually stripped of basic necessities including housing, daycare, education, and, of course, healthcare. As Mashacare gains attendance, a vast archive of sustainable, affordable, and comprehensive remedies is established, and from that grows a truly renegade healthcare system: hundreds of women running free clinics from their homes across the nation, and eventually the world. Annual panels are held amongst practitioners, and a physical archive and education center is created in Brooklyn to house remedies, samples and case studies. The organization is at first treated as a major threat by Big Pharma and the Establishment, but as decades of ecological collapse ensue, the elite turn their focus to a new project: creating home elsewhere in the cosmos. In the final years of land access, the Mashacare community bands together using their collective skills to terraform an artificial island from available materials, while democratically creating a peaceful and matriarchal social structure. Existing under continual threat of airborne plagues issuing from nearby cesspools of floating plastic and trash, the island’s inhabitants live with Mashacare’s original holistic healthcare philosophy at the core of their society. By 2100 AD, Mashacare is thriving with sectors dedicated to architecture, farming, healing, engineering, and love. With the flooding of the Earth came the end of patriarchy, the end of capitalism, and the opportunity to start fresh.
Deftly interweaving utopia and dystopia, fact and fantasy, personal and political, Surazhsky communicates with a sophisticated command of materials across a diverse range of media. Sustaining the tradition of women in her family who have worked as tailors for generations, Surazhsky’s sculptural works are comprised of posed mannequins and dress forms outfitted in one-of-a-kind, hand-tailored garments. These pieces often feature transparent plastic pockets containing various medicines and wellness products, complimented by colorful textiles designed by the artist. Expressing the visual culture of Mashacare, Surazhsky’s bold textiles are collaged from sources significant to the project including stock images of herbal remedies, appropriated Constructivist patterns, emojis, maps and family photos. One image features a group of women from Surazhsky’s family - including her grandmother Masha, the project’s eponymous matriarch - engaged in a celebratory dance. Above the joyous photo, on a backdrop of high-visibility orange, a black text states, “Mama, we eradicated: illness, violent men, trash, money, misogyny, heteronormativity, xenophobia, homelessness, weapons.”
A shrewd political sensibility and sharp sense of humor are evident throughout the body of work which plays with the visual language of both political propaganda and corporate branding. This inclination is further expressed through the show’s exhibition design which features vinyl wallpaper, fashion photography and audio narration. An underlying cynicism manifests in a deeper questioning of the traditional “art object,” its production, marketing, and sale to a mostly elite consumer base. Bringing mannequins and clothing into the space of an art institution, Surazhsky challenges the cultural hierarchies between art and fashion which presume that art and artists hold a higher moral ground when compared to other industries. Unlike art, fashion is regularly recognized for its blatant misdeeds and commodity status. Accordingly, Surazhsky presents the viewer with what could more directly be classified as commodities within the gallery space. On the other hand, Surazhsky’s work brings the labor of tailoring out from behind the scenes, highlighting the craft of couture as an artform and occupation dying in the age of fast fashion. Directly informed by Surazhsky’s upbringing in an immigrant, working class family who left the Soviet Union with communal tendencies intact, Mashacare combines a collective, utopic cynicism with an ode to the invisible labor of women, whether it is sewing or caregiving. The results are a complex and multivalent body of work articulating a vision of queer, feminist populism that feels refreshing, necessary and achievable in spite of austere predictions for our future.
Molly Surazhsky received a BFA from California Institute for the Arts, Valencia CA (2019) and attended Mountain School of the Arts in Los Angeles, CA (2017). Recent exhibitions include Mashacare: Home of the Freaks, Misfits & Weirdoes (thesis exhibition), A402 Gallery, CalArts, Valencia, CA (2019); Death Show, Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles (2018); EX NIHILO, Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles (2018); CO/LAB III, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2018); and El Acercamiento, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, CU (2017).
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In conjunction with the opening reception, there will be a live fashion show presenting the complete Mashacare collection of 21 unique looks. Models include: Abigail Stanton, Alicia Piller, Anais Franco, Finn Hopper, Herbert Mendoza, Isabel Ivey, Jasmine Alise, Jordan Terrell, Kat Walker Shea, Kristin Wetenkamp, Lindsey Villarreal, Melis Nur York, Michelle Sauer, Richard Chevrier, Samara Bradley, Serena Himmelfarb, Shaun Johnson + Fanny, Tatiana McClung, Violet Sciole, featuring music from DJ Charlie Scovill and Lighting Design by Soowan An.
The artist would like to acknowledge Courtney Coles for co-producing the photographs, as well as voice actress Abigail Stanton and coder Taeheem Kim for their work on the sound pieces. A tremendous thank you to Natalia Surazhsky, Shane Rothe, Shaun Johnson, Violet Sciole, Milan Northcote, Alicia Piller, Finn Hopper, Isabel Ivey, Anais Franco, and Tatiana McClung. And finally, a very special thank you to Scott Benzel for his continued support.
Opening reception:
Sunday May 19, 4-7pm
On view:
May 19 - June 30
Gallery hours:
Thursday - Sunday 11am - 5pm and by appointment
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90019
The Institute for Chaotic Love & Healing advocates the function of art as a conduit to salvation, a means to engage community and forge a path out of personal and collective trauma. It advocates the function of art as a solvent of boundaries and a megaphone to amplify the cosmic giggle. It advocates the function of art as a tool to shape change and a vessel to ride the wave of entropy. Including works by R. Lord, Harry Gould Harvey IV, and DJ Richard, The Institute for Chaotic Love & Healing is a liminal environment articulated in sound, image, sculpture, and hand-shaped surfboards.
In the Buddhist tradition, the Three Refuges or Three Jewels are comprised of the Buddha-Dharma-Sangha triad. Put simply, Buddha, The Teacher; Dharma, The Way; and Sangha, The Community are three precious and necessary elements on the path to enlightenment. This triplicate is the focus of recent works by R. Lord created while recuperating from a violent car crash. As a dedicated surfer, Lord has recently developed a surfboard shaping practice in conjunction with her studio work in an active attempt to engage Sangha: learning, growing, healing physically and mentally through positive community interaction. The hand-shaping of surfboards is a discipline of functional sculpture with an evolved formal lineage and a highly-engaged community of creators and connoisseurs. On a spiritual level, surfing and board shaping are about sharing joy amongst this community: the surfboard as a vessel to commune with nature, a technology for accessing the present moment. The metaphysical link between surfing and spirituality is further explored in the artist’s recent paintings which fuse the iconographic visual language of both arenas.
Mystical observations and enigmatic mantras adorn the small, potent drawings of Harry Gould Harvey IV. Deftly interweaving text and image, Harvey’s compositions draw the viewer into a loop of observation, reflection, and interpretation. The messages are rendered in a confident, legible hand suggesting an earnest inclination to communicate with the viewer, yet their meanings remain seductively cryptic, infused with the abstract mystique of an insight scrawled in the midst of transcendental ecstasy. Frequently possessed of a subtle, Koan-like humor, the significance is deceptively simple, the meaning shifting and deepening the longer it is contemplated. Each drawing is complemented by an ornate frame carved from materials foraged in the woods near the artist’s home in Rhode Island. Intricate and precisely whittled with a folk-gothic sensibility, the baroque carvings lend the drawings an altar-like objecthood, which is further articulated in the artist’s free-standing sculptures. Recent structures suggest devotional architecture, hermetic environments, and fantastical vessels which have been assembled from detritus collected along the LA River.
Positive transmutation through chaos is explored in an untitled sound piece by DJ Richard. Repurposing a selection of Meditation and New Age compositions, the artist has run MIDI files from separate parts of different songs through generative music software to achieve new arrangements from the recombination of disparate elements. Relinquishing degrees of control to the program’s parameters of randomization, the resulting soundscape is often the outcome of minimal human intervention. Expressing an attitude of calm non-attachment the work demonstrates the possibility of passively shaping change: by inputting peaceful data to a chaotic system, the output is peaceful but unpredictable. The emergent, unforeseen occurrences are both progressive and generative, sonically embodying the intentions of The Institute for Chaotic Love and Healing.
R. Lord received a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Safeworld, The Composing Rooms, Berlin (2016) and Documental, Dem Passwords, Los Angeles (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Dulce Dientes, Rainbow in Spanish, Los Angeles (2017); Investment Casting, In Lieu, Los Angeles (2017); Corpus Rising, American Medium, New York (2017); Post Analog Painting, The Hole, New York (2015); Surround Audience, New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York (2015).
Harry Gould Harvey IV is a self-taught artist. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include EARTH CRISIS, Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York City (2018); Amen, Thanks Computer God!, Freddy, New York (2018); Harry Gould Harvey IV, Motel, New York (2018); Harry Gould Harvey IV, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta GA (2018); An Inconvenient Hoax, Farewell Books, Austin TX (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Hard To Be A Hole, Kunsthalle Wichita, Wichita KS (2019); NADA (curated by Michael Assif), Motel, New York (2017); Dog, Tree, Table, Grin Contemporary, Providence RI (2016).
DJ Richard is an electronic music producer based in Philadelphia. Recent recordings include Dies Iræ Xerox, Dial Records (2018); Path Of Ruin, Dial Records (2017); Grind, Dial Records (2015); Nailed To The Floor, White Material (2014).
Suzan Pitt
Joy Street
Opening reception:
Sunday March 31, 4-7pm
On view:
March 31 - May 5 2019
5513 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90019
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to announce Suzan Pitt : Joy Street. The exhibition will feature a continual loop of the artist’s hand-painted animation masterpiece Joy Street (1995), presented here in a newly-produced archival edition, alongside a selection of related works on paper. Battling a period of depression in the late 1980s, Suzan Pitt utilized a Fulbright Grant to visit the remote, unspoiled rainforests of Central America, painting the region’s vibrant biodiversity and healing emotionally through immersion in nature. Trekking deep within the tropical forests of Mexico and Guatemala, Pitt worked en plein air from her inflatable kayak, producing a series of intimate and expressive watercolors of the virgin jungle, exhibited here for the first time. This regenerative experience directly inspired Joy Street, and over the next five years the artist painstakingly animated what would become a profound story of spiritual renewal through contact with nature - within the film’s narrative and her own life.
Suzan Pitt painting the jungle of Río Sarstún, Guatemala, 1989
Ironically, Joy Street begins in despair. Set to the downtrodden chords of a ragged and forlorn jazz melody, the film’s opening sequence introduces a suicidally depressed woman suffering conditions of urban isolation and emotional torment. Drinking and smoking alone in her drab, cavernous apartment, her melancholy festers into agony. Eventually, she passes out after a disturbing scene of self-harm with a cactus. At this point, the film undergoes a series of sudden mood swings when a cartoon mouse on a ceramic ashtray comes alive in the next room. Charged with bright optimism, the colorful, happy-go-lucky spirit comically dances and flops around, enlivening the bleak apartment. Accidentally stumbling upon the unconscious and bleeding woman, the mouse becomes fearful and cries for her. The dreadful atmosphere of the bedroom mutates into a vision of fetid waters polluted with human and animal corpses, broken and bloodied trees. In response to the terrible vision, the mouse carries the woman’s body to a nearby park, which magically transforms into a tropical forest bursting with life. The woman is brought to her senses by a dazzling, joyous ballet of howler monkeys, flirtatious butterflies, and hungry ants harmoniously enjoying the dense, vibrant jungle. This visually delicious sequence ends with a meditative ape delicately sniffing a rose, his eyes rolling back in peaceful pleasure over and over. When the woman awakens, back in her bed, she grins fondly as the cartoon mouse fades from view - his work complete, her spirit and consciousness restored. With effort, she pries open her dirty bedroom window, letting in sunshine and bird songs on the morning breeze - a newfound curiosity for the outside world visible on her smiling face.
Joy Street is a tremendous achievement of visual and musical storytelling. Accentuated by a brilliantly versatile score from Roy Nathanson’s Jazz Passengers featuring Debbie Harry, the film’s music and imagery deftly convey complex content without the use of dialog or text. Free from language, its message is universally accessible. Throughout the film, Pitt’s formal decisions regarding materials, style and color clearly communicate the emotional and intellectual qualities of the story. The woman and her world are rendered in a harsh, sickly manner reminiscent of the extreme angles, foreboding architecture, and romanticized dread of German Expressionism. The arrival of the mouse brings in a colorful, zany animism. The world becomes infused with spirit and character: the radio grins as the wood grain on a shelf turns into a flowing, flowering stream. On a deeper level, the ashtray mouse is in fact a talisman or fetish - a manmade object imbued with magical qualities, in this case the innocence and creativity of nature. The mouse represents the animist worldview of early cartoons in which objects, buildings and landscapes wriggle and pulsate with life, and is therefore a spiritual conduit for the woman to reconnect with nature.
In a 2008 statement on Joy Street, Pitt speaks to her inspiration for the dynamic between the depressed woman and her exuberant shamanic guide: “My son had given me a tiny ceramic ashtray, probably from the 1940s, with a little generic mouse sitting on it. I thought about how there must be something very pure in the essence of life - uncorrupted - existing in pure color, like the colors of the mouse and the innocence of the childlike nature of the cartoon. We were all becoming aware in the 90s of how we have polluted the earth and how nature has fallen to our greed and exploitation. I made the storyboard very simply about two opposites - the woman who is depressed, neurotic and spiritually bankrupt and the cartoon mouse. One forever hopeful and creative and the other mired in a sense of futility. So the film is about manic depression in one way, and in another way it is about our need to apply creative and passionate thinking to the dilemma of the natural world.”
Nearly twenty-five years since its release, Joy Street’s message of compassion towards other beings is now more urgent than ever. Widely regarded as a classic of independent animation, Joy Street is an artwork of world-class execution and worldwide significance. It is truly the work of an auteur and undoubtedly the magnum opus of Suzan Pitt’s distinguished career.
Suzan Pitt was born in Kansas City in 1943. In 1965, she received a BFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her film Asparagus premiered in an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979, and was paired for two years with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD in the notorious midnight shows at the Waverly Theater in New York City and the NuArt in Los Angeles. A retrospective of Suzan Pitt’s prize-winning animated films was presented in 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One person exhibitions of her paintings have been presented at The Ginza Art Space in Tokyo, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Holly Solomon Gallery NY, Cantor-Lemberg Gallery Detroit, Hans Mayer Gallery Dusseldorf, and the Delahunty Gallery NY amongst many others. Her paintings and films are in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, The Museum of Modern Art, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Los Angeles. Her animated films have been featured at hundreds of prestigious venues around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, the Ottawa International Animated Film Festival, Morelia International Film Festival, and the Image Forum Film Festival in Tokyo. The artist now lives and and works in Taos, NM.
Suzan Pitt with Keith Haring, wearing jackets painted by Suzan, NYC, 1980s
Meet The Monster
Jamie Fletcher
Ian Hokin
R. Lord
Jonny Negron
March 16 + 17
Other Places Art Fair
Battery Leary-Merriam
Angels Gate Park
3601 S Gaffey St. San Pedro CA 90731
Hunter Shaw Fine Art presents Meet The Monster, a site-specific presentation of works by Jamie Fletcher, Ian Hokin, R. Lord, and Jonny Negron. Responding to the bizarre history of Battery Leary-Merriam, the location of Other Places Art Fair, and more famously, the so-called “Battle of Los Angeles,” Meet The Monster examines the role of the human mind in fabricating our fears and desires. The mind is both repository and breeding ground of information, misinformation, imagination, addiction, prejudice, and preference; this exhibition explores how these influences conspire to construct our subjective experience of consensus reality.
On the night of February 25 1942, citizens of greater Los Angeles were alarmed by reports of a “mystery invader” in the skies - an unidentified flying object had apparently breached the city’s airspace. With Pearl Harbor having taken place only two months prior, and wartime paranoia at an all time high, the military responded by calling an immediate citywide blackout, and lighting up the skies with convergent spotlight beams and an enthusiastic barrage from the anti-aircraft guns at Battery Leary-Merriam. Mysteriously, no wreckage was ever recovered although the skyward offensive lasted for over an-hour. Civilian reports of the incident ranged from mundane to fantastical, although everyone agreed the army had certainly fired at… something. Whatever the case, the “Battle of Los Angeles” captured the imagination not only of San Pedro residents - where a yearly re-creation of the event is staged - but also of a more widespread, conspiracy-minded community interested in uncovering a connection between extraterrestrials and the Military Industrial Complex
This line of thinking is explored in a series of small canvases by R. Lord, depicting the domestic life of an extraterrestrial family and their human pet, amongst other darkly comic, conspiracy-laden images. Across this body of work, the narrative is appropriately loose, associations relying on a feedback loop of niche information, cognitive gymnastics and near-rhyme relationships. In Little Blue Book (all works 2017), a flying saucer erases the text of the Bible and replaces it with information about NASA, conflating the Christian holy book with Project Blue Book (the notorious top-secret study of UFOs conducted by the United States Air Air Force, which has served as conspiracy theory jet fuel for decades.)
Hell (2013) by Jonny Negron plumbs a darker vein of nightmarish military conspiracy. The dense and cinematic drawing envisions the infernal torture of a POW at the hands of an ancient and demonic Nazi. In the foreground a laptop displaying lusty jpgs - perhaps some kind of evidence - is lost to the flames, while in the background, a figure absconds, youthful pigtails disappearing behind a wall of fire. This associative dread is stripped to its innermost elements in Negron’s Portishead (2012), a dystopian Narcissus in tight close-up. Enraptured by its own image, a figure intensely locks eyes with its reflection, the the tip of its nose hovering centimeters above a black puddle polluted with electronic waste. Rendered in the stark negative space of the raw page, the subject is detached from its environment, isolated by ego and mind.
The isolated mind is in fact the central focus in the practice of Ian Hokin, whose paintings are based upon visions he receives while floating in a sensory-deprivation tank. Free from external stimulation, the artist can sink through his own subconscious, and dive more deeply into the ocean of collective unconscious. From this realm emerge archetypal forces and primordial energies, which - like dreams - materialize in forms specific to the subconscious of the person perceiving them. For example, if the monster represents a primordial fear of the unknown, the mind creates the image of the monster, giving it a form culturally recognizable to the individual imagining it. Working with this symbolic visual language, Hokin’s paintings create an open system between creator, image and audience, where interpretation and meaning vibrate between familiar and foreign, euphoric and terrifying.
Jamie Fletcher also examines how complex mental states are materialized into subjective experience. Investigating the psychology of BDSM, Fletcher’s work explores the emotional and experiential ambivalence of consensual submission or domination, in which a participant may feel simultaneous arousal and humiliation, or pleasure and pain. Executed with a spare and expressive hand in bleach on black canvas, a pair of untitled paintings depict these hybrid states. In Untitled 1 (2013), a figure dripping in fluids stares directly at the viewer, a smug expression visible under a skin-tight mask. In the companion piece, a wild-eyed, messy-haired figure bares its teeth around a ball gag, its face urgent and intoxicated. Both images depict the manifestation of mindset, in which inner fears and desires are materialized through the experience of submission.
Although BDSM is an extreme example, our minds are constantly producing a self-image and worldview based on our fears and desires, while in turn projecting and experiencing a subjective version of consensus reality. What is projected influences what is experienced. Multiple viewers of the same incident may report drastically different interpretations based on the preferences they project. For nearly 80 years, the inconclusive and contradictory information surrounding the “Battle of Los Angeles” has fueled many Americans’ obsession with extraterrestrials, shaping their worldview, and undoubtedly influencing culture and politics from the Cold War to the present. Recent investigations into the “Battle of Los Angeles” suggest that there was, in fact, no invading aircraft, and that the military had actually orchestrated the event as a show of force to dazzle citizens and frighten any foreign enemies lurking off the coast. They had fired at nothing and the extraterrestrial rumors that followed were just icing on the cake. Setting the tone for Atom Age fears and speculations, Aliens became the latest manifestation of fear of the unknown. For many decades now, the military has allowed rumors and misinformation to guide the public’s perception of its activities, especially for those connecting the dots from San Pedro to Roswell to Area 51 and beyond. For the military, electing not to disprove or comment on these topics has the benefit of further obfuscating the truth about their enterprises, allowing the public’s imagination to produce erroneous conclusions which are never confirmed nor denied.
