Vija Celmins

To Fix the Image in Memory

December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019

Floor 4

TicketsEntry to this exhibition is included with general admission.Sharehttps://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition

For more than five decades, Vija Celmins has been creating subtle, exquisitely detailed renderings of the physical world — including oceans, desert floors, and night skies. Distilling vast, expansive distances into mesmerizing, small-scale artworks, these “redescriptions” are a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience. One of the few women to be recognized as a significant artist in 1960s Los Angeles, Celmins relocated to New York City in 1981, where she continues to live and work. Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory features more than 140 artworks, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures. A global debut, this is the first Celmins retrospective in North America in more than twenty-five years.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

INTERSECTIONS:
DOSSHAUS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

“Turning the corner into Gallery 2 at Downtown LA’s Corey Helford Gallery, the viewer is immediately confronted with over-sized, monochromatic letters in a sketchy hand-drawn font. It appears to be a hotel vacancy sign, yet this one offers something else entirely… VAGRANCY. Entering the gallery proper, one is immediately transported into the lobby of a flophouse hotel. Everything is in place: the front desk, with guest book and small rotary fan; the row of resident mailboxes and rack of hanging room keys; the elevator doors, the ratty chairs; the television. One could half expect to bump into Kerouac or Bukowski, or perhaps a Warhol superstar, Patti Smith or Sam Shepard. Yet everything in view, from the walls to the furniture to the elevator doors to the room keys themselves, are painted in the same sketchy monochromatic style, giving the viewer the feeling that they have stepped out of their known reality and into a two-dimensional drawing come to life. It is only on the closest inspection does the break from reality become irreparable. Every object in this lobby, and in the rest of the hotel for that matter, is an individual sculpture, meticulously crafted out of cardboard and hand-painted in a palate which ranges from black to white and every shade of grey in between. Though there are touchstones marking the familiar, this is a completely fabricated alternate world. This is the world of Dosshaus.

Dosshaus is the creative collaboration of Zoey Taylor and David Connelly, artists whose work blends painting, sculpture, photography, fashion, video, and performance. From the outset, the pair has been interested in the intersection of high and low culture. Responding to a society saturated with social media-generated images in which reality itself seems more and more relative, Dosshaus explores the impact the emerging culture has on the way people view themselves and their place in society. They seek to create something out of that culture – a substitute reality that selectively accepts and rejects the conventions placed upon them individually as people and collectively as artists. They use recycled cardboard, paper, acrylic paint and glue as their primary mediums to fashion their own highly idealized universe. The works themselves invert the very idea of the readymade. These are highly manipulated, sculpted pieces that give the illusion of everyday objects from an alternate, animated dimension. This cardboard world is at once separate from and a comment on our modern culture.

Their 2016 show at Gregorio Escalante Gallery dealt with issues of fantasy and domesticity, eliciting a cockeyed dream house with a massive surreal banquet table spread, idealized garage band instruments, and a classic car. Increasingly, the artists have used their medium as their message. In their 2016 appearance at the Taos Arts Festival in Taos, New Mexico, Dosshaus installed a full-scale cardboard phone booth along a busy pedestrian street. The artists described their intent to disrupt the space by “drawing” the phone booth into reality as a “ghost of a time when there was such a thing as private space within a public place.” Their 2017 feature installation at the LA Art Show, entitled The Artist’s Room, hearkened a large fantasy creative space filled with tools that would inspire artists of all mediums. It was both a whimsical nod to the joys of

all forms of creativity and, by virtue of the fragility of their chosen medium, a comment on the lack of affordable creative space in that city. Perhaps this space was another “ghost from the past” drawn into the modern day.

This is not to suggest that the artwork is nostalgic. Dosshaus is an experiment in duality: past and present, female and male, humor and contemplation, childhood and adulthood, trash and beauty. The tension between these aspects is what gives their work its energy. Everything Dosshaus creates is about altering the concept of reality. Each individual sculpture, when placed into a real-world setting, gives the illusion of a two-dimensional drawing inexplicably sprung forth into the third dimension. When multiple sculptures are grouped into an installation, the sense of reality is completely subverted by giving a viewer the ability to step inside a drawing come to life. In their photography, Taylor and Connelly frequently appear within an installation, interacting with the objects in the cardboard world around them as a surrogate for the viewer. The message is clear. This isn’t simply a drawing or a photoshopped image. This is reality, at least a fractured and highly subjective form thereof.

Given their interest in exploring duality, it seems only fitting that Dosshaus would one day set their sights on America itself, a place fraught with crossroads and contradictions. The result is the Paper-Thin Hotel at Corey Helford Gallery. Ostensibly a voyeuristic peak into the lives of the denizens of a low-rent residential hotel, it is also easy to see the installation as a treatise on the country in which this fictional hotel exists. Just past the lobby, viewers are able to wander through four hotel guest rooms. Each room is a completely different environment, and the sculptures collected within suggest a narrative about its inhabitant.

Room 101 is the honeymoon suite. Amongst many signifiers of carefree romantic love, the careful observer may find a stash of money and a gun. Are the two lovers also criminals on the run? The freewheeling fun of the counterculture films of the 1960s and 70s come to mind. Yet seen through a modern lens, one can’t help but wonder if we, as a society, have lost something in the erosion from that era’s “I’d do anything for you” romantic ideal to today’s decidedly less committal version, “swipe right.”

Room 103 implies the harried life of a travelling musician/writer, stretched out on the road in search of inspiration. This room has a direct lineage to Dosshaus’ “Artist’s Room” installation. This artist is forced to reside in this flophouse hotel because they can no longer support themself with their art, a fate that has befallen countless creatives in the social media age.

The final room, 105, is by far the most fantastic. The ornate hanging chandelier, birdcage, and numerous objets raffine?s indicate the inhabitant is both financially affluent and tastefully eclectic. At first glance, this room may seem out of sorts with the others on view. It is only on the closest inspection that the connection becomes more obvious. Prescription pill bottles and an exquisitely rendered cigar box containing heroin works

suggest the narrative of a wealthy debutante ensnared by the country’s ongoing opiate crisis.

Each of these rooms is separated by a thin, cardboard-covered wall. They are the literal representation of a flophouse hotel’s “paper-thin” walls, and ostensibly the objects from which the show takes its title. There is no illusion of privacy within this hotel. In that, the hotel can be seen as a metaphor for a modern world in which seemingly everyone is only a Facebook friend or Instagram follower away. Our walls are thinner than ever. Additionally, with the myriad cardboard variations on artifacts that once served as the foundation of American culture, one can’t help but wonder if the real things are anything more than a paper-thin illusion.

And yet this is by no means a dour exhibition. Quite the opposite. The Paper-Thin Hotel is a glorious celebration of stuff. There is joy in every meticulous detail on view, and one is free to lose themselves, albeit momentarily, in a fantasy land devoid of the real-world trappings of politics, judgment, and consequence. Dosshaus is clearly enamored with the hotel dwellers they’ve created. This could be because the characters, as signified by the objects that surround them, represent different aspects within the artists themselves. As such, Taylor and Connelly will appear at set times within the installation, performing the role of one or more of the characters. This is a departure for the duo, who previously appeared only as versions of themselves within their work. One gets the sense that the Dosshaus universe is ever expanding. And beyond this intersection, there’s an open road ahead.”

Jarvis Boyland – Flaunt

April 09, 2019 in Boyland, Flaunt, News

Q&A | JARVIS BOYLAND AT KOHN GALLERY

By Christopher Andrew Armstrong

Growing up in the South isn’t easy. Not only do you have to deal with the overbearing humidity during the summers, but there’s also the sea of neighboring red states which blanket the United States map each election cycle, the conservative attitudes polluting a majority of its residents, and, of course, the reality of the South’s ugly history which you must confront each time you’re walking down the street and see a Confederate flag posted on a neighbor’s porch. The burdens of living there are even heavier when you’re a person of color, or, heaven forbid, your sexuality is anything other than hetero. Jarvis Boyland, an emerging black, queer artist from Memphis, Tennessee, currently based in Chicago, experienced these burdens throughout his childhood. Instead of allowing the discomfort of his background and surroundings to overwhelm him, he’s using them as catalysts for his work.

Boyland’s most outstanding pieces focus on intimate portraits of queer, black men in the comfort of domestic settings, free from the prejudices which follow them throughout their life. Although relaxed, by deconstructing their anxieties, the men are inherently defiant in their abode. On Saturday, April 6th, Kohn Gallery opened On Hold:, an exhibition, which, in conjunction with NY-based artist Heidi Hahn’s stellar show, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven, continues on until May 23rd. Flaunt had the lovely opportunity to chat with Boyland on his experiences growing up in the South, the inspiration behind his work, and the power behind portraiture.

Heidi Hahn Burn Out in Shredded Heaven
Opening April 6, 2019

Kohn Gallery is very pleased to announce its first solo exhibition by New York-based artist and painter Heidi Hahn, opening on April 6 and on view through May 23, 2019. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body. Her sumptuously atmospheric and layered application of paint, in conversation with art-historical traditions, draw the viewer into a psychological space that evokes our attachment to the female form and how that is processed through both traditional and contemporary readings of the male gaze. Hahn incites the sinuous lines of Edvard Munch, the soak-stained expressionism of Helen Frankenthaler, and therawsymbolismof late-Guston, all the while establishing a truly distinctive voice of today–aware of what came before, but also untethered to it. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Hahn’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves.

“Confronting insecurities and fears, embracing shortcomings, and contending with the burden of one’s own identity and truth are of paramount importance for becoming more concretely formed. My current studio practice maintains this endeavor: cutting through, digging out, excavating, laying bare wounds—past and present, temporary and permanent—on the surfaces of paper and canvas. 
—Nathaniel Mary Quinn

“Gagosian is pleased to present Hollow and Cut, new paintings and works on paper by Nathaniel Mary Quinn. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

Quinn’s composite portraits probe the relationship between perception and memory. He rejects the notion of documentary portraiture; instead of depicting physical likeness, he illuminates subconscious aspects of the human psyche, coaxing forth manifestations of innate and repressed emotions.

While Quinn’s portraits might resemble collages, they are actually rendered by hand with oil paint, charcoal, gouache, oil stick, pastels, and gold leaf. He begins with a vision—a vague flash of a face from his past—that he feels viscerally compelled to translate into reality. To do so, he collects images from fashion magazines, newspapers, advertising, and comics, reconceptualizing the snippets as purely aesthetic imagery before methodically redrawing and repainting each one. In an impulse akin to the parlor game cadavre exquis, Quinn covers parts of his own composition with construction paper as he goes, so that no existing section influences the appearance of the next. Only when the work is complete does he remove the paper—revealing a visually disjointed yet psychologically unified portrait or figure whose genesis echoes the extemporaneity of human memory.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“At this stage, I have been writing and thinking about what’s going on without trying to control it,” Martínez Celaya says standing with half his body facing the painting and the other toward me. He contends that “The Promise of the Most Whole” and much of the works in “The Tears of Things,” are more focused on “the land, and more about journey, and risk and transformation,” while the sea was a dominant motif in “The Mariner’s Meadow” at Blain|Southern, London. Presenting the roaring ocean in shades of gold, the painting titled “The Second Sign,” is a continuation in the artist’s preoccupation with gold. The terrain has shifted from the water to land which sparks the question for Martínez Celaya, “what happens when the entire landscape that you are engaging with seems to be transforming into gold?” The color gold can be considered an allegory for painting- the presentation of a shining, glistening surface that has risen from the ashes to serve as a beacon. However, there is a tension between the subject and the artifice of the surface. In a conscious decision, Martínez Celaya crudely renders the gold to suggest gold but also acknowledge the crudely painted paint.

While writing is an integral part of his artistic practice, the subjects of each painting are rendered without reference to any source, just as a writer doesn’t begin in pencil to trace over selected words in ink. The paintings undergo a revision just like a piece of writing. “There’s a lot of writing in my notebooks and I have this desire and hope that there will be a lot of text in these paintings when they’re done,” he says while mixing more auburn shades into the golden trunk. “I still haven’t figured out why it is that text appears sometimes early and sometimes later,” he explains. The paintings are often inscribed with words and this weight makes them feel like poems as Martínez Celaya suggests, “I think that sometimes it feels as if the paintings are poems anyway because the aspect of space between words is so important to them that they should be considered poems in themselves.” The narrative of his poetic paintings often shifts depending on who is reading the works, especially because Martínez Celaya’s personal story references turbulent cultural climates in his native Cuba and upbringing in Spain and Puerto Rico. To achieve autonomy from his work so that they are not dependent on his story and symbols, the artist commits to making his actions faithful. Painted in the artist’s light cursive hand, the same message appears on the highest point of the wall, looking down onto the studio space below. Looking up at the message the artist explains that “the idea is that your actions and your words will be the same. If I am saying something to you and the moment you leave I am acting completely different, then that’s kind of a lie that not only destroys you as an individual but destroys you as an artist.” Pointing to a table on the opposite end of the gallery, the artist refers to the photographs and objects placed along the wall. “None of those things are mementos,” he insists. “They look like they are, but they are not. They’re all rulers by which I measure my behavior,” he states after smudging the canvas with a blue cloth.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Almost mythic in status, the Bauhaus is seen as one of the most influential schools of art and design of the 20th century. Established in 1919, the Bauhaus sought to erode distinctions among crafts, the fine arts, and architecture through a program of study centered on practical experience and diverse theories. Until the school’s forced closure by the Nazi regime in 1933, students and masters worked with a variety of traditional and experimental media and continually reconceived the role of art and design in contemporary society. Despite its relatively brief, itinerant existence, the Bauhaus occupies an outsize position in the cultural imaginary. 

Marking the 100th anniversary of the school’s opening, Bauhaus Beginnings reexamines the founding principles of this landmark institution. The exhibition considers the school’s early dedication to spiritual expression and its development of a curriculum based on elements deemed fundamental to all forms of artistic practice.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel

JUN 9-SEP 1, 2019

“The first American survey of one of the UK’s most influential artists.

Over the past 30 years, Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK) has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as furniture, cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. Bringing together more than 130 works in photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel reveals the breadth and ingenuity of the artist’s practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power–with a particular attentiveness to the legacy of surrealism—from her clever modifications to  everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the mundanely familiar and the disorientingly strange.

Alongside new sculptural works created for the exhibition, Au Naturel features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. In addition to the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States.

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is organized by the New Museum, New York. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator. The Hammer’s presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant.’

• per website
• – for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China

“Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood, to hair, tobacco, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and develop this creative mode, with some devoting decades of their practice to experiments with a single material. The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China brings together works from the past four decades in which conscious material choice has become a symbol of the artists’ expression, representing this unique trend throughout recent history. Some of the most influential Chinese contemporary artists today are featured in this exhibition, including Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lin Tianmiao, and Ai Weiwei. The Allure of Matter premieres at LACMA before traveling to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, and finally the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

This exhibition is accompanied by the first scholarly volume to examine Chinese art through the lens of materiality. It is co-authored by the exhibition’s curators, Wu Hung, Smart Museum Adjunct Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, with Orianna Cacchione, Smart Museum Curator of Global Contemporary Art.”

• per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Parrasch Heijnen is pleased to present Peter Alexander, a correlative selection of the artist’s recent sculpture and wall relief work in conversation with his sea and landscape paintings dating from 1990 – 2019. Alexander’s attention to the energies and forces of light and color discerned through observations of atmosphere and water are defining concentrations of this artist’s six-decade practice.

The core of Alexander’s work has consistently remained focused upon a devoted engagement with light in structural space, evoking the emotive sublime in an opulent exploration of color. Whether looking through paint or resin, depth emerges from thin layers and suspended pigments. The artist’s textural play loosely defines focus and horizon lines, often confusing the viewer’s physical orientation. This brilliance permeates through the work’s precise turns bending light by way of tinted gradations. Alexander’s forms transmit luminous energy in relation to their adjacent negative space, with illusionistic light bursting forth from beneath.

Informed by his architectural background (the artist began his career working as an illustrator for architect Richard Neutra), Alexander perceives the atmosphere around him as an all-encompassing entity. Encouraging his paint in swift motions to naturally settle, he mirrors the unpredictability of celestial phenomena and seduces the viewer into a hypersensitive state inciting a spectrum of emotive visual perceptions. The artist’s translucent urethane objects envelop the viewer in secluded interiors, consciously engaging with surroundings through various monochromatic hues, echoing a sense of cosmic awareness. Both mediums inform the other, quietly interacting with the senses and capturing the passage of time.

Peter Alexander (b.1939, Los Angeles, CA) has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide since the mid-1960s. Alexander is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 and the California Art Award in 2014. In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA mounted a retrospective exhibition In this Light inclusive of painting and sculpture. His work resides in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and The Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.

Peter Alexander will be on view at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from January 7 – February 1, 2020, with an opening reception taking place on Sunday January 5, from 1-3 pm. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or [email protected]

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson