Artist Kara Walker is well known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually involving black figures against a white wall, that address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. For the Otis College of Art and Design Mandy & Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series, Walker will speak about her practice and how art can address the ongoing legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. This lecture coincides with CAAM’s presentation of the exhibition California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848–1865. In conversation with Jamillah James, curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Seating is first-come, first-served.

Presented in partnership with Otis College of Art and Design in celebration of its centennial. The program and series is funded through a generous gift from Mandy and Cliff Einstein.

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

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by renowned artist Anish Kapoor. Since the 1980s Kapoor’s ambitious practice has continuously expanded the limits of sculptural form by investigating scale, volume, color, and materiality. With this exhibition, the artist’s sixth solo presentation following his gallery debut in 1992, Kapoor brings together a selection of new mirror works that challenge optical perception and phenomenological experience through experiments in shape and form.

The cornerstone of the exhibition is a monumental stainless-steel Double S-Curve. Expanding upon a singular work originally exhibited at Regen Projects in 2006, the sculpture’s alternating concave and convex structure snakes through the center of the gallery. Simultaneously appearing both solid and liquid, its highly polished mirrored surfaces refract and reflect its surroundings, creating an illusory sense of reality that confounds one’s relationship to the space.

A new series of wall-mounted mirrors subtly shift in shape between convex and concave. Hovering at eye level each sculpture projects various geometric shapes of acute triangles, circles and rectangles, that playfully tease the viewer’s optical perception and force them to re-examine their phenomenological experience. In his landmark essay on Kapoor’s work “Making Emptiness,” Homi K. Bhaba writes, “The tactile experience of transition is caught in the virtual space in between the double mirrors. The perspectival distance between subject and object, or the mimetic balance between the mirror and its reflection, are replaced by a movement of erasure and inversion – ‘reverse, affirm, negate.’ It is as if the possibility of pictoriality or image-making, associated with visual pleasure, has been unsettled to reveal emptiness, darkness, blankness, the blind spot. However, the purpose of Kapoor’s work is not to represent the mediation of light and darkness, or negative and positive space, in a dialectical relationship in which emptiness will travel through the darkening mirror to assume the plenitude of presence. Kapoor stays with the state of transitionality, allowing it the time and space to develop its own affects – anxiety, unease, restlessness – so that viewing it becomes part of the process of making the work itself. The spectator’s relation to the object involves a process of questioning the underlying conditions through which the work becomes a visual experience in the first place: how can the conceptual be visible? How can the perceptual void be spoken?”

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India in 1954 and lives and works in London.

Kapoor’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. In 2019 he became the second contemporary artist to install their work in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The exhibition was presented at the Imperial Ancestral Temple and coincided with a survey at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Additional recent solo exhibitions include CorpArtes, Santiago (2019); Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto (2018); Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires (2017); MAST Foundation, Bologna (2017); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); Couvent de la Tourette, Eveux, France (2015); Château de Versailles (2015); The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow (2015);  Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); and the Royal Academy, London (2009).

He has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including a Premio Duemila for his representation of Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), a Turner Prize (1991), a CBE (2003), Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2011), a Padma Bhushan (2012), and a Knighthood (2013) for services to visual arts.

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

Close to Home: Erica Deeman, Mark McKnight, Eva O’Leary, and Larry Sultan

March 2 – April 6, 2019

Opening Reception March 2, 6-9pm

Shulamit Nazarian is proud to present, Close to Home, a group exhibition of four photographers that mine their personal experiences–past and present–to express moments of intimacy within larger social and political structures. Engaging with the deep and complicated history of photographic portraiture, each artist renders his or her subjects in part as extensions of themselves, coded with personal and cultural references.

Pioneering photographer, Larry Sultan, seamlessly weaves fact and fiction, creating narrative possibilities that charge domestic familiarity with artifice. Sultan explores the deeply personal, while utilizing both documentary and staged photography to create surreal and psychological spaces that speak to intimacy and power within suburban family life – creating images often captured near the artist’s hometown in the San Fernando Valley.

Eva O’Leary has been producing photographs in and around her hometown of Central Pennsylvania, ironically nicknamed Happy Valley. Gaining access to college parties, dorm rooms, and proms and other social spaces of those in the midst of pivotal coming of age moments, O’Leary examines individual vulnerability in these transitional times. Her work explores intimate moments to deftly confront power dynamics as it falls along gendered lines, especially within the lives of adolescents.

Erica Deeman’s Brown series is a collection of medium format photographs that depict isolated men from the African diaspora, rendered shirtless in front of a brown backdrop that matches the color of the artist’s own skin. Injecting her own presence in the portrait of others,these deceptively straightforward imagesprovide a foil for the deleterious tropes of black male portraiture—particularly images affiliated with the practice of physiognomy and mug shots. Her subject’s gazes are quiet, vulnerable, and self-aware, carrying the power and weight of the photographic history and lineage that she is acutely referencing.

Mark McKnight’s black and white photographs depict the human figure and the landscape with congruence. Often rendering the bodies of queer friends and lovers, McKnight carefully depicts the effects of entropy on the human form and pairs it with similar scares found on architecture, urban spaces, and the landscape. Situated between documentary and the surreal, McKnight’s photographs imply an erotic, yet brutal psychological space, informed by his personal relationships.

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

AI WEIWEI: LIFE CYCLE

(from Marciano gallery) September 28, 2018 – March 3, 2019Marciano Art Foundation is pleased to announce the third MAF Project in the Theater Gallery, a solo exhibition of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, on view from September 28, 2018 — March 3, 2019. This exhibition is Ai’s first major institutional exhibition in Los Angeles and will feature the new and unseen work Life Cycle (2018) – a sculptural response to the global refugee crisis. The exhibition will also present iconic installations Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Spouts (2015) within the Foundation’s Theater Gallery.

On view for the first time in the Black Box, Life Cycle (2018) references the artist’s 2017 monumental sculpture Law of the Journey, Ai’s response to the global refugee crisis, which used inflatable, black PVC rubber to depict the makeshift boats used to reach Europe. In this new iteration, Life Cycle depicts an inflatable boat through the technique used in traditional Chinese kite-making, exchanging the PVC rubber for bamboo.

Suspended around the boat installation are figures crafted from bamboo and silk. In 2015, Ai began creating these figures based on mythic creatures from the Shanhaijing, or Classic of Mountains and Seas. The classic Chinese text compiles mythic geography and myth; versions of the Shanhaijing have existed since the 4th century B.C. These works are crafted in Weifang, a Chinese city in Shandong province with a tradition of kite-making dating back to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Windows (2015), which hangs along the perimeter of the Black Box, draws from Chinese mythology, the tales and illustrations of the Shanhaijing, the history of 20^th-century art, and the life and works of the artist. The vignettes feature a dense mix of biographical, mythological, and art historical references to craft a contemporary story. Similar to chapters in a book, or acts in a play, the various scenes include the mythological creatures of the Shanhaijing alongside bamboo versions of Ai’s earlier works, such as Template and Bang, and homages to Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns. A central theme running through the ten vignettes is freedom of speech and Ai’s efforts in defending it. Motifs recurring in Ai’s practice—the bicycle, the alpaca, symbols of state surveillance and control—are repeated and multiplied.

This multifaceted installation is a continuation of Ai’s ongoing engagement with politics and social justice. It follows the release of his feature-length documentary, Human Flow (2017), which depicts the refugee crisis on film. In the artist’s op-ed for the Guardian in February 2018, he writes, “I was a child refugee. I know how it feels to live in a camp, robbed of my humanity. Refugees must be seen as an essential part of our shared humanity.”

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

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition by Deborah Roberts in our Downtown gallery entitled Native Sons: Many thousands gone.

Below is an essay commissioned on the occasion of Roberts’s exhibition by Dr. Cherise Smith of the University of Texas at Austin: 

“The fourteen works on display reflect a shift in Roberts’s practice, from collages on paper that depict girls to mixed-media paintings, such as Our Destinies are Bound (2018), in which the artist focuses her gaze on Black boys. In recent years, Roberts has reminded viewers that Black girls are indeed girls whose youth is worthy of protection, whose intelligence is worthy of cultivation, and whose dreams are worthy of fostering, particularly in the moments of #MeToo and #MuteRKelly. In these new works, she turns exclusively to Black boys, whose well being and futures are equally at risk, while deepening her examination of the childhood years of African Americans—an exceedingly treacherous period of our lives.

I stand waist deep
in the decadence of forgetting.
The vain act of looking the other way.
Insisting there can be peace
and fecundity without confrontation.
The nagging question of blood hounds me.
How do I honor it?
– Essex Hemphill, The Father, Son and Unholy Ghosts, 1996

VSF is pleased to present unholy ghosts, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX). Employing the loom to explore intricate weaving techniques from West Africa, Kente textiles, and European tapestries, Brackens stitches together narratives of the American South, rebirth, and the changing of seasons for his new body of work. The titles and themes for this exhibition take inspiration from Essex Hemphill’s poem The Father, Son and Unholy Ghosts.

For Brackens, who identifies as a black queer person, the act of naming and birthing oneself is a radical gesture. Drawing from his personal life, ancestry, American history, and folklore, Brackens’ weavings are encoded with symbolic animals and materials that tease the knotted threads of American identity and sociopolitics. A bloodhound sniffs the ground for a subterranean figure in hiding, alluding to the terrorization of black bodies through the omnipresence of state-sanctioned violence. Catfish, on the other hand, occupy the space of spirits; swimming parallel to a levitating body, inside the heart of an aquatic being, or by hands outstretched to the sky, they are both ancestor and sustenance, the origin of human life. The silhouetted figures are born from Brackens’ projected shadow, a mirror of the self sewn with jet black yarns.

For the three non-figurative works, Brackens reimagines newborn receiving blankets distributed by American hospitals. Weaving his own version of the familiar swaddling cloth, a material meant to provide comfort in place of the trauma of leaving the womb, Brackens channels the domestic history of textiles while acknowledging the practice of hand weaving as an ancient act of creation.

“Force of Nature features painting and video by six international artists: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (Los Angeles), Glen Baldridge (New York), Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion (Paris), Nick Farhi (Los Angeles), John Knuth (Los Angeles) and Lukas Marxt (Cologne). While traditional landscape art has often been concerned with the sublime and the spiritual, a different focus operates in Force of Nature. The six artists here are inspired by nature to express ideas that are especially relevant now. Immigration, climate change, land abuse, new technology and social media are some of the themes of this exhibition, and while the artists convey political and environmental realities that are bleak, they still rely on the beauty of nature to convey their sentiments.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is a first-generation American of Salvadoran descent whose work focuses on the Salvadoran diaspora, migration, and the interrelated histories of Central and North America. He uses rubber, an important natural resource from El Salvador (and Mexico), to create paintings that encapsulate natural and man-made images embedded within the surface of urban trees in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Using rubber to make “life masks” of the surfaces of urban trees, Aparicio retains the painted and carved graffiti, dirt and natural decay into the surfaces of these molded works, which also incorporate decades of urban history. The works are beautiful as paintings but they also represent a complicated history that relates to the Spanish conquest as well as to the complex relationships between Central America, Mexico and the United States.

Glen Baldridge grew up in Great Falls, Montana amidst vast open spaces and in close proximity to glacial lakes and dense forests. A New Yorker since 2000, his practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking and painting which frequently relate to youth angst and lament for the worsening condition of the environment. In Force of Nature, he presents new paintings that include phrases (dark daze, no way, damaged, spare me and buzz kill) that have been camouflaged to varying degrees of legibility.

Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion are a Paris-based collaborative duo that work in video, painting and sculpture to highlight the nexus of nature and new technology. In Force of Nature, they present three miniature paintings of nature scenes. They are painted on smart phones atop Instagram posts and will be presented with the phones powered on so that they are electronically illuminated.

Los Angeles-based Nick Farhi is an intuitive painter of wide-ranging subjects (figures, drum skins, wine stains, checkered flags, skies) whose most recent works focus on cacti and desert scenes. The images largely come from the artist’s imagination, but in using colors that suggest a fiery landscape, the artist simultaneously creates a beautiful color composition and a frightening outlook.

John Knuth is a Los Angeles-based artist who often interacts with nature to create works of art. In a recent painting series he used thousands of flies to create marks upon sheets of paper. For this exhibition, he presents mountain scenes that have been crafted from UV film that comes in various colors. The scenes appear to be snowy crags and jagged crevasses.

Cologne-based Lukas Marxt has worked in many distant corners of the world to explore the dialogue between human and geological existence and the impact of man upon nature. He has shot films in the Arctic; a total eclipse from a uranium mine in Australia and the raging sea from an oil rig off Norway. In Force of Nature, Marxt presents Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off), a 14-minute video that he shot in California’s most southeastern county. He used a drone camera to shoot the entire length of an irrigation canal as it coursed through a desert landscape. The landscape that Marxt portrays is more geometric abstraction than it is a nature scene suggesting that the post-apocalypse is not a matter for the future, but that we are already well within it.”

“Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar have created some of the most powerful, important and deeply moving art in our contemporary world. Their compelling works forge idiosyncratic constructions of social memory and personal identity, as well as the cultural histories underlying them. All three Saars assemble two- and three-dimensional works based on unexpected juxtapositions of form and content. They deploy the flotsam of material culture, from discarded architectural components (old windows, ceiling tiles, wall paper) to domestic detritus (washboards, buckets, shelves) to historic photographs and printed fabrics.

​“I like things,” Betye asserted in a recent interview. “Every object tells a story. If I recombine them, they tell another story.”  In their aesthetic practice of collecting and recombining objects, the Saars become what French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss called bricoleurs: creators who arrange preexisting articles and images to produce dramatic visual compositions.  Levi-Strauss expanded the French term bricoleur (a “Do-It-Yourself” handyman) to include anyone who works with the materials at hand, cobbling together disparate parts to create novel solutions.

​All of the Saars use recycled materials not generally considered “appropriate” art media. Modern art academies, founded in Europe in the seventeenth century, had privileged oil paint on canvas and cast bronze as elite, “high art” media. In contrast, creations in jewelry, textiles and ceramics were considered “low art” or crafts. When the Saars employ objects like handkerchiefs and old books as painting surfaces, or tin ceiling tiles and buckets as sculpture, they violate long-held boundaries between high and low arts. Their material contraventions parallel the artists’ transgressions of identity-based binaries such as male/female, culture/nature and master/slave. “

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce the second installment of Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s, a selected survey exhibition curated by Mika Yoshitake. Focusing on the themes of retro-futurism, noir, satire, and simulation, as well as those that probe national boundaries, the show is presented in two parts at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Works from over twenty-five artists including EYE, Kenjiro Okazaki, Mariko Mori, Kodai Nakahara, Masato Nakamura, Yukinori Yanagi, Kenji Yanobe, and Tadanori Yokoo feature media spanning painting, sculpture, performance, noise, video, and photography. A catalogue will be published for the occasion, with artist testimonials and new scholarship by Yoshitake and David Novak, award-winning author of Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press Books, 2013).

Part II of Parergon expands on the thematic territories explored in Part I, with seminal installations and sculptures from the era and performances by renowned figures of noise, sound, and electro-acoustic music genres. Kenji Yanobe’s Tanking Machine (Rebirth) (2019) is a darkly humorous, interactive, sci-fi sculpture first presented in 1989 that addresses the ever-present reality of nuclear crisis through a retro-futurist narrative. Influential multimedia artist, Kodai Nakahara’s bizarre installations of figurine-like marble stones and brightly, suspended spheres reflect a humorous take on sculpture’s “post-medium” condition.  As an intellectual and artist, Kenjiro Okazaki’s practice engages with theories of perception through interdisciplinary genres spanning architecture, literary theory, painting, reliefs, sculpture, robotics, and dance. Trained in both Japan and the U.S., Yukinori Yanagi’s large-scale and site-specific installations interrogate the politics of institutional borders and boundaries often drawing from semiotic systems of symbolic imagery. Psychedelic ’60s graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo revisits strategies of historical pastiche with his figurative noir paintings that hang alongside his cut-canvas portraits of Dada figures, as well as ceramic depictions of spiritual mediums. Finally, a dedicated Japanese noise archive of photography, journals, and vinyl records from Tokyo’s experimental underground will also be featured on the second floor giving historical context to the live performances. 

The exhibition title makes reference to the gallery in Tokyo (Gallery Parergon, 1981-1987) that introduced many artists associated with the New Wave phenomenon, its name attributed to Jacques Derrida’s essay from 1978 which questioned the “framework” of art, influential to artists and critics during the period. Parergon brings together some of the most enigmatic works that were first generated during a rich two-decade period that are pivotal to the way we perceive and understand contemporary Japanese art today. In the aftermath of the conceptual reconsideration of the object and relationality spearheaded by Mono-ha in the 1970s, this era opened up new critical engagements with language and medium where artists explored expansions in installation, performance, and experimental multi-genre practices.