IN THE GALLERIES
Wendy White: Racetrack Playa is the current exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian gallery. The exhibit takes its name from a 3-mile dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park and features paintings, sculptures, pigment prints, and a site-specific installation. Using this scarred landscape as a metaphor for our current times, the works in the exhibit explore power, entitlement, and imperialism via the aesthetics and evolution of American car culture. Thru May 25, 2019.
Wendy White
Fig Gallery presents Theresa G. Fernald: Recent Work. These recent paintings are images of domestic joy and include children at play, blue skies, and exquisite landscapes. According to the artist, “My recent work is a look into the negative relationship human beings have with the Earth. This continual stress fights with a sense of balance, challenging the Earth’s strained relationship with humans.” Thru May 15, 2019.
Theresa G. Fernald
Native Sons: Many thousands gone is a body of work by Deborah Roberts at Suzanne Veilmetter Projects downtown gallery. There are 14 artworks on view in which the artist focuses her gaze on young black boys. These mixed-media pieces will charm you and disturb you. These images pay tribute to the many Black boys who lost their lives to the violence of American racism. There are also some sculptural pieces in this exhibit. For example, Trumpet of Consciousness (2019) is composed of an old and rusty jack, its base is shaped like a deformed bare foot. Its clamp is filled with a load of books, including Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Lezley McSpadden’s Tell the Truth, and Shame the Devil, and Sybrina Fulton’s and Tracy Martin’s Rest in Power. “These volumes—the last two were written by the mothers of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, respectively—represent the intellectual flowering of postwar writers of the African Diaspora, who sought to address the continuing realities of racial oppression.” Thru June 8, 2019.
Deborah Roberts
Craig Krull Gallery presents work by 2 very diverse artists, Carol Es: Memoir and Gwynn Murill: Figures. Carol Es offer a collection of oil and mixed media paintings, small gouaches on San Fernando Valley area maps, and drawings from The Journal Project. Es uses wit and humor to express deep personal yet universal stories. Sculptor Gwynn Murrill, known for her animal forms now takes on the human form. Among these small epoxy and plaster figures are entwined bodies inspired by Japanese shunga prints. Some plaster works have been transformed into bronze. Thru May 25, 2019.
Carol Es
Walter Maciel Gallery is featuring the work of Jil Weinstock, False Truth: uprooted. Her new body of work acts as a metaphor for the experience of the immigrant coming to live permanently in a foreign country in order to find work or better living conditions. She created the work while she was an “artist in residence” at the American Academy in Rome. She uses the metaphor of a weed and like weeds, immigrants seek to settle in foreign lands where they are often rejected, and yet they resist the sometimes unfriendly and unfavorable environment as they replant their own roots. Weinstock questions the purpose of this wild plant drawing upon Ralph Waldo Emerson’s suggestion that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Thru June 22, 2019.
Jil Weinstock
Inherited Memories is an exhibition of work by 3 artists, Shula Singer Arbel, Dwora Fried, and Malka Nedivi opening mid-month at Castelli Art Space. These 3 women artists are all daughters of Holocaust survivors. This shared history informs their art practices. The power of memory and effects of trauma play an important role in their oeuvres. Curator, Peter Frank explains “Fried’s assemblages reflect on the normal life led by her mother’s family in prewar Krakow and the “post-normal” life her own family led in postwar Vienna– what was lost. Arbel’s paintings are based on photographs from the Bavarian Displaced Persons Camp where her parents met after the war – what was gained back. And Nedivi’s sculpted figures and objects muse upon the dysphoria her mother experienced in a painful present – what could be survived but not tolerated.” May 18-26, 2019. Reception: Saturday, May 18; 6-9 p.m.
The upcoming exhibit at Loft at Liz’s curated by Betty Brown in collaboration with gallerist Liz Gordon is Forest Bathing. The exhibition is inspired by a Japanese healing practice known as Forest Bathing or Shinrin-yoku which translates to “taking in the forest atmosphere“. The concept is that many ills can be lessened by having a mindful experience in nature. The gallery with work by 17 artists will be transformed into an “art forest” filled with paintings, sculptures, photographs and drawings to create an atmosphere similar to that of actual nature. Among the artists in this exhibition are: Marthe Aponte, Chenhung Chen, Bibi Davidson, Barbara Edelstein, Susan Feldman, Renne Fox, Maria Greenshields-Ziman, Joann Julian, Sant Khalsa, Samuelle Richardson, Jill Sykes, Linda Valljo and more. Opening Reception: May 11;7-10 p.m. Artist Talk 1, May 15; 7-9 p.m.; Artist Talk 2, May 22: 7-9 p.m.
Samuelle Richardson
The Brand Library Gallery presents Sway curated by Chenhung Chen. An interplay of shadows, negative space and color contribute to creating works with dimensionality and movement. In a myriad of media these artists have created some very sensual and energetic work. The artists are Debbie Carlson, Chenhung Chen, Gina Herrera, Echo Lew, Snezana Saraswaiti Petrovic, Linda Sue Price and A.M.Rousseau. Thru June 14, 2019.
Gina Herrera
The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 is Patty Chang’s 8-year project currently at ICA L.A. This body of work redefines the role of artist, image, object and performance in the construction of narratives through an exhibition that integrates video projection, photography, sculpture, publication, and performance as one expansive body of work. The exhibition allows viewers to navigate through Chang’s personal, associative, and narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics, and landscape. Chang’s multi-year project was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book The Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—the project also chronicles the loss of Chang’s father as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son.
Thru August 3, 2019.
Patty Chang
IN THE MUSEUMS
Opening soon at Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow. The exhibition of work by this ground breaking artist brings together both CARVING series, a new self-portrait, and a related serial work from the 1970s, provoking reflection on discipline, vulnerability, and the passage of time. May 12-July 7, 2019.
Eleanor Antin
I am always keeping my eyes peeled for the very rare appearance of women artists’ work at the Getty Museum. Currently a photography exhibition Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography includes the work of Eileen Cowin, Christina Fernandez, and Gillian Wearing among some notable male artists. The narrative possibilities of photography and the depiction of personal relationships are central in Cowin’s photography. In these examples from the 1980s she captures her husband and father enact various scenarios inspired by European art history. Fernandez who is an important voice in the development of Chicanx art in So. California interweaves familial and national histories in a suite of images that are personal and yet political. Wearing’s examples are from her ongoing series Album where she created a series of self-portraits using masks, wigs, and prosthetics to re-create photographs of her immediate family. The artist is known for this type of imagery where she focuses on the differences between individual and collective identities. Thru June 9, 2019.
Eileen Cowin
Christina Fernandez
Gillian Wearing
