The Box is pleased to feature artists Julien Bismuth and Sarah Conaway for the second week of Gallery Platform LA. Julien Bismuth (b. 1973, Paris, France, lives and works in New York) shares a selection of recent drawings, all featuring the classic 17th century commedia dell’arte stock character, Pulcinella, who is often hunchbacked, wearing a baggy, white costume and donning a long-beaked mask. Over the past 2 ½ months (since the beginning of the New York COVID-19 lockdown), Bismuth has rendered Pulcinella (directly translated to ‘little chicken’) onto found-images from newspapers, magazines, and advertisements. Sarah Conaway’s (b. 1972, York, Pennsylvania, lives and works in Los Angeles) photographic constructions are playful and formal, material yet philosophical. Her works engage and evoke surrealism and modernism, the decorative, and the ancient. They seek to inhabit and interrogate the representations of art history and language. She transforms meager materials— foil, fabric, cardboard, sticks, wire and styrofoam— into elegant arrangements: fabrics connote the draped figures of religious iconography, suggesting a human body underneath folds. Figures inhabit space in a moment of potential, where both thoughts and ideas become form. Bismuth and Conaway both mine art historical and philosophical narratives with a critical eye, recontextualizing and flipping classic modes of representation with acute formal experimentation.

Narsiso Martinez’s work incorporates portraiture and multi-figure compositions to depict farm laborers set against the agricultural landscapes and brand designs of grocery store produce boxes. Drawn from his lived experience as a farm worker, Martinez’s drawings and paintings focus on the people currently described as "essential workers” picking the fruits and vegetables that line produce shelves around the country. In a style informed by inter-war Social Realism and its predecessor European Realism, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous working conditions of the American farm worker. For Superfresh, his debut at CJG, Martinez has executed an ambitious series of paintings and drawings as well as his first ceramic tile mural resulting from an ongoing residency at the Long Beach City College Ceramic Studio.

Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) migrated to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. To finance his education, Martinez worked seasonally in the apple orchards of Eastern Washington for nine years. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in 2009 from Los Angeles City College. In the fall of 2012 Narsiso earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach. In the spring of 2018 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach, and was awarded the prestigious Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, and is in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA.

Referencing Roy Orbison’s song by the same name, famously featured in David Lynch’s film, Blue Velvet, In Dreams includes appearances by famous faces such as Andy Warhol, Peter Fonda, and Wallace Berman, which are intimately interwoven with Hopper’s peripatetic life and his daily use of the camera. While Hopper was very much an insider—at ease with the celebrities and artists of his day— this new engagement with his archive reveals that, like many photographers, Hopper was also in some ways an outsider, an observer. Famous himself, but also an observer: it’s this unique duality that allowed Hopper to view the world in his distinctive way.

In Dreams is an exhibition of works that connect Hopper’s role as an actor, husband, father, and photographer. Our exhibition is in conjunction with the newly published book of the same name (by Damiani), which affirms the restless energy and curiosity of Hopper’s eye, as well as his unique place in the culture of 1960s America.

In a time where the center does not hold, and the future is obscured, we are presented with the opportunity to embrace the uncharted waters in which we find ourselves and dive inwards. In this introspective spirit, Karma International presents I Saw it in a Dream, an insight into the visual language and subconscious of gallery artists, Meret Oppenheim, Elisabeth Wild, and Keiichi Tanaami. 

Encouraged by her psychoanalyst father, Oppenheim began documenting her dreams as a teenager, following the Jungian tradition of analysis. The works exhibited reveal a mature Oppenheim’s reaction to the Jungian concepts of  the Anima and the Animus, and the Archetypes. 

Similarly, Tanaami documented his dreams in the form of a diary. His dream drawings serve as stark psychedelic reactions to ideas surrounding the alienation of man, libidinal impulse, and his traumatic memories of the U.S. bombing of Tokyo. 

With harmonic compositions made out of images from the external world, Wild created in her collages a dream-like subconscious, transforming scraps from magazines into sublime worlds. These exceptionally vivid collages, termed “Fantasias” by Wild, present an intimate reflection of her internal world.

Together, these works offer a dialogue between three artists who share the ability to manifest the fantastical world of the subconscious into physical reality. 

We use art to elucidate the inexplicable. Were history a single book, turn to the first page and you would find shamans painting their visions across the Caves of Chauvet. Dreams are dissected with symbols and metaphors, in a language which transcends reality but stops just short of fantasy.

When Marc invited me to curate a selection of works for Platform LA, I was taken by the number of artists in the gallery’s program for whom the image machine of Hollywood is a major concern as well as an inspirational source. Thinking about our home in Los Angeles as a center of image production, Ways of Seeing brings together five artists who each critically engage with the image cultures of Hollywood, the fashion world, and television in photographic-based works that highlight the highly constructed artifice of our popular culture. Whether using techniques of appropriation or evoking mysterious or humorous narratives with their own photographs, each of these artists speaks to the necessity of exploring a world in which the dissemination of images has exploded exponentially, and a reality television star has ascended to the presidency.

— Douglas Fogle

In Allan McCollum’s new series “The Uncredited,” the artist explores the collision of personal and cultural memory by appropriating and reproducing unidentified artworks from the sets of films of the 1930s and 1940s in which his father Warren McCollum appeared as an uncredited extra. Isolating artworks from the set of the depression-era film Blazing Barriers, McCollum digitally reproduces them on canvas in a blurry and almost abstract resolution. Ghostly in appearance, these unidentifiable Hollywood art props are both apparitions of the nameless players who provide the backdrop to Hollywood artifice but also markers of our own fallible personal memories.

Calling himself a “paraphotographer,” the legendary Los Angeles-based artist Robert Heinecken used photographic collage and appropriation to explore our culture’s production of meaning through an obsession with commercial images. In his works of the late 1980s—camera-less photograms that overprinted both sides of a magazine page as a result of the transparency of the original paper—Heinecken explored the creation of desire in advertising with a Dada-like collage technique that short-circuited the intended advertising messages. In his appropriated television image of the Reagans dancing in front of a photographic backdrop, the artist exposes the way in which image and politics collide—and continue to collide today—in a world of constructed reality.

William Leavitt peels back the façade of Hollywood storytelling in his work The Tropics. In his installations, paintings, and photographs, Leavitt deploys fragments of popular culture modeled on the melodramatic narratives of B-movies and soap operas to reveal seams in the constructed illusions of the Hollywood backlot. In The Tropics the artist juxtaposes three black-and-white photos together—an image of a painting, a close up of a woman’s neck with a necklace, and an image of tropical plants. Leavitt asks us to imagine a possible story emerging from these cinematic stills—a man giving a woman a pearl necklace in a modern apartment with an “exotic” painting of a South American jungle cat on the wall and tropical plants in the courtyard.

Allen Ruppersberg’s 100 MPH creates a storyboard narrative through the montage of discrete images with a slight slapstick twist. In a sequence of five color photographs, the artist constructs a tragi-comic, quasi-cinematic scenario in which two toy cars find themselves involved in a fiery collision guided by the hands of the artist. The punchline occurs in the last “shot” depicting the artist face down and on fire, protected by a rented Hollywood stuntman’s fire suit.

Matt Lipps’ new series “Where Figure Becomes Ground” continues his ongoing fascination with the ecology of our culture’s image world. By appropriating photographs from iconic 1990s women’s fashion campaigns, Lipps brings them into a productive friction with images culled from US Camera Annual (1939-1969) which published photos by well-known modern photographers such as W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, and Dorthea Lange. Cutting them out, collaging them together in an analogue manner and re-photographing these images, Lipps elevates the supposedly superficial “feminine” genre of fashion photography while interrogating the unexamined “heroic” qualities of the more “masculine” genres of documentary and art photography.

For GalleryPlatform, Night Gallery is pleased to present work by the Los Angeles-based artist Kandis Williams.

Across disciplines, Williams’ work focuses on the body as a site of experience at the same time that it is co-opted as a symbol by the spectator. Drawing from philosophical and psychoanalytic writings, Williams explores the buildup of forced and aspirational social interaction that the body undergoes on the planes of the corporeal, the psychological, and the spectacular simultaneously. Placing original choreographed performances in dialogue with imagery from mainstream pop culture, Williams aims to unfound the unconscious associations by which the human body is distorted into a signifier. Pointing to artist and philosopher Bracha Ettinger’s concepts of borderlinking and artworking as methods by which subjects can be regenerated away from the moralized imaginary and codes of Otherness. From scholar Hortense Spillers’ writings on substitutive identities, defined as “the capacity to represent a self through masks of self-negation,” as well as Calvin Warren’s concept of “the violence without end, without reprieve, without reason or logic” with which the black subject is incessantly met, Williams will speak to the analytic possibilities of her works as they meet a discourse designed to instantaneously and continuously claim, commodify, and outstrip them. 

Williams’ collage work frequently incorporates images from anthropological textbooks alongside images from contemporary advertising, counterculture celebrities, and dance performances, placed in delicate geometric compositions that, in their harmonious organizations, belie their philosophical tensions.

Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore, Maryland) has had recent solo shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Printed Matter, New York, NY; SADE, Los Angeles; St. Charles Projects, Baltimore, MD; and Works on Paper, Vienna, Austria, among others. Recent performances include “Eurydice,” organized by Alex Zhang Hungtai for Red Bull Music Academy at Gesu Cathedral, Montréal and “A Woman’s Work,” organized by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah at MoMA, New York, as well as iterations of her ongoing performance series “Eurydice” at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, and NAVEL LA, a project which was profiled in Artforum in March 2020. In 2020, her work will be included in the Made in L.A. Biennial hosted by the Hammer Museum and the Huntington Gardens & Libraries, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth will open “A Field,” a running solo exhibition highlighting all aspects of William’s practice, which will run through Summer 2021. Other recent group exhibitions include the Frye Museum, Seattle; The Studio Museum, Harlem; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles; the Wignall Museum of Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; Neu West and 68 Projects, Berlin; and The Breeder, Athens, Greece, among others. Williams has an active curatorial and writing practice, and runs Cassandra Press. Williams is currently a visiting faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

FriendsWithYou, the collaborative artist duo of Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, are well known for their unique experimental pop visions taking form in immersive installations, high fabrication sculptures, paintings, animation, live performances, virtual reality, and most recently their unique wall-bound reliefs made from plasticine. Forging their own brand of post-pop visual language informed by pioneers such as Takashi Murakami, Arturo Herrera, and Yayoi Kusama, FriendsWithYou takes a spiritual and serene approach to form and figure. FriendsWithYou have successfully impacted culture beyond the contemporary fine art realm, and have also become well known for their contributions to pop culture with multiple projects, such as co-creating the successful animation show True and the Rainbow Kingdom, participating in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a live performance and inflatable, and recently have received acclaim for producing visual experiences for musician J Balvin. By blurring the divide between perceived “high” and low” art, as explained in Murakami’s Superflat essay, FriendsWithYou utilizes other mediums like design and limited edition products from a fine art perspective. Their most important artistic tactic to foster these interpersonal relationships is the use of play. FriendsWithYou works are commonly populated with characters, either created or pulled from popular culture, often times associated with children’s entertainment such as Kermit the frog, Elmo, Bart Simpson, and many more. These characters create a visual language and set of references specific to the act of play, a tool for unstructured free association and interaction.

FriendsWithYou’s work has been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Basel in Miami Beach; Dallas Contemporary; Galerie Perrotin, Miami; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; The High Line, New York; The Indianapolis Museum of Art; Marine Projects, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles; Oakland Museum of California, and most recently at NSU Art Museum in Ft. Lauderdale. FriendsWithYou works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, The Goldman Family Collection, Montblanc Collection, amongst others. FriendsWithYou and The Pit have forthcoming projects scheduled for 2021 and beyond.

FriendsWithYou released their Rizzoli published monograph We Are FriendsWIthYou in May 2014. The book spans their career thus far, and features contributions by musician, producer, and longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams; director Alejandro Jodorowsky; and Dallas Contemporary executive director Peter Dorshenko.

On view here for the first time, these six artworks by Christina Quarles showcase her virtuosic practice, highlighting the formal, conceptual, and aesthetic devices she employs to create rich and evocative works that teeter on the edge of representation and abstraction.

Quarles’ expressionistic and vividly hued paintings feature a singular lexicon that draws equal inspiration from the history of painting and popular American culture. Informed by her identity as a multiply situated queer woman of mixed race, the three paintings on view visualize the complicated and often fraught experience of inhabiting a body, a concept that is seen shifting and evolving across the picture plane. Polymorphous figures form the compositional structure of I Think Yew’ve Made Yer Point Now. Identified only through a smattering of body parts – heads, feet, hands, thighs, and breasts – they twist and contort into various states upon the surface of the canvas. Behold! And Be Held Beside Me evokes the art historical trope of the pietà, featuring lithe, overlapping figures firmly weighted by a palpable gravity that draws their cascading limbs downward. Perspectival planes – here in the form of a white picket fence – both serve to situate and bisect the bodies, drawing boundaries that contain and exclude forms, expanding the limits and potential for representation.

The three drawings on view feature Quarles’ signature elongated figures, deftly rendered through various modes of mark making. The scenes represented in this selection of images range from the cacophonous to the intimate and are at once dynamic and deceptively simple. Oftentimes her drawings are punctuated by text in the form of puns or poetic wordplay that reference pop culture and situate the works in our time. 

Christina Quarles (b. 1985, Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2016 and holds a BA from Hampshire College. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); The Hepworth Wakefield, England (2019); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2018); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017); and Fictions, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017); among others. In the spring of 2021 her work will be the subject of solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, South London Gallery, London, and X Museum, Beijing. A fully illustrated catalogue featuring texts by Grace Deveney, Mark Godfrey, and Uri McMillan will be published to coincide with her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Click here for a studio visit with the artist

Little did we know when we titled our current exhibition Turn Back, Turn Back! that we would have to temporarily close the gallery just days after opening. The exhibition features works by Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Rainen Knecht, Lila de Magalhaes, Elham Rokni, Summer Wheat and Tori Wrånes. These artists explore narrative structures that resonate with a deep history of storytelling found in ancient myths, fables, and folktales. 
 
For our debut Gallery Platform LA presentation, we paired two established gallery artists with two emerging Los Angeles-based artists: Trenton Doyle Hancock with Diana Yesenia Alvarado, and Summer Wheat with Lila de Magalhaes.
 
Amalgamating images related to culturally significant stories, these artists examine how fables serve as guides to the unconscious, using metaphors to explore age-old fears, anxieties, and shared beliefs. We invite you to explore the exhibition in its entirety on our website!

Trenton Doyle Hancock’s elaborate works interlace personal memoir with the history of painting and pop-cultural imagery. Hancock’s dense and subversive storylines employ tropes, ranging from comic-strip superhero battles to religious mythologies. Within this exhibition are significant works that illustrate the artist’s central character of the Mound, as well as depicting key moments in the origin of Hancock’s epic, decades-long myth narrative. For Hancock, the Mound is more than just a character; it is a way of life.

Diana Yesenia Alvarado creates otherworldly and free-formed ceramic sculptures that are fantastical and historically referential, anthropomorphic, and gestural. Inspired by her childhood dreams and her hometown of East Los Angeles, Alvarado crafts cartoonish guardians on top of pedestals made of ornate security bars and cinder blocks.

Summer Wheat’s tactile paintings merge process and narrative to ponder human experience through various moments in art history. Using an inventive process of pushing paint through aluminum mesh, Wheat’s large-scale paintings resemble medieval tapestries. 
 
Wheat focuses special attention on the connection between human and animal behavior, as seen in Stepping on Snakes. The shoes of a witch – a powerfully healing female figure that was historically persecuted by men for having agency – are stepping on a snake, a symbol associated with both evil and fertility. Wheat’s undermining of archetypal animals considers the fraught and mythic needs between woman, beast, and survival.

Graham Greene once defined melancholy as “the logical belief in a hopeless future.” Such is the sentiment many of my peers have expressed with respect to the rapidly changing climate and with regard to the current coronavirus pandemic and subsequent global economic recession. In the midst of our current lockdown measures, it is undeniable that the apprehension felt by millions regarding our collective political and environmental uncertainty is only intensified by our current predicament. 

Can artists do anything to abate the “hopelessness” to which Green alludes? Certainly there is an opportunity and responsibility for artists as citizens to participate in rigorous public debate about what faces all of us environmentally and fiscally. Simultaneously, however, there is also the question of relating aesthetics to the present problem: How can a painter engage the world without reducing his or her work into merely an absorption and reflection of such hopelessness? How can we avoid “flaunt[ing] alienation as if it were freedom,” as Hal Foster warns? Perhaps in our present moment this is not necessarily a question of what I am calling “transitive affectation”—of what to paint, but rather a condition of “intransitivity”—of how to bear witness through images. 

Presently, I’ve rediscovered the works of Goya and On Kawara. In particular, I find Goya’s peninsular war etchings, and On Kawara’s telegrams—“I am still alive”—as testaments to the endurance of the human record. That is, that these works communicate the urgency of recounting; that extreme events enlighten and alter our experience of the world in the aftermath. Goya’s etchings, for example, are titled in the affirmative: “I saw it”, “and this as well”. In a way both artists conflict with Giorgio Agamben’s notion that contemporariness is “...a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it, and at the same time, keeps a distance from it.” Quite the contrary, there is little “distance” in the work of Goya and Kawara, but instead, the deft verisimilitude and sobriety of the artists’ recounting of their immediate present. It is the precise time-fullness, rather than timelessness that projects these artists’ experiences into our contemporary crisis in a unique, more urgent light. Like a diary, their work is a means of recollection. 

Between January and May of this year, I completed ten paintings, some of which I made in my basement during Philadelphia’s stay-at-home order. While these paintings differ in affect from the work of Goya or Kawara, I have attempted to reflect their methods of recounting through my own aesthetic language. The last few years I have been making paintings of domestic spaces in which light transforms various chattel into objects of extraordinary presence. Now, and for the foreseeable future, the pandemic consigns me to my home, to dwell among my subjects. I count myself fortunate to be in such a position. From the vantage point of my ad hoc studio, I absorb the exhortations of friends, family, and public health officials as gospel: to stay home, to be present, to listen carefully, to be quiet. 

—Paul Rouphail, 5/14/2020

Paul Rouphail  (b. 1987) received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His recent solo and group exhibitions include Stems Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; SMART OBJECTS, Los Angeles, CA; Jack Barrett, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Fisher Parrish Gallery, George Adams Gallery, Nancy Margolis Gallery, and Microscope Gallery, New York, NY; Fjord Gallery, and Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA; The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; and White Columns online. Rouphail's work has been reviewed online and in print, including the Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Artspace, New American Paintings, Juxtapoz Magazine, Maake Magazine, and Gestalten Press' Imagine Architecture, among others. Rouphail lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and is represented by SMART OBJECTS in Los Angeles and Stems Gallery in Brussels.

Six feet. We’ve gained a new radar for this radius. Proximity has become a problem. We improvise real and imagined protective screens in front of and around ourselves. The spheres we are able to safely occupy have contracted into lonely bubbles. Space gets measured by an empty arm’s reach. Empty chairs, empty benches, empty sidewalks, empty stores, empty restaurants, empty everything. The dream of a vast, deep, unpopulated beach has become an emblematic yearning for me, alongside the nightmare of any crowded place. This incomplete sadness of approaching family or friend, not too near and never making contact, circling like repellant magnets, this sustained dull sadness rolls over my inner landscape like a fog. I can only hug the two bodies with whom I live, so I try to hug them more. Living through the pandemic has immersed us in unprecedented contrasts and stark shades of isolation, distancing, and solitude—and the complicated ways that those involuntary states coexist with and produce different, compromised kinds of intimacies, exposing newly heightened sensitivities. On the one hand, I look to communities that have faced pandemic and survived through calculated separation and the refuge of private communion before, like the gay community. On the other hand, there’s also a new diachronic awareness of space, for instance, that we have honed, thinking about airspace shared not only concurrently but separately, sequentially over different spans of time that correlate to different levels of risk. Are droplets still lingering? What else from when and whom is in the air or, for that matter, in the ground? Space becomes experienced temporally, too. Or, the closed, hermetic family unit comes to mean differently, too, in sweet and uneasy ways: at the same time that we are isolated from friends and extended family, we are also in forced, full-time, relentless proximity with those at home. No break from that either, which throws off and taxes intimacy’s fine balance.

Covidian life of these past three months has been defined by various large and subtle losses and absences, waves of scarcities, cutting away and cutting off. That said, while the loss of habits and life as we knew it is extreme, I am reminded that not all cancelations are losses, many may also be a relief.

—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer