This Saturday, May 1, Château Shatto opens Ensemble, an exhibition that is formed around the bonds and curiosities shared between galleries, without thematizing these relations. Conversation and cooperation among galleries often functions as a kind of collagen, an invisible and binding substance that ultimately confers a more resilient form. 

In a milieu that continues to be shaped by slipperiness and temperamental restrictions, a space in Château Shatto’s exhibition program quickly arose at the beginning of May. Rather than compensating with a hastily-conceived exhibition, we will use the afforded time and space to enact a gesture of exchange with treasured colleagues, having extended invitations to a handful of galleries and artist run-spaces to suggest artists and artworks to compose an exhibition. 

It’s a simple re-wiring of the development of an exhibition: a procuring idea isn’t first conceived and then materially expressed through an arrangement of works; rather, the exhibition materializes then we can observe any chemistries and dissonances that might arise. Artworks find themselves alongside each other, not by a relational conceit, but by organizing structures beyond themselves. 

With the contributions from Carlos/Ishikawa, Company Gallery, Coastal Signs, Miguel Abreu Gallery, DM Office, Apartment 13 and New Low.

Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions, Ltd. is thrilled to present their 2021 new releases by Lita Albuquerque, Simphiwe Ndzube and, launching today, Farah Atassi. Alongside our new releases we also have two rare editions by John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha in our presentation.

Known for her geometric, figurative paintings that reference Picasso's modernism yet that counter the canonized movement’s two dimensionality; these prints, in absence of the paint's physical materiality, re-contextualize Atassi's use of space in the print medium. The prints, all digitally rendered, are based on three homonymous paintings: Model in Studio No. 4 (2019), Model in Studio No. 6 (2020) and Seated Woman (2020).

Regarding the process of her print, Albuquerque wrote that “[t]he aesthetic of this print is in-between the digital medium and drawing. The blue background image is taken from my pastel drawing method in which I use the long edge of a single pastel to shade the whole of the black paper. But this time, and unlike my drawings, my hand has digitally drawn a star field of my own envisioning, creating an imagined star field with an ambiguous perspective. […] Through this digital and hand drawn process, I have produced an image that is almost photographic. Rather than setting out to map the stars, I realize and embody a cosmology of my own making where the 25th Century Female Astronaut uses the language of light to send a message guiding us through our ongoing story.”

Ndzube’s print, Iqhawe, is a multicolor lithograph with collage elements and comes in an edition of 50. Iqhawe means “the hero” in Isixhosa, Ndzube’s home language. The figure in the print is a fictional character made up by the artist and based on myths of Xhosa hero warriors as well as Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey–encountering struggle, respite, and eventually freedom. The hero in this portrait, looking back, his eyes partially ahead of his body, while offering an open palm forward, becomes a symbol of rebirth and fits within the overall narrative of Ndzube’s work that stitches together a subjective account of the black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective. The combined analog and digital techniques Ndzube applied play with our visual perception, the gaze and blur the line between reality and fantasy.

Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, sought to “write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” Analogies between artistic inspiration and human form are equally embodied in the work of the nine LA women in this exhibition. The evidence of their hand is revealed in the use of elemental materials, dichotomies of physical strength and fragility, as well as palpable manifestations of energy. As the sculptor Taylor Kibby reminds us, “no energy is ever created or destroyed, it simply shifts from one form to another.” There is a bodily relationship of artist to material, a corporeal coalescing of anatomy with the raw earthly matter of clay, fibers and fire. It is an alloy of spirit and substance, as Shakespeare transmogrified; “of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes.” Tactile and raw materials are employed by these artists in repetitive acts and rhythmic processes. Systems of production result in patterned, arterial forms not unlike the work of Eva Hesse and Ruth Asawa. The primarily abstract work in this exhibition appears, as Sydney Croskery states, “counter to our technological present,” the work “grows like geological forms” and finds “meaning in the making.” In fact, much of the work contains a quiet kineticism, revealing fundamental aspects of physics and dualities of energy. For example, Kibby’s clusters of ceramic chains find their own angle of repose as they snuggle into unique shapes each time they meet the floor. Claudia Parducci’s resin castings of heavy rope morph seemingly limp swags into stiff armatures of frozen tension. Diane Silver’s bone white ceramic vessels are scarred with rust from the pendulum swings of chains across their surfaces. Certainly, the use of rope and chain lends a nautical quotient to some of the work, particularly in Brittany Mojo’s Marina Marinara where ceramic buoys and chains of all sizes are transformed by fire, undergoing “a sea change into something rich and strange.” Working with fishing nets, crab traps, bait baskets and plastics found on the beach, Blue McRight “creates a visual, metaphoric language that addresses ocean plastic pollution as well as gender fluidity, reproduction and death in marine creatures." The textile works of Lavialle Campbell and Christy Matson possess the taut, muscular balance of warp and weft, the sinuous textures of fiber and thread, as well as the meticulous handwork of cutting, patching and seaming fabric into skin. A work from Campbell’s NB Series layers black-eyed peas over a biomorphic mound of ceramic baby bottle nipples, referencing her battle with breast cancer. In Pamela Smith Hudson’s dark, densely layered painted surfaces of earthly organic veins, and tubular intestinal swirls, one can hear the blood, as Springsteen intones, “just as black and whispering as the rain.” Rope, chain, fiber and fabric are linkages, like nets and networks, combining to form strength in individuals and unity amongst groups, even if those chains are only made of clay.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present The Beatitudes of Malibu, an exhibition of works by more than 40 artists and poets that respond to, depict, question, or are inspired by landscapes of all kinds. The exhibition is on view May 15 through July 2, 2021.

The Beatitudes of Malibu borrows its title from a poem of the same name by Rowan Ricardo Phillips; in the poem’s eight parts, the poet engages in a series of encounters with natural, social, and aesthetic landscapes associated with Los Angeles, but also with the full spectrum of myths, narratives, and allusions these landscapes elicit.

Among the highlights in this diverse, multi-generation-spanning exhibition are new and recent paintings by Sayre Gomez, Jennifer Guidi, Angel Otero, Hilary Pecis, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood; historical paintings and drawings by Milton Avery, Charles Burchfield, Jane Freilicher, Miyoko Ito, Helen Lundeberg, Agnes Martin, and Alma Thomas; and works by Huma Bhabha, Lauren Halsey, and Sky Hopinka that transcend traditional genre distinctions. A selection of poems by Gabriela Jauregui, Bob Kaufman, Ann Lauterbach, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Cedar Sigo will be included in a complimentary booklet published as part of the exhibition.

The Beatitudes of Malibu employs a broad range of approaches to the landscape genre by bringing together artists whose paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and poems are born of divergent—and often conflicting—legacies. Freely mixed, for example, are abstract and representational depictions of the natural and urban worlds. But on an even deeper level, the totality of the works on view juxtaposes a number of entirely distinct positions vis-à-vis the environments that make up a “landscape.”

These distinctions can be geographical and generational. For instance, while a 1930 painting of California redwoods by Millard Sheets and a 1966 canvas of a Long Island potato field by Jane Freilicher both present relatively straightforward renderings of their respective scenes, they are imbued with attitudes toward life and time that are palpably different from one another. But in the context of this show, even the impressionistic realism that these two works share is an open quantity. Lauren Halsey’s wall-based “funk mound,” in another example, is a vivid representation of what South Central Los Angeles looks and feels like both in physical reality and in the heart and mind; its realism transcends the visual realm and suggests that landscapes have an internal dimension.

Other works acknowledge and confront the construction of landscape as a social invention. In mixed-media photographs by Sky Hopinka, handwritten text is etched around the edges of each image, offering reflections on what it means to be in relation to the land on emotional, psychological, and political terms; landscapes are shown to be places where individual human experiences intersect with larger forces, and where time and physical space are relative quantities. A painting by Raul Guerrero addresses the competing narrative strata that lie beneath the surface of any image of place, and pays particular attention to the ways in which Indigenous cultures, ongoing legacies of colonialism, and popular aesthetic forms populate the landscapes of the Southern California imaginary. “Toll Evasion” drawings by Michael Williams are made on paper supports that were originally citations for unpaid highway tolls; incorporating images of cars speeding through toll booths and their offending license plates, they are filled with vivid abstract patterning that flies in the face of the controlling acts of surveillance which gave rise to them.

Other positions in The Beatitudes of Malibu, while no less specific or personal, evoke the archetypal makeup of the human relationship to the surrounding world and open up spaces for formal contemplation. These include a luminous painting by Takako Yamaguchi in which subtly modeled geometric forms come together to generate a surreal mountain scene; a canvas by Etel Adnan, whose boldly colored, interlocking shapes suggest that landscapes are processes of cohesion and dispersal rather than static conditions; and a fiery picture of a tree by Shara Hughes in which the act of painting itself is revealed to be a generative force akin to light or wind.

For all the many linkages that can be traced among artists and artworks in this exhibition, it is perhaps best described as a series of openings, each of which provides a view onto a different landscape with its attendant subjectivities and contradictions, its cultural antecedents and proposals for future interpretive axes, its natural features, and its all too human perplexities. In “Nave,” a poem by Ann Lauterbach included in the show, the speaker observes “constellations / sieving the night,/ equations/ distorting the aperture/ —this does not/ equal this.” So too the works in The Beatitudes of Malibu, which offer distinctions rather than universalities, and which, for all their historical import, remind us that the most immediate—and often the most urgently provocative—landscapes are the ones we perceive wherever we are, in the here and now.

With respect to the various interpretations of landscape by the artists and poets featured in The Beatitudes of Malibu, we at David Kordansky Gallery would like to acknowledge that our spaces were built and physically reside on the traditional homelands once known as Tovaangar (Los Angeles basin, Southern Channel Islands) and home to the Tongva people—later referred to as Gabrieleño and Fernandeño by Spanish colonizers. We understand that acknowledging the gallery’s occupation on Tovaangar homeland calls for us to commit to continuing to learn how to be better stewards of the land we inhabit. In all facets of our work, we remain committed to creating inclusive and equitable spaces by implementing policies and practices that promote diversity and sustain an environment of mutual accountability.

Del Vaz Projects, in inaugurating its new location, sets the stage for yet another one of Max Hooper Schneider’s experiments in the rerouting of morbidity’s presumed meaning into something wonderful, something that galvanizes a spirit of hope. Seven years ago, his mother’s pig-entrail-strewn laptop was succeeded as the dank playground for hundreds of freshwater crabs. Today, we are presented with a pearlescent mauve casket repurposed as a chicken and duck egg incubator, in what was once Shirley Temple’s bedroom. An allée of fossilized ceramic battle vests of varying glazes flank the casket like heraldic relics incanting a rite or elder spirits sanctifying a birth, the entire room existing as a mausoleum of natura naturans, a shrine to life. Ducklings and chicks will begin to hatch and will populate the agricultural gardens of Del Vaz Projects circa May 8th-13th. 

Throughout her multidisciplinary practice Los Angeles based artist Evangeline AdaLioryn has developed an aesthetic lexicon communicating emanations of sacred beauty from the Divine. AdaLioryn engages ceramic practice as a mode of elemental magick, working with earth, water, fire and air to materialize objects invested with intention and will. Ornately embellished with protective thorns and organic filigree, these ritual objects adopt forms from nature imbued with mystical significance. Inscribed with prayers and spells, sigils of transformation, protection and care, these works may serve ceremonial purposes, holding candles, incense and flowers. Individually and collectively, these sumptuous forms inspire quietude and contemplation, honoring the mental and physical aspects of the Soul.

AdaLioryn’s approach questions the subject / object distinction of viewership proposing instead an I-Thou relationship between the artwork and the percipient. Rather than a mere consumption of cultural product, engaging with these works is a communion between intelligences, unfolding a hermeneutic dimension in which the self may be transformed. This experience calls forth empathic instincts of reciprocal tenderness, to care and be cared for, to hold and be held.

For a fifth online exhibition with galleryplatform.la, Make Room is pleased to present “Sweet Peach Trios”, a solo presentation of six works by Miguel Angel Payano Jr.

As a cultural nomad, Miguel Angel Payano Jr. oscillates between Spanish-speaking Afro-Caribbean, English-speaking American, and Mandarin-speaking Chinese cultures. His indoctrination into these cultural spheres has been deep formative and can be measured in decades. Payano's constant exposure to cultural codes prompted him to reflect on the formation of identity. 

Recognizing language as the prevalent medium for socialization regardless of the culture or community, Payano sees that the identity-forming push and pull between self and one's communities is primarily manifested through verbal exchange and conversations. In other words, we are primarily sculpted by speech. Realizing this, the artist began to think of socialization as a system of conversations between people of all kinds. After further reduction, he started to create a network of disembodied mouths, mouths as symbols of individual life, mouths through which all of this formative exchange occurs. Later on, in the play of this network, Payano fused mouths onto peaches. He considers the mouthed peach as a "single-celled" human. The mouths could serve as components to uniquely individuate the peaches, while the relatively simple shape of the peaches facilitated their insertion into more complex scenarios and metaphors.

Miguel Angel Payano Jr is an Afro-Caribbean American artist born in New York, and currently working between Beijing and New York. He received a dual degree in Studio Art and Chinese Language from Williams College in Massachusetts in 2003 before moving to China and attending the renowned Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he graduated with an MFA in 2008. In 2020, Payano received a second MFA from New York’s own Hunter College, where he was the recipient of the S&W Scholarship. He has shown in exhibitions throughout the northeastern United States, as well as in Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, Indonesia and China. He has had solo exhibitions of his work in Bali, Indonesia (2015); the Williams College Wilde Gallery in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2014); the LDX Hong Kong Gallery, Hong Kong (2013); and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China (2006). Prior to moving back to NYC for his MFA studies, Payano had been primarily based in China, where he has lived for nearly two decades.  In addition to exhibiting throughout China, he has also exhibited in Europe, Southeast Asia and the US. His forthcoming and recent exhibitions includes Make Room, Los Angeles (Solo exhibition, 2021), Anna Zorina Gallery, New York (Group Exhibition, 2021), and Charles Moffett, New York(Solo Exhibition, 2021). His works are in major collections in Asia and Europe.

Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again an exhibition of new sculptures by Canada-born, Los Angeles based artist Jon Pylypchuk, opening May 15th and on view until June. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 15th from 3 – 9pm.

In recent years, Jon Pylypchuk’s multidisciplinary practice has focused on the making of and use of bronze. For Jon, the medium represents a way of non-directed experimentation where through the use of different patinas that effect color and finish, the artist can control the aging process - making his sculptures appear older and weathered after only having recently been cast.

While the artist’s use of bronze may be new, Pylypchuk continues to use his sculptures as a way to explore the frailty of human existence and social relationships. Through anthropomorphism, he creates characters that seems to have lost their way, appearing in a wounded condition, harmed by themselves or by others. The combination of cynicism, anger and sadness imbue his installations and sculpture with a sense of survivalist humor.

I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again is an exhibition of ten bronze cigarettes all languishing in various poses throughout the gallery. The cigarette motif is not new to Pylypchuk’s work, but whereas before Pylypchuk’s cigarettes were made of found materials, reinterpreting the bricolage of the Art Brut tradition, their reincarnations are now solely in bronze. These new cigarettes are metaphoric for change – or the intention to change and ultimate failure to do so. The metaphor of the cigarette as “our false perception of control” rather than one of our control over our fate is a particularly poignant one after a year of the pandemic.

One can’t help but feel a kinship with the exercising cigarette “Untitled, I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again (situps)” whose body is scrunched into an impossible U shape – his aspirations of a better body seemingly far away against the reddish rust of his bottom half. The weakness of will that Pylypchuk seems to be targeting has its auspices in Greek philosophy, for wasn’t it Socrates who said that “No one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on its present course.” A particularly depressing invenitably given the varying cigarettes perceived endeavors to be better.

Smoking is the perfect metaphor for sin, which is a moral version of the means by which our conscious and publicly expressed desires are frequently sabotaged by another part of ourselves whose power we give insufficient credit to.

Originally born in Canada (1972), Pylypchuk has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1998. He studied at the University of Manitoba where he co-founded the artist collective Royal Art Lodge in 1996 alongside Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois and Adrian Williams. The group of Canadian artists was bound by their crude aesthetic, outsider status and interest in breaking down the established rules of artistic production. Considered a torchbearer of the Los Angeles art scene and ‘an artist’s artist’ by his compatriots, he has long since hoarded the attention of local enthusiasts before breaking out on the international scene.

Jon Pylypchuk’s works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Saatchi Collection, London; the Museum of Old and New Art, Berriedale; the Whitney Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit and the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Sedrick Huckaby. The exhibition is the Fort Worth-based artist’s first at the gallery.

Everyday people are the essence of Sedrick Huckaby’s work. “Ordinary people matter,” he comments. “The African-American family and its heritage has been the content of my work for several years,” he writes. “In large-scale portraits of family and friends I try to aggrandize ordinary people by painting them on a monumental scale.” Huckaby’s words and images ask us to think about our communities. They ask us to look hard at the people around us, to really see them, and to listen to the stories they have to tell. “I am most enthusiastic about painting from a live sitter. There is an incredible energy when painting directly from another person and I love the challenge. Sometimes there is conversation, and at other times silence–but always there is a feeling of sharing a small slice of life together. I hope these paintings not only celebrate the sitter’s facial features but also send the message that ordinary people, who may not be great in society’s eyes, should be of paramount importance to us.”

“My exhibition, “Estuary,” deals with death in the black community, diversity in the African-American family and the continuation/continuity of life. I deal with Black mortality through paintings and sculptures of figures wearing memorial T-shirts - clothing usually worn during a funeral or wake. Some of these figures have quilts in the background speaking to their connection to a spiritual African American heritage. I try to deal with family diversity by creating individual images of family members and creatively bundling them together. A sense of difference among the groups is taken one step further by grouping various types of traditional works together in un-traditional ways. Distinct variations of materials are used to express other types of differences. These groupings allow the viewer to think about people from different spaces, places, times and even different dimensions coming together and having a dialogue. Although these are thought to be impossible, I like to think that the past, present and future can all converge in the estuaries of life.”

— Sedrick Huckaby

Sedrick Huckaby (b. 1975, Fort Worth, TX) received a BFA from Boston University (Boston, MA) and an MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT). His work was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). In May 2021, Huckaby’s work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX). In fall 2021, Huckaby will be included in “Kinship,” curated by Dorothy Moss, alongside Njideka Akunyili Crosby and others at the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC). Recent solo exhibitions include Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, TX); African American Museum (Dallas, TX); The Grace Museum (Abilene, TX) and Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, MA). Huckaby has been the recipient of awards and fellowships such as Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (New York, NY); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (New York, NY); The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (Washington, D.C.); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (New York, NY); and the 2018 Texas State Visual Artist Award. His work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); the African American Museum (Dallas, TX); McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, TX); Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University (Durham, NC); Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN); and the U.S. Embassy, Namibia (Republic of Namibia, South Africa). His work has been featured in various publications including “Artforum,” “Hyperallergic,” “National Geographic,” and “Houston Chronicle.” Huckaby lives and works in Fort Worth, TX.

Roberts Projects is pleased to present The Edge of Blue featuring contributions from Amoako Boafo, Lenz Geerk, James Hayward, Ruth Ige, Betye Saar, and Beatrice Wood.

Illustrating the poetic depths of the color blue, the works on view use restricted palettes to explore emotional, psychological themes. They point us to reflect on how the same stories can be told in different ways, and that new stories need to be told in as many ways as possible. Varying blue shades set the terms of each piece, from the energetic Prussian blue brushstrokes that accentuate Amoako Boafo’s assertive self-portrait, James Hayward’s monochromatic cerulean thickly applied by the tubefull, or Betye Saar’s superlative blue assemblage. Ruth Ige’s calm, atmospheric painting emphasizes the ephemerality of light, with a seated figure immovable against a landscape of water and sky, while Lenz Geerk’s portrait of a young treesitter sees them gently perched against an endless turquoise firmament; the crackling of his robins egg suit echoes the luster of the Beatrice Wood glazed ceramic vessel in ultramarine.

ING DI TS
● 1⁄2upour
● 1 ea oon a t
●1⁄4aoonelyou a eer
●  2 ou s ee e e oin o o e e ir oi o ee , I e o a e e io at a cut I 2- y-1/4- y-1/4-I h rip
●  1⁄2 up (o e I ) u e
●  1⁄2 u I e y o e o io
●  1⁄2 ou u oo , I y I e
●  2u eeo Ie o,Ieayoeae
●  1 uou ea
● 3aeoo oaoae
● 1eaoo oee Ieaue
● 3aeoo Iey oe a ey

Bjorn Copeland (b. 1975, Malone, New York, USA) received his BFA in 1998 with a focus in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, USA. His artistic practice involves reclaiming the discarded waste of contemporary consumer society to produce collages, prints, sculptures, and drawings that reflect the influence of psychedelia and Pop art. By using these materials to create his works, he side-steps the role of consumer in materially saturated culture. Additionally, in reorienting the viewer around the altered functions of his sculptures’ component parts, Copeland suggests the social potential of multifarious perspectives.

Copeland was an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001. He has exhibited at galleries internationally including Capital, San Francisco (2019); Bahamas Biennale, Detroit (2019); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2017); David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen (2014); and Canada Gallery, New York (2012). He has additionally exhibited in museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); University of Redlands Art Gallery, Redlands (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); Kunst (Zeug) Haus, Rapperswal (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2007); and Musée d’Art Contemporaine, Montréal (2007). Copeland is also one of the founding members of the seminal electronic rock band Black Dice. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.