“There’s a certain Slant of light,” 
Emily Dickinson 

“... opened up my eyes baby you made me realize what I wanna do now I wanna do now babe, looking at you, looking at you babe, looking at you, looking at you, looking at you baby” 
The Damned 

The look is the strangest lie God gifted us. Pointed gawks back and forth, stuck in stare, with lovers, unknowable animals and the rest of the world’s stuff. The (modern) animal is said to be locked in an interminable cycle of disappearance. Phantasmal creatures that slip in and out of view, only illuminated as symbols and pictures. To know them is to see them. To see them is to try on a battered old human conceit: the animal was the first metaphor. It’s dreadful, a thing that should never have been possible, for sight to possess such procedural power. And yet, here we are, like moths to a bulb in the twilight of our go, amid a scene that holds an audience and a stage, a spotlight and the darkness that surrounds it. In solidarity—together, beside, a cabaret of sights unseen. 
-Nicole-Antonia Spagnola

Visibility within the arts has historically been racially determined by existing hierarchical power structures. This directly correlates to the erasure of Black and Brown bodies in the art world. There still exists a massive lack in images of self-affirmation and representation for people of color in traditional figurative portraiture. The result has forced those outside of this one-sided narrative to perceive their history through a predominantly white lens deemed as Universal. Shattered Glass gathers a group of 40 international artists of color whose subjects don’t ask, but rather demand to take up space.

Several of the works gathered here explore questions of power, surveillance, and justice in the quotidian Black and Brown experience while speculating on radical futures. Going against the grain, where these bodies have been historically weaponized, they are now seen as divine: simultaneously destroying and reconstructing the self. Artist Kezia Harrell defines identity as the one true thing we have, and her phantasmagoric self-portraits lead us to an entirely new universe for Black identity that exists far from the heavy traumas of the past. Similar to Harrell, artists Simphiwe Ndzube and Phumelele Tshabalala’s work is beautifully saturated in surrealism and fantasy, narrating the Black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective.

This past year’s civil rights movement and shifts in societies’ interactions alongside a global pandemic that disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities calls for meditative reimaginations of what world we would like to see ourselves in. Shattered Glass focuses on redefining the tradition of western figurative art through painting, sculpture and film. The artists explore and expand the possibilities of self-determination while situating their place in this flux system.

Shattered Glass makes space for the creative voices of the community to speak as individuals and in community. We invite you to explore the vast talent of this group of artists; a new class of innovators who point toward imagined utopias. From the sands of the Dominican Republic, academies in London, South Africa, California and the southern terrains of Louisiana and Texas, these artists are all linked together through a diasporic lens. Relationships of friendships, partner and sibling bonds all help to gather this voice together, and together we continue forward towards a future only artists can imagine.

Gajin Fujita’s unique practice brings together wildly diverse styles, cultures, and time periods in riotous compositions that proudly affirm the artist’s Los Angeles roots. Blending graffiti styling with Edo-period Japanese aesthetics, Fujita’s work simultaneously tells two sides of his own story: a teenage tagger from Boyle Heights associated with the KGB and KIIS crews; and the son of Japanese immigrants, both artists, who was introduced to traditional Japanese art and craft at an early age.

Fujita’s core medium is spray paint. He uses intricate stencils to achieve complex compositions on panel; these stencils, flush with overspray and heavy with sketches and personal notes, are affixed to a paper support and signed by the artist as finished studies. The intimate relationship between painting and study can be seen in Burning Down the House and its companion, Burning Down the House II. The paper stencils retain ghost images of what appears in the painting; they are elegant, spare negatives of the painted image.

Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present Time and Intent, a solo show by Alex Heilbron. The exhibition presents five paintings that are part of a larger body of work she began prior to, and completed after, the onset of the pandemic.
 
The power of pattern lies in repetition. As an ongoing echo of the past, a pattern defies linear time and one-way movement, all the while, maintaining structure. Using techniques of doubling and repetition, Heilbron creates paintings in which patterns form grids of floral motifs, geometric shapes and rigid lines that withhold and expose the underlying imagery of female figures.

Alex Heilbron received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2014-2017. In 2020, she was awarded her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. Heilbron has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recent solo exhibitions include High Shame at Hiestand Galleries, Miami University, Oxford, OH and Scent Description for a Young Woman at Ashley, Berlin. Group shows over the past few years include exhibitions at LAXART, Los Angeles. Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Cosmo Sports, Düsseldorf, Good Forever, Düsseldorf, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin and Unit/Pitt Gallery, Vancouver.  In 2019, she won the William and Dorothy Yeck Purchase Award and the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship in 2019 - 2020. Heilbron lives and works in Los Angeles.
 

Gianni Berengo Gardin is an Italian photographer who has worked for Le Figaro and Time Magazine. Considered a artistic heir to Henri Cartier-Bresson, like Bresson he has long used and admired Leica rangefinders. His work has been published in more than 200 photographic books and shown in the most prestigious galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Now in his 90's, Gardin boasts a personal archive of more than a million pictures.

The Lapis Press is pleased to present recent editions by Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban and Matthew Brandt. Despite the worldwide shut down from COVID-19, Lapis was able to complete three editions that were initiated before the onslaught of the pandemic. These works represent a sense of hope and beauty during a very challenging time.

GAL CHEWS GUM by Ed Ruscha is the artist’s second bronze edition with Lapis. The new sculpture melds multiple aspects of Ruscha’s iconic vision: text, signage, and shadows into a singular form. The bronze conjures a weathered road sign or billboard displaying the words ‘GAL CHEWS SAME PIECE OF GUM SINCE 1970.’ However, rather than conveying its message with eye-catching graphics, the text is written in negative space with the letters cut out from the face of the sign in a stretched, horizontal font.

GAL CHEWS GUM speaks to several eras of Ruscha’s practice in creating something uniquely and simultaneously nostalgic, droll and modern. The colloquialism of the phrase, ‘GAL CHEWS SAME PIECE OF GUM SINCE 1970’ evokes images of small-town roadside attractions or local news headlines; yet by immortalizing the phrase in bronze, the artist invites the viewer to consider the monumentality of the mundane. Ruscha once said, “I’m dead serious about being nonsensical.” Although this statement might initially read like an off-handed quip, it is highly representative of his practice and this new edition. His ability to stir the viewer’s imagination with a suggestive or illusive choice of words allows for both a conceptual and visual experience that leaves room for interpretation and delight.

Transcending Pigment from Paint to Canvas, from Canvas to Paint by Analia Saban is an edition of 40 unique, mixed-media monoprints in which Saban continues to test the limits of printmaking. Similar to Saban's previous collaboration with Lapis, this new edition uses layered, acrylic paint as a substitute for paper, adding a further step to the process by printing on paint as well as Belgian linen.

In this series, pigment is layered on top of a white layer of acrylic paint, transforming what it means to add color to paint. Transcending Pigment includes four color compositions in color schemes inspired by the color targets that were developed in the 1970's as digital color printing became more accessible. In Transcending Pigment, Saban synthesizes the history of painting with the recent technological advancements in digital printing.

Boxes by Matthew Brandt is a series of 12 images, each an edition of 5, inspired by the Carnegie Observatories Astronomical Plate Archives, consisting of over 200,000 photographic glass plate negatives created from 1892 through the early 1990s using telescopes at Mount Wilson, Palomar, Las Campanas and Kenwood Observatories.

Astronomers used to carry corrugated boxes of exposed glass plate negatives from their mountaintop telescopes. Brandt pierced the bottom of some of those boxes, replicating the random order of the universe framed within like a primitive telescope. The artist utilized multiple exposures to capture the various angles of light travelling through the pinholes, evoking a sense of wonder that we get from stargazing.

Real Pain is pleased to introduce a new suite of paintings by Los Angeles based artist Alex Chaves. Here, the painter elaborates on his investigations with letterforms, unconventional framing devices and pictures-within-pictures, ribald and quixotic portraiture, American corporate mascots, and fragmentary, artifactual abstractions that serve to “uncomplete” an otherwise rigorously consummated image. The Chrysler Set brings these to bear on an entirely new and rather pressing set of concerns: the fallacies of Western capitalism, the spectre of political brinksmanship, and the twin projects of rational egoism and new liberalism, both arguably failures. At its core is the art deco skyscraper built by Walter Chrysler in 1930.

Chrysler appears unfailingly corporeal, and when absent, is never gone, seen in the blocky edges and heaplike comportment of Chaves’ pliant figures. An interest in the Morton Salt girl has given way to a Sweet’n Low mascot. In Pink Panther (from behind), the familiar character is a gumshoe, his file-folder body a geometric study ala Mondrian or Bart Van der Leck. When he returns in Mugshot, he’s more Pinko than Pinkerton, holding the artist’s Jasper Johns in defiance, his whiskers oddly terminated by the edge of his inverted collar. Like Bibendum, weaving his way through lower Manhattan in “Ghostbusters,” or Johnnie Walker, the devious cat killer of Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore,” these mascots register as cognitive dissonance. In American Flag, Chaves’ unique syllabary, the Playboy Bunny, and the spectre of postwar masculinity are all legible.

In Hiroshige print, New York and Tokyo are joined quite literally by a twisting Western Juniper, a tree endemic to Chaves’ home and their geographic midpoint; Eagle Gargoyle provides a roofer’s view of twin suns; one white and one burning Rectification red, both held uncomfortably by an oblong halo. In Snake Vase Still Life, a twisting cobra, outlined in an exaggerated glowing line, serves as an uneasy vessel for an arrangement of sunflowers. The flowers are snakelike and the snake, floral. In their pistils, primate faces, apple cores, and a painter’s palette are all visible.

The Chrysler Set is pinned on 3 new muslin works, their scrimlike quality reinforced by visible seams, chiefly in White House, where the neoclassical building, clad in rising sun, is framed by a shrublike terrier: the ultimate symbol of subjugation. Yet absent from these canvases are the social conflagrations that previously held the painter’s interest. Chaves has chosen to spend the pandemic creating smaller, solitary pictures, which are situated in the gallery alongside aluminum locker-room benches, inviting another sort of solitude: that offered by the encounter between a person and a painting.