Kirsten Everberg’s painting practice begins with a place. Whether a landmark, well-known landscape, or a cinematic space, Everberg is drawn to sites of cultural significance, images of which might be ubiquitous, even iconic. Through her paintings, they take on a new dimension and a different life. Working on paper, Everberg conceals some details in order to reveal others, the subjects emerge from a blank field, floating on a white background. In Network (2017), as in many of her compositions on paper, the foreground melts away, practically dripping onto the paper’s frayed edge. The effect is mirage-like, evocative of a hot day, an old video tape, or a distant memory.

The subjects she studies from Walden’s pond to Ingmar Bergman’s remote island in Faro, Sweden or Villa Aurora in Los Angeles or the New York Times building are often ones belonging to great thinkers or artists whose lore is imbued in the places they lived and worked. Within this group, there is a distinct attention to detail, a roving focus through these spaces deemed sacred for their witness of “greatness.”

In these works, considering the sites where these thinkers set up venues of contemplation and isolation, Everberg draws connections between the interior and exterior grounds treating both as a kind of landscape rather than a still life. The effect of the thick application of enamel is glassy and loose yet weighted by the rich deep colors. The spaces in Everberg’s rendering are slightly dreamy, fading in and out of focus, they emerge and recede from view.

Kirsten Everberg is a LA-based painter whose work explores the interplay between memory, fragmentation, photography, cinema and the subjective nature of perception. Everberg received an MFA from UCLA. She has exhibited widely at the Scottsdale Museum of Art; Pomona College museum of Art, Claremont, CA; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; MOCA, Los Angeles.

Band of Vices is pleased to announce a special presentation and solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based contemporary artist, Lisa Diane Wedgeworth, entitled Passion Power Prayer. Ms. Wedgeworth is an interdisciplinary artist whose large-scale abstract paintings are informed by memory and employ energetic mark-making in order to interpret psychological and emotional energies. She is an abstract painter whose work sits at the intersection of an engagement with fraught historical events of America's past and present balanced by a personal desire to know where she fits in the world.

She explains that she creates “paintings using only black paint because I want to explore the depth of blackness; because being BLACK in America is complex and layered; because the black experience in the United States is beautiful, incredible, horrifying, tragic and exceptional; because being black in America is the evidence of strength, love, courage, power, beauty, warmth, creativity, discipline, commitment and excellen[t] ... I dig deep, reflecting on my life experiences past and current, employing the visual language of abstraction to tell, interpret and explore themes related to being an observant human being.”

These erudite abstract paintings exhibit a maturity, coupled with a palpable resoluteness of purpose. Ms. Wedgeworth has decided to mine the emotional and complex terrain of herself in these works as they relate to organic and geometric shapes. Her fascination began with exploring the circle but her interest has expanded to include the triangle and other shapes. This inclusion is one that is most deliberate and is imbued with a personal directness that is inescapable. She explains that her interest has to do with the interplay of the notion of celestial or heavenly bodies and their connection with the spiritual and earthly realm. The triangle represents how Wedgeworth sees herself: firstly as a daughter, then as a sister & finally as a mother. So in the painting Self-Portrait As A Triangle With Aura (Daughter, Sister, Mother) 2018 she has learned how to balance these different aspects of her personality as she navigates through society. She also conveys that while the triangle may seem fully balanced, her personal triangle is not, which is the case with the majority of humankind. 

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth has been thinking about exploring the color black in her paintings for years now. This idea began while she was getting her MFA in painting in 2013. She began thinking about shapes, language, DNA, using symbols to express herself and the relationship between celestial and earthly bodies. Wedgeworth began making these large-scale paintings that were informed by historical events such as Hurricane Katrina, the landmark 1967 trial of Loving v. Virginia & the 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing. These represent collective memories but also historical pain and trauma against Black bodies.

These works also bring her into conversation with such African American abstract painting giants who came generations before her including Norman Lewis (1909-1979), Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) and Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942), artists who based much of their artistic journey and practice on mining and exposing America's litany of inequities and disparate treatment of its Black citizenry. Her work can be viewed as a bridge between the Civil Rights Movement struggles to coming to grips with our current Black Lives Matter Movement protests and marches of today.

Her art practice is rooted in the vicissitudes and verisimilitudes of historical & personal reckonings, all in an effort to unearth more truth, fairness & understanding of the world in which we live.

Band of Vices is pleased to present MASTERPIECE II: Globalization, Pandemics, Racial Reckoning: Where Do We Go from Here? curated by Melvin A. Marshall. This is the second annual iteration of MASTERPIECE, a recurring exhibition the gallery began last year. Similar to last year, the artist roster is a large-scale international affair composed of contemporary emerging and mid-career artists including Alicia Piller, B. Robert Moore, Bryan Keith Thomas, Bryan Lee Tilford, Calvin Clausell, Jr, Connie Kurtew, Dread Scott, Edyta Pachowitz, J. Michael Walker, Kevin Demery, Maya Iman, Muna Malik, Najee Dorsey, Nina Buxenbaum, Oluseye, Patrick Henry Johnson, Patrick Dougher, Ransome, Robert Peterson and Steve Prince. The artists were asked to grapple with some of the most pressing issues of our time such as globalization, the pandemic and the constant volatile nature of race relations affecting people living on the margins of society. The exhibition engages with tropes such as visibility and invisibility, racial justice, history, memory, equality, sexuality, femininity, masculinity and trans-gender aesthetics, among other topics embedded in the American imaginary. Broadly speaking, these artists interrogate such questions like: what if the migrant worker, the refugee, the political prisoner, the dispossessed, the disappeared, the displaced, the victim of torture are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? 
 
History tells us that this particular era is difficult but not unique. The forces that are shaping the worst parts of us right now are forces that are part of the American character and fabric such as nativism, xenophobia, racism, sexism and isolationism. Our polarization as a society seems greater than ever on the bases regarding race, class, economics, basic fairness and decency are all at generational inflection points. History gives us the ability to see what is the nature & scope of our crisis and how previous generations addressed those crises and how those lessons apply. We must arm ourselves with a historical understanding of how complex our history was because if we do not then we are not going to be able to react in real time to save America. It is not unexpected in these tumultuous times that we scrutinize our past in order to understand the present. MASTERPIECE II will present some of the most reasoned and enlightened artists wielding their visual scalpels in order to examine and elucidate the challenges and potential solutions to these troubled times.
 
It is during these uncertain times, that we have historically looked to our contemporary artists for guidance and reassurance that we will find a way through these uncertain times. We are currently commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and that can be bookended with the summer of 2020 representing a period that gripped the American consciousness, which included the senseless police killing of George Floyd. This event brought an international spotlight to an ill that continues to historically plague America: racism. The murder of George Floyd led to international Black Lives Matter Movement marches and protests for equal opportunities & justice. The Covid-19 pandemic mandated that governments globally put into place devastating stay-at-home orders that required an unprecedented halt to normal social, economic and cultural activity, which caused an unparalleled number of international travel restrictions, many of which are only now beginning to ease.
 
We look to artists to develop a world of creative innovations, expressions & inspirations during times of strife, grief and global difficulties in order for us to make sense of things and this moment is no different. The curator has assembled an internationally diverse group of artists to give us some guidance and to help us to become a more caring and understanding global citizenry during a time when the world is in crisis. The exhibit is composed of paintings on canvas, sculpture, works on paper and photography.

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Dani Tull. Tull’s abstract paintings are language-based and inherently sentimental, a dynamic the artist calls “narrative abstraction.”

The compositions in these paintings appear to be subject to the forces of gravity -- the earth element that keeps us on the ground able to sustain and propagate life, or alternately, gravity makes things fall apart. The forms in Tull’s paintings lean, support, and navigate the space and negotiate complex relationships, much like organic lifeforms and human interrelations. The compositions ultimately work towards what Tull refers to as “self-correcting forms” -- always striving toward equilibrium while arching against collapse. 

In the process of painting, the artist encountered a Tabula rasa (or clean slate) upon which he meticulously inscribed the underpainting in graphite with personal texts as well as poetry by various writers (including friends and family members). These lettered layers are painted over and are intentionally obscured.

The exhibition offers eighteen paintings presented in two groupings: earlier works with dramatic luminous backgrounds painted in oil on canvas and recent works in which raw linen is stained with dynamic layers of loosely spilled washes of paint. Both backgrounds set the stage for Tull’s narratives.

Through a generative process, a repetition of pinstripe lines is hand-painted in flashe and accumulate into what Tull refers to as “streams.”  The color combinations chosen for the streams have been derived from meaningful life experiences and suspended in these forms and on the surfaces of the paintings like trace artifacts.

For example, within a single canvas, one stream of colors is derived from Tull’s memory of an event he does not have a photograph of, or his late grandfather’s vintage flannel shirt; others are the colors of his wife and daughter’s hair, or Tull’s own teenaged psychedelic memory of watching the sun setting during an outdoor concert on a California beach.

Others borrow from artwork: the color palette from a landscape painting by the artists’ mother or colors from Tull’s previous bodies of work. These meaningful life experiences offer source material while embedding the abstractions with inherent sentimental narrative.

Dani Tull (USA, b. 1966) is a painter, sculptor, and musician. He received his MFA from Stanford University (1990) and BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute (1988). His sculpture is currently on view in Judson Studios: Stained Glass from Gothic to Street Style at the Forest Lawn Museum; and a recent solo show, Slow Burners, was at The Pit II (2019), both in Glendale, CA. He lives and works in Highland Park, CA.

Alex Da Corte (b.1980) explores the nuances of contemporary life in his videos, installations, paintings, and sculptures, which are often united together in richly-hued, dreamlike environments. With a keen attention to color and form, Da Corte draws from a wide range of sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history, and modern design.


“Alex Da Corte: As Long as the Sun Lasts,” is now on view on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in New York through October 31.

Da Corte’s neon sculpture, god is a loving mother (2019), reassesses Richard Serra’s earlier neon, God is a Loving Father (1967), in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. By inverting the gender typically assigned to God in Christianity, and by electing not to capitalize the work’s title, Da Corte uses Serra’s sculpture to reframe existing power structures. Throughout his work, Da Corte breathes new life into things already in the world, from pop songs to canonical artworks. Da Corte uses neon’s vibrant glow to illuminate many of his immersive installations, including Rubber Pencil Devil (2018), a landmark work created for the 57th Carnegie International and subsequently exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale. 

In his Blue Pencil Drawings (2019–present), Alex Da Corte paints on found images, isolating specific objects and incidents within fields. Da Corte redirects our attention, highlighting what often lies hidden in plain sight. The title of the series, Blue Pencil Drawings speak to the legacies of animation, which Da Corte studied as an undergraduate. As he explains, “Blue pencil was traditionally used in editing photos for analog graphic design […] When Xeroxed or reproduced photographically (as was the tradition back then), the blue pencil lines would become invisible.”

For Gallery Platform Los Angeles, we are pleased to share a group of small scaled container works by Kentaro Kawabata, each titled Seed.

Kentaro Kawabata has formed these works in porcelain and mixed media. He pinches, coils and crenelates the soft porcelain to add crests and ornamentation to his vessels. He crushes stained glass to mix into the porcelain, or to impress into the object at regular intervals. He studs the works with bits of slag, a metal smelting byproduct which appears black, almost like peppercorns. In the extreme heat of the kiln, the stained glass melts, washing the work in color and making the force of gravity visible. The artist finishes the works in silver and gilds features and rims with platinum. The objects are probably not functional, though they do evoke ideas of luxury and ritual of precious oils and perfumes.

A large scale work by Kentaro Kawabata is included in SIZED: An Exhibition and Platform of Works for the Home and Life. The SIZED is exhibition is on view June 15-27, noon to 7pm, at 619 N Western Ave, Los Angeles CA 90004. sized.studio/bookaviewing

Kentaro Kawabata (b. 1976, Saitama, Japan) lives and works in Gifu, Japan. After graduating from the Tajimi City Pottery Design and Technical Center in 2000, Kawabata began winning awards for his work, including the Kamoda Shoji Award at the Mashiko Pottery Exhibition (2004) and the Paramita Museum Ceramic Award (2007). His work has been the subject of numerous solo and grounp exhibitions at highly-reputed ceramic institutions, including the National Museum of Modern Art’s Crafts Gallery (“The Power of Decoration: A Viewpoint on Contemporary Kôgei (Studio Crafts)”, 2009), the Ibaraki Ceramic Art Museum (“Phenomenon of Contemporary Ceramic”, 2014), and the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu (2004, 2010). 1998 Diploma, Tokyo Designer Institute, Ceramic Department, Tokyo 2000 B.F.A., Tajimi city Pottery Design and Technical Center Gifu, Japan.

Sean Randolph (b. 1986) is a storyteller whose work demonstrates his rare amalgam of humor, anxiety, and solicitude. His enchanting works are curious abstractions of epic allegories and mundane observations. Before his MFA at ArtCenter College of Design in 2020, Sean received an MFA in Creative Writing at San Diego State University in 2012. For this presentation with Gallery Platform Los Angeles, O-Town House is pleased to present a selection from both mediums.

Parrasch Heijnen is pleased to present Arp 273, the gallery’s forthcoming exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Rosy Keyser (b. 1974, Baltimore, MD).

In Keyser’s most recent body of work, the interaction of disparate parts colliding, generates deliberate beauty and symbiotic flow. Relationships between the artist's surfaces are that of both friction and integration. Keyser's emerging constructions come from an engaged physical relationship with the limits and potential of her materials. Through experimentation, substrate and paint shift roles through bending, crushing, and flowing just as brut matter turns symbolic and illusion gains a working agency. It is in the manifold of physical elements informing the unknown where Keyser’s language begins to be defined, as one thing falls through and affects the position of another, leverage for a new understanding arises.

A limited artist zine with text by Jenny Monick will accompany this exhibition. On Saturday June 26th, the gallery will host a socially distatanced reception for the artist from 5:00 P.M. - 7:00 P.M.

Rosy Keyser (b. 1974, Baltimore, MD) received a BFA from Cornell University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Keyser has shown extensively throughout the United States and Europe, including solo exhibitions at Maccarone (New York and Los Angeles), Peter Blum Gallery (New York), and Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Group exhibitions include: Rosy Keyser & Eleanor Mikus, Parts & Labor, Beacon, NY; Painter Painter at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Pink Caviar at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Keyser’s work is held in the permanent collections of: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Zabludowicz Collection, London, England. Rosy Keyser was a Fall 2017 artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, TX).

Rosy Keyser: Arp 273 will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from June 26 – August 7, 2021. On Saturday June 26th, the gallery will host a socially distatanced reception for the artist from 5:00 P.M. - 7:00 P.M. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 6pm. For more information, or to request a preview of the exhibition please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Horizon Lines, a series of new neon sculptures by Cammie Staros. Continuing research from her 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, Staros focuses on exploring classical art historical tropes by upending the visual language of Greco-Roman architecture and artifacts.

In this series, Staros explores stone as a geological and human relic of marking time. Soft pink neon is embedded into textural travertine, appearing to melt away from the compacted rock as if pulled by the weight of gravity. The sculptures undeniably appear as landscapes. The contrast of the natural stone edge and man-made elements of the neon simultaneously references an ancient past and possibly unknown forces on a structure left to ruin.

The human body is also present throughout Staros’ practice. In Sleight of Hand, wall-mounted walnut arms cradle a delicate knot of neon, the coils reminiscent of classical Greco-Roman iconography of snakes, ropes, and lassoes. Elsewhere, marble hands gesture from the wall, bathed in blue light. These fragmented figurative sculptures, modeled after the artist’s body, are rooted in history yet disarmingly present.

While addressing the historical narrative associated with these sculptures, Staros focuses on the prescience of ancient artifacts — how their treatment foretells a possible future of today’s objects. Relics and ruins, which outlast the societies that made them, emphasize both the achievements and the hubris of humanity.

Cammie Staros (b. 1983, Nashville, TN) has had solo exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Lefebvre & Fils, Paris; and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work was presented in the 2020 Clay Biennial at the Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles and is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a Thames & Hudson survey of contemporary sculpture. Staros was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2020. Staros received her BA in Art and Semiotics from Brown University (2006) and her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (2011). She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Steve Turner is pleased to present Lean On Me, a solo exhibition by New York-based Jon Key featuring new paintings that are inspired by issues relating to race, gender, family and community. Key creates a visual language based on geometric simplicity and bright colors to make distinctive works that feature images of himself, his birth family and his chosen family. In previous works, he explored the lineage and history of his identity through four themes: Southern-ness, Blackness, Queerness, and Family, each of which he represents chromatically in a corresponding color: green, black, violet, red. In some works, he portrays himself in a contorted pose against a green, black, violet or red background, a flamboyant figure whose freedom is stifled by the tight framing.

In Lean On Me, Key features his chosen family–friends who have become as close as siblings and mentors who have become parent figures–all leisurely relaxing in a park. He utilizes the posture of leaning, a position implying support and trust, to underscore the need for such relationships for Queer POC to exist today.

Jon Key (born 1990, Seale, Alabama) earned a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design (2013) before moving to Brooklyn where he began developing his studio and design practices. He has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2019 & 2020); Rubber Factory, New York (2019) and The Armory Show, New York (2020). Lean On Me is his second solo exhibition at Steve Turner.

For the past year, the Pandemic has had a profound effect on the normal rhythms of
our lives. Almost all of life’s social and cultural interactions “out in the world” came to a
complete halt. In the art world, museums closed and galleries held openings virtually.
Yet, for the artists themselves, this tended to have a counterintuitive silver lining. With
most of life’s usual distractions and obligations on hold, time in the studio for art
making increased dramatically. It has allowed artists to stretch in new directions and
dive more deeply into their process and practice.

CrossCurrents offers an exciting sampling of work produced in and around this time.
Many of the artists in this exhibition continue to experiment and probe the expressive
possibilities of the materials with which they are working, creating works that in some
instances inspire meditative reflection, and in others utilize reflective materials to
inspire movement and interactivity.

Casper Brindle presents three dramatic investigations into color and perspective,
utilizing automotive paints to create poetic, spatially dynamic atmospheres.

Alex Couwenberg makes a welcome return to the gallery with bold, engaging new
work which create wonderfully complex symphonic compositions in line, color, shape
and texture.

Shingo Francis presents beautifully subtle, gossamer-like oils that shift and move with
a grace that’s like wind over water.

Jimi Gleason introduces two exuberantly gestural, lustrous silver nitrate paintings,
edged with electric bands of color.

Peter Lodato offers new oils on canvas, whose layers of paint and scumbled surfaces
resonate like tuning forks to the soul.

Andy Moses follows his acclaimed solo show with two new works, whose surfaces
shimmer and shift as they pull one into their radiant spaces.

Nellie King Solomon makes her gallery debut with two elegant works on mylar, where
thick improvisational gestures appear to float above the mylar’s milky translucency.

Jennifer Wolf utilizes layers of painted silk and mineral pigments to add luminous
depth to her exquisitely moody abstract landscapes.