Nancy Buchanan and Martha Rosler: Entropy
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Entropy, a two-person exhibition of works by Nancy Buchanan and Martha Rosler. Paul McCarthy’s “Black and White Video Tapes III, Basement Tapes” will be on view concurrently with Entropy at our 969 Chung King Road location from December 14, 2024 through January 11, 2025.
Buchanan and Rosler both work across several mediums yet maintain political engagement at the core of their practice, utilizing video, photography, sculpture, painting, and performance to highlight injustice and inequality throughout their bodies of work. The two artists connected in California in the early 1970s, recognizing in one another a distinct multidisciplinary approach to political artmaking and commitment to feminism. The exhibition includes works from two of Rosler’s major series – The Rewards of Money and Off the Shelf – alongside collage works, paintings, and drawings by Buchanan. In these works, both Buchanan and Rosler probe the decaying center of late-stage capitalism and the failed promise of the American dream.
Buchanan’s works in the exhibition speak to the current political moment by exploring the idea of home as something aspirational but also ephemeral. A continuation of her longtime exploration of inequality, Buchanan’s works reveal an America that promotes idealized luxury dream spaces in glossy magazines while at the same time funding tools of war capable of reducing whole cities to rubble. In Buchanan’s paintings and drawings, things fall apart or are blown apart, and we are often complicit. Whether a building has been the brought down by arson, neglect, or American-made artillery, Buchanan bears witness to its demise. Elsewhere, a suite of collages probes the consumerist impulse that ultimately leads to such chaotic inequality.
Buchanan’s Confusion collages build intricate and opulent imaginary spaces out of collaged imagery drawn from travel, architecture, and design magazines. Beautiful interiors and striking vistas invite the viewer to untangle Buchanan’s spatial puzzles as they draw the eye energetically across the composition. The glossy magazines from which these images are sourced offer escapist content that often sparks envy, their beauty emphasizing through contrast the banality of daily life. Buchanan further complicates the images with small details that hint at something darker beneath the surface: a mushroom cloud rises within the confines of a traffic sign, an advertisement touts “customizable shooting ranges.” These inconsistencies hint at a rot that lies just beneath these polished surfaces, something explored further in a collaborative work made with Ever Velasquez. Confusion #5 considers the consequences of modern excess on the natural world, in which the by-products of human advancement displace and disturb a landscape that long predates us.
As a counterpoint to the opulence of the collages, Buchanan’s paintings of derelict buildings capture the entropic process of architectural decay. These ruined structures come from photographs of actual places that have been neglected or destroyed, and are the product of the artist’s fascination with collapsing houses. The paintings question the idea of shelter: who gets to have it and who gets to keep it? Buchanan captures the process of collapse, wherein man-made, orderly structures devolve into something wild and chaotic that is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. The gradually collapsing houses serve as a quiet parallel to the calamitous destruction happening in Gaza. Buchanan draws from news images in compositions that emphasize the scale of the chaos, jumbled piles of ruined architecture standing in for a much greater human loss. These works attempt to process the unimaginable, the product of a simultaneous desire to both look away and bear witness.
The exhibition includes four works from Rosler’s series of photomontages begun in the mid-1980s and resumed in 2022, on the theme "the rewards of money," drawn from an advertising series that forms the works' backdrop. Like other of Rosler's works, it responds to the celebration of naked, rapacious greed. In the work shown here from c. 1985, a yuppy couple glories in their beautifully appointed, art-filled loft while outside their picture window, drab brick apartment buildings are in the process of demolition – a salient feature of the gentrifying wave in Reagan years. In the three works from the present decade, drones and even an advanced military aircraft invade high-bourgeois homes, cottages, and gardens. Outside the window of one high-rise, a refugee camp is visible amidst bombed-out buildings while a woman in a white corset-topped bridal gown lurks behind the couch. In another, the image of a gardening family is dominated by a cemetery, with open graves, for Yemeni children killed in war. As with Buchanan’s Confusion collages, The Rewards of Money highlight the stark inequalities of American life and allude to its destructive global reach, as in Rosler's well-known series House Beautiful Bringing the War Home, antiwar photomontages from c. 1967-72, relating to Vietnam, and 2004 and 2008, in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rosler’s Off the Shelf series (2008-2018) was instituted during the height of the second Iraq War and was later revisited in 2018. The twelve images from this series feature a number of mostly non-fiction books from the artist’s library, ranging from political history and theory to gardening to contemporary incarnations of imperial power and the consequences of the War on Terror. Several of the series relate to utopian visions of social life and art, seen through the lens of activism, urbanism, science fiction, and even—with a wink—mushroom gardening. The Off the Shelf series is Rosler's only fully digital work and relates to the traveling Martha Rosler Library of over 7,000 decidedly real books, which toured seven museum and gallery venues in the Unites States and Western Europe in the mid-2000s. Rosler's arrangement of the book spines is not dissimilar to concrete poetry. Each work in Off the Shelf constitutes a two-dimensional geometric abstraction while directing attention to analysis, theorization, activism, and celebration.
Rosler has also contributed a silent reel of still photos of New York City demonstrations from 2011 to 2022. They encompass several ebullient post-Occupy demonstrations on May Day 2011 and May Day 2012, the Climate march and related Flood Wall Street march of 2014, Black Lives Matter in 2015, three women's marches post-Trump, in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and a silent vigil for George Floyd in a Brooklyn Park in 2022.Also included in the exhibition is Faith Full, a 2008 video sculpture by Buchanan made in collaboration with the artist Carolyn Potter, with whom she has collaborated since 1988. Nearly every surface of this six-room miniature Victorian home contains religious iconography and ephemera from around the world. This visual accretion reflects the confusion of the collages, yet here the disparate elements happily coexist under one roof. Video of Maryam Kashani playing one of Biber’s Rosary Sonatas is projected onto a tiny screen within the house. Faith Full offers a hopeful alternative to the sectarianism of contemporary geopolitics, yet an undercurrent of anxiety hovers in the background even here.
Beginning with her participation as a founding member of F Space Gallery in Costa Mesa, Nancy Buchanan has been involved in numerous artists’ groups including The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); she has also acted as curator for several exhibitions and projects. Her work has been seen domestically and internationally and she is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants, a COLA grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media, which enabled her to complete Developing: The Idea of Home, an interactive CD-ROM, in 1999. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at MOMA, MOCA, the Centre Pompidou, the Getty Research Institute, and was included in four of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time exhibitions; in 2022, her work was included in the Carnegie International.
In 2016, she organized a durational performance at UC Irvine’s xMPL Theater as the second event in The Art of Performance; from 1988-2012, she taught in the Film/Video School at CalArts. From 1988-1998, she worked with community activist Michael Zinzun on his cable access show Message to the Grassroots and as a member of Zinzun’s LA 435 Committee, she traveled to Namibia to produce a documentary about that country’s transition to independence from the Republic of South Africa.
She has shown with Charlie James Gallery since 2017. Buchanan lives and works in Los Angeles.
Martha Rosler is an artist whose work—in documentary photography and photomontage, video, performance, sculpture, and writing— centers on the public sphere and everyday life, particularly with respect to women. Recurring themes include food in its many roles and guises, urbanism and spaces of transit, and war and national security. She has initiated a number of events in the US and Europe that bridge diverse publics, including garage sales, pop-up libraries, and a long-standing collaborative project that explores homelessness, housing, and the built environment. Through her artistic practice, writing, and activism, she challenges the mechanisms of power and their normalization within imagery, narrative, and discourse. She has received numerous honors, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award, the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, the Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award, the Asher B. Durand Award, the Lichtwark Prize, and four doctorates Honoris Causa.
Rosler lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, whose decades of gentrification have often figured in her work.