BECCA MANN & APRIL STREET
James Fuentes Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring April Street and Becca Mann. Both based in Los Angeles, Mann and Street share conceptual parallels in materially distinct practices. Brought together, their works reflect upon the continual transformation of the natural world as it is shaped by tools, mediated by technology, and refracted through the shifting lenses of time and human perception. The exhibition foregrounds a set of temporal inversions to be found with each artist’s work: alternating between light and darkness, forming sequences akin to film strips, and continually moving through cycles of time.
April Street’s Four Seasons series (2021-25) comprises large-scale, theatrical watercolor drawings that bring forward two notions of time: the disembodied temporality of imagined space, and real time as marked by the artist’s own body. Each work is bordered by painted impressions of Street’s feet, mimicking clock hands and tracing time as an embodied loop. In this transfiguration, her limbs operate as both tool and subject, floating between the painting’s interior as well as the space beyond the frame. Likewise, Street adapts nature’s four seasons as a shifting psychological and emotional landscape.
Street’s series is titled in reference to Alberto Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932)—a large-scale armature of an interior space inspired by the artist’s relationship with a past lover—drawing out further metaphor for the surreal slippage between states of being and memory. Alongside fragments of her own body, the compositions are filled with studio tools like scissors and knives, which pierce through lush, imagined terrains as if traversing a dream. A continuous vine runs throughout the series, forging a connective thread between these changing images. Echoing the symbolic logic of Flemish Renaissance “world landscapes,” this vine also functions as a kind of umbilical cord, linking acts of historical mark-making with the artist’s own corporeal present.
Becca Mann’s botanical series (2018-25) engages its ephemeral subjects—yucca, cereus, rose, nasturtium—through the frame of manipulated time. The artist’s image-making is deeply process-based and research-driven. Working with found photographs, Mann presses at the handmade slowness of painting to refract the speed and flatness produced by the camera. She seeks out images that contain a peculiarity of light and color, drastically enlarging her findings beyond 1:1 scale, breaking down and losing visual information in the process. Carrying forward certain details and inventing others, Mann invites surface variations and imperfections to draw attention to the physical conditions involved in the representation of an interrupted moment in time.
As she renders these interventions of camera and paint legible, Mann shifts between two working methods. In the first, she works dry oil paint onto a black-primed canvas to produce a nocturnal glow, whereby the image’s light seems to emerge from the pigment itself. In the others, Mann manipulates the luminosity and translucence of her medium by applying solvent-washed pigment onto an unbleached canvas ground. These ambient differences lend to the sensations of not only light but atmosphere—of being in time—like the haze, scent, and sounds of a damp spring night by the ocean, or a UV-drenched dusty mountainside. In this way, Mann’s practice foregrounds the sensual experience of natural phenomena, while making visible the series of mediating lenses through which that sensation has been pushed.
April Street studied bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at venues including LAXART, The Underground Museum, François Ghebaly, Various Small Fires, Vielmetter, Maccarone, and Carter & Citizen in Los Angeles; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and Common Gallery, Tokyo. She is a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her solo exhibitions have been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, LAWeekly, Hyperallergic, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and KCRW. Born in Virginia, Street lives and works in Los Angeles.
Becca Mann earned degrees in Painting and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at venues including François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; James Fuentes, New York; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Le Maximum, Venice, CA; and Safe Gallery, New York. Often exploring ideas through other artists' work, she has organized a number of exhibitions and collaborated on programming for several years with Soccer Club Club in Chicago. Her work has been reviewed by Artforum, Frieze, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and Contemporary Art Review LA. Mann was born in Los Angeles, where she lives and works today.