Math Bass: Mondays Child

In the exhibition, the artist presents a new selection of paintings, the latest iterations of their iconic Newz! Series. These paintings are activated and accompanied by sculptural translations of similar poetic themes in the form of a series of three apple sculptures, a concrete-coated sculpture entitled “Full Body Parentheses,” and a sound installation. Monday’s Child finds exuberance in ambiguity and asks the question: where might meaning lie in a field of unlimited language?

The nine paintings, all oil on linen, draw on the artist’s bespoke lexicon of symbols. These symbols resemble letters, bodily forms, architectural fragments, animals, bones, and other items.  Bass arranges and rearranges these symbols iteratively on each canvas. In the artist’s compositions, each symbol is an empty space of meaning, filled in by the context in which it finds itself. Repetition of these symbols, rather than codifying them into one solid signification, exposes the difference at the heart of each iteration; there is always a gap in meaning, something unnamable left out of and left over in the viewer’s reading.

In the selection of paintings in Monday’s Child, some compositions – the titular Monday’s Child, Thursday’s Child,  and About About Face – seem to toy with representation, approaching the revelation of a referent without fully going there. Yet others go in a different direction altogether, suggesting infinite space or expansion in an imaginary field.

The familiarity of the symbols in the Newz! series only heightens their uncanny quality. Indeed, familiarity is its own theme in the artist’s work, finding expression through eerie renditions of Americana, commercial nostalgia, and mid-century design.

Bass’s mother was a teacher, and apple forms were common in their childhood home, an everyday motif of growing up as well as the emblem of nearby New York City. The apple sculptures in Monday’s Child stand for both original sin and the infamous apple on the teacher’s desk. The tall concrete-coated sculpture, Full Body Parentheses, reimagines a form from a thrift store lamp in Palm Springs, transforming it into a larger, more abstract, and experiential piece that serves as punctuation for both the paintings and the bodies that enter the gallery. Meanwhile, the sound installation features field recordings of crows that the artist came upon during a walk in Los Angeles, adding a stark background to the themes of positive and negative space in the show.

Before the artist’s last exhibition at the gallery in 2021, their mother passed away, inflecting the work in that show with themes of loss. Prior to this exhibition, the artist found themselves expecting their first child, which brings a further sense of expansiveness, mystery, and anticipation into the current work. The two exhibitions together form a sort of yin and yang, representing two sections of a spiraling life cycle.