REFUGE FROM THE INFERNO: L.A.'S BEST SUMMER GROUP SHOWS - Denk Gallery
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8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
Whitney Bedford, "The Time Inbetween" (2015)
REFUGE FROM
THE INFERNO:
L.A.’S BEST
SUMMER GROUP
SHOWS
Talk to Me, Von Lintel Gallery; Conceptual Craft II, Denk Gallery; As You Like It
or C’est Comme Vous Voulez, Praz-Delavallade
by Ezrha Jean Black ·
August 8, 2018 · in
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
‘What is it with dudes and trees?’ I wonder for a
second as I’m about to put this up on-line—
thinking more about Shakespeare’s pastoral
romantic comedy than the cool oasis of a
summer group show René-Julien Praz has
curated at Praz-Delavallade’s L.A. premises.
(Though I suppose I could ask Paul McCarthy,
who produced a somewhat notorious rendition
along these lines for Paul Schimmel’s landmark
Klea McKenna, “Palms #2,” 2017
Helter Skelter exhibition for MOCA in 1992.) But
Human relations with trees are a bit strained
then I’m a bit of a tree-hugger myself, though it
lately. Having thinned out their ‘herd’ with our
would never occur to me to abuse them with
demands for paper, building materials and
romantic sentiments of any kind. (Nor political for
their many attractive by-products, we’ve failed
that matter.)
to reciprocate by thinning out our own
predatory hordes and checking our continuous
Shakespeare’s As You Like It creaks a bit (for
stream of toxic emissions into the environment
the Bard) a few decades after the first encounter;
we share, thereby threatening our mutual
but there’s no getting around its pastoral charm. I
survival. Who can say how Shakespeare would
was about to say ‘melancholy charms’, which
have updated his settings? He would scarcely
makes no sense—except actually it does a bit.
recognize his drought-stricken Albion this
(Consider Jaques: Shakespeare wrote his own
summer. Amazingly, Arden (the Ardennes?)
songs for the show; but consider the possibilities
might still bear some resemblance to its
of a 20th century update. You don’t suppose
ancient majesty, notwithstanding Belgian and
Noel Coward wrote “World Weary” for him, do
French development and the trail of
you?) I mean how could I not like something so
destruction the Germans left between Belgium
deeply trans? That had to come across on some
and France 75 or so years ago. But Jaques’
subconscious level. Of course the Duke has to
line would probably be something along the
exile Rosalind. The less-than-perfectly court-
lines of ‘I told you so.’
adapted Orlando is scarcely aware of the extent
to which he has overthrown the ‘natural order’.
Summer is a time for group shows
Rosalind consciously defies it.
everywhere, and not just in L.A.; but they are
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
particularly rich this summer in L.A. and offer von Lintel has long represented, including
brief escape—not necessarily to Arden or Joseph Stashkevitch, Antonio Murado, and
Arcadia (though come to think of it, Los Roland Fischer. A few of these have yet to
Angeles County has its own Arboretum in the mount solo shows with the gallery in Los
County’s own ‘Arcadia’), but nevertheless to Angeles, including Tokyo-based Izima Kaoru,
an air-conditioned space, which this particular who followed a long career in fashion
summer might actually be life-saving. photography with several iterations of
Landscapes With A Corpse (a number of which
bear uncanny parallels to Melanie Pullen’s High
Fashion Crime Scenes), and more recently a
high-concept follow-the-sun series of acutely
refracted photographs of the sun abstracted to a
line or curve.
Sometime this year, Tarrah von Lintel realized
that her gallery was entering its 25th year—half a
world away from its origin point (Munich), but
having nurtured rich associations with many
artists along its trajectory through New York to
Los Angeles. Parallel to her collectors, von A conceptual blur parallel to the willful confusion
Lintel’s relationships with the artists and their and commingling of media (especially
works have amounted to an on-going dialogue photography and painting – or work that
with their processes, ideas and obsessions—and resembles one or the other) is a through-line that
a larger dialogue with the art and culture for runs through much of this work, including that of
which the work is a focal point. These include artists no longer represented by von Lintel. In
many of the artists for whom von Lintel has addition to a first in-person encounter with
assumed representation here in L.A., including Kaoru’s abstracted Tokyo winter solstice, it was
Farrah Karapetian, Canan Tolon, Christopher interesting to revisit ‘zero-degree’ work by both
Russell, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Christiane Sarah Charlesworth (a faintly limned Book
Feser, and Floris Neusüss; but also artists who diffused in a pool of white light from 1999) and
the aggressively etched chromatic striations of
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
Marco Breuer (from 2003 – Pan (C-245))—a kind her ‘salon’ into the fall—but this is a show worth
of drawing-by-extraction (that makes for an seeing regardless.
interesting transition to the work of, say, Edward
Burtynsky, whose principal subject is the
scarrified earth that is one of the most visible and
dramatic legacies of the anthropocene). The
contrasts in mood and medium are both
refreshing and startling. Compare the near-
stridency of the Breuer with Klea McKenna’s
more recent gentle rubbing on gelatin silver
paper in Palms #2 (2017).
Patrick Nickell, “Ideals of strength
and beauty,” 2016
As is pretty clear from some of the (mostly
photographic) work just referenced, there is
considerable continuity between medium and
concept in the execution of any work of art.
However idea-driven the work may be, no small
amount of thought and effort are invested in its
Von Lintel was en route to France by the time I visualization and execution. In the contemporary
visited the show, but she may be back in L.A. post-conceptual landscape, artists increasingly
before the show closes (August 18th); and she’s feel free to articulate and enlarge upon ideas and
serious about engaging the gallery’s audience in concepts through engagement with the materials
an on-going dialogue about the work and the themselves and processes that are continuously
artists. With this notion of a gracious improvised, modulated, and reinvented. There
engagement with the gallery’s visitors in mind, was never anything remotely oxymoronic about
the rear gallery has been staged as a kind of Carl Berg’s Conceptual Craft exhibition at
salon—replete with classic 20th century furniture Denk Gallery last year; and that remains true in
and accessories—designed by Carole this year’s far more diverse and expansive
Decombe; and I can’t imagine a more delightful iteration. You could even find parallels to the
refuge on the kinds of blistering days we’ve been artists’ treatment of materials between some of
having in Los Angeles. Von Lintel may continue the work in the Von Lintel show and this show.
Consider the drama of the iridescent chromatics
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
in Tim Ebner’s seemingly folded, pleated and
corrugated squares of powder-coated forged
steel; or George Stoll’s ethereal parabolas and
catenary curves of colored disks and glass
beads. Stoll’s work often plays ironically upon
notions of celebration and festivity—a zero-
degree abstraction of human vanity, so to speak.
(Or the inverted vanitas, where the commonplace
and utilitarian is invested with a transitory
illumination.) The ephemeral is given a notional
permanence or duration, the intangible given
material mass.
This is a very refined sort of craft—something
that can conceivably be held in the hand as well
as the mind’s eye—yet something that, as
Lachowicz’s work indicates, can be infinitely
extended in any conceivable direction under a
variety of pre-set conditions. There are few if any
limits (certainly not in our post-conceptual
domain); and the furthest extremes of this range
can be pretty expansive indeed. Consider Gjoj
de Marco’s Replica of A Confessional Central
Patrick Nickell’s glass sculptures go directly to Section – Cinema Prop F1-1808 A (2018),
that domain of the ideal and/or idealized—the looking pretty much like what it must have once
paradox of giving concrete form to, as one of the been in goddess only knows what movie or
work’s titles express it, “something that can’t be movies. These sorts of properties get reused and
found.” Or what if it can be found—albeit under recycled quite a bit. (I mean that’s why studios
an electron microscope. Or a loom? Or beneath have art departments and property masters.)
a pattern-cutter’s paper or muslin? Or rendered,
as Rachel Lachowicz has done here with C
Lycra Knit (2018), in a kind of cyan-blue plexiglas
—though conceivably I’m reading too much into
Lachowicz’s choice of color. (Lachowicz has
used monochromatic ‘signatures’ before,
however—e.g., most notably in her 2017 tour de
force crimson installation, Lay Back and Enjoy It.)
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine But here’s the thing: what might be held in the hand (or two), its shape, texture, physical dimension and tactilely registered detail, is capable of its own free-form and unpredictable extension into other worlds or dimensions that emerge exclusively from the artist’s imagination —or that imagination in its random encounter with all phenomena and signifiers in its orbit. Kristen Morgin turns a random audiotape cassette—picked up at a garage sale from the looks of it, now stained and battered (though apparently with most if not all of the song titles spelled out—not an insignificant detail here)— into a trapdoor into the universe. The source A number of works invoke this sense of infinite object is an old country music hit, but Morgin’s expansion more specifically (e.g., Ross Rudel’s There Goes My Everything (2018) transforms it subtle chromatic intervention on a zig-zag into a cosmic explosion. Before you spiral off into pleated ‘infinite column’, Blue Stripe (2016); or the Milky Way, there’s more. If one object throws Tom LaDuke’s full-fathom talismanic Oceans you down an astral chute, consider a (2015) with its delicately filigreed pewter head juxtaposition of two, say Death Wish and Pierre planted atop a water-washed stone). It was Who Didn’t Care (referencing both the Brian equally bracing to see work that unpacked the Garfield thriller-turned Charles Bronson movie ‘concept’ of craft (or technique) itself (e.g., Sean and the Sendak classic), or a Pretty Mick Jagger Duffy’s Sfumato, 2018). and Free Kittens (the cover of the Performance soundtrack with its stylized portrait of Jagger, with a random yard sale sign). https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
Arden (or I suppose Ardennes would be equally
apt for this particular gallery’s directors),
although he sets the mood as we’re ushered
towards the ‘birch grove’ wallpapered rear of the
gallery, with Jennifer Steinkamp’s gently
undulating poplars whispering alongside from
their darkness in the midst of this otherwise
immaculately white space. But that’s a clue, too.
There are dark, or certainly shadowed moments
in the midst of this sunlit space. Praz’s
‘Ardennes’ is a series of moments that take our
measure of nature, our perception of, and
variously willful and passive projections upon it,
Denk is one of the most beautiful spaces
our fraught co-existence with it, and our yearning
downtown to view art, and there is nothing in this
to reclaim or recapture its variously fearsome
show that does not richly plumb the pleasures of
and fragile beauty.
both concept and craft.
Further into the gallery, we continue to sort out
the terms of our approach – our ‘to see and not
see’ (to paraphrase Oliver Sacks) ‘forest-for-the-
trees’ relationship to reality—as for example in
Catherine Opie’s soft focus, barely limned grove
My favorite among these shows, though, might
of trees (mounted here against the birch-papered
be the aforementioned Praz-Delavallade show
wall), Untitled #2 (2012), which I always
(but then, as I said, I’m quite mad about trees).
associate with dark winter evenings. (Some
I’m also a lover of great painting—and there’s a
works in this series were, I believe,
lot of it here, alongside painterly work in other
photographed in such conditions, but not all; and
media, including video (e.g., Jim Shaw). René-
not this one.) Then Kerry Tribe’s installation with
Julien Praz hasn’t made the gallery over into an
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
video (Forest for the Trees, 2015) spells out the photo-negative image, or possibly two layered
dilemma explicitly. That tentative, conditional images (007, 2017). There’s also a vague hint of
approach contrasts starkly with the “radical” and flame here, reminding us of the flames
ambiguous space Francesca Gabbiani shows consuming so much foliage around us. Welling
us in a palette pitched some distance from foregrounds purple leaves or blossoms against a
nature. Amber and terra cotta are found in bright yellow background in a companion image
nature, but Gabbiani effectively denatures them (001). It’s all a bit too bright, which can only bring
against a backdrop of black and deep purple on dark thoughts; and it’s as if Kim McCarty is
with a neon glow. A ragged frond of fern and few offering our eyes an oasis of calm in her two
tufts of grass are the last earth-bound remnants spare watercolors—her signature minimalist
of this “destruction.” Then there are the remnants brush trace here rendered almost ghostly, what
of the human-built environment here – joists or might be a trace of lavender pressed from the
louvers, lumber planks or trim that give evidence flower (of a marijuana plant) dissolving into the
of a structure on this site. It’s as if that amber white paper as if into the light itself.
volume rising to the upper edge of the canvas
were a kind residual aura of what was once Disappearance is a subsidiary theme here. (Not
“radical.” sure if that has anything to do with Shakespeare
—exile was more or less the thing there.)
Certainly we’re not likely to see ‘sea-changes’,
much less ‘coral’, which we’ve mostly killed off
(but then that’s a different play). Cole Sternberg
addresses this erasure more or less directly (a
wooded sky being erased, 2017) with its hillside
treeline sinking beneath a mottled pink sky. But
there is that moment we cling to for its
melancholy beauty (like Jaques?)—Matthew
Brandt distilling that melting-away to the
sublime in silver on silver gelatin (AgXBD752A,
There are no apparent roots to return to here. 2018) in a moment that seems to simultaneously
Nature’s tenuous hold seems to melt away – like pull us 200 years back even as we see our likely
those ‘purple mountains majesties’ of what was terminus 200 (okay 20) years forward.
once a beautiful continent (and planet). On the
wall opposite, James Welling exploits a similar
palette in a kind of deliberate reversal—foliage
rendered on Kodak Metallic Endura paper (this is
all we’re told) through what I’m assuming are
Photoshop manipulations of what looks like a
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
8/11/2018 Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows - Artillery Magazine
molded white resin feet peek from beneath a
velvet curtain printed with a woodland scene,
replete with pond and flowering trees.) We’ll all
be hiding there soon enough.
The sublime will bury us (as Charles Gaines
documents chillingly in Absent Figures: Rainier,
Version 2, Marine Transport Files, 2000); but we
leave our trace, variously brutal and poetic.
There are many instances here, from Sternberg,
to Adrien Missika’s Botanical Frottages, to The souvenirs we take from a show like this are
Kirsten Everberg and Matthew Chambers, as dark as they are sunlit—the monsters as
whose gorgeous foliage studies evoke both joy abundant as the golden moments. Whitney
and an autumnal melancholy (which may seem Bedford’s gorgeous painting, The Time
pretty joyful in the dog days of summer). Inbetween (2015), summed up a then-now-
forever moment, poised between that ‘fear of
hope’ and ‘knowledge of fear.’ We’re still here for
the beauty—and there’s quite a lot to be had in
this beautiful show.
Talk to Me runs through August 11th at Von Lintel
Gallery, 2683 La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles
90034. Conceptual Craft II runs through August
18th at Denk Gallery, 749 E. Temple St., Los
Angeles 90012. As You Like It or C’est Comme
Vous Voulez runs through August 18th at Praz-
Delavallade, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
90048.
No forest offers refuge here; but as Pierre
Ardouvin might put it, [t]he night is not over
(2018)—which might be the universal GPS. (Two
https://artillerymag.com/refuge-from-the-inferno-l-a-s-best-summer-group-shows/
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