Andrea Geyer: plein-air

Unpacking larger complexities of fascist ideologies lies ahead in the Southwest German forest Andrea Geyer creates in plein-air. The multimedia experience combines text, photography, and video. never yet (2023), her slowly panning video installation, inspired by the German forests of her childhood, creates a perspective as if we were standing among the large forest trees. The projects establish a calmness mixed with an unsettling feeling that a darker truth looms ahead. The accompanying voiceover of Geyer’s experience as a queer teenager growing up, juxtaposed with her mother’s history during WWII, adds a rich layer to the installation. In the adjacent collage of print and online news stories, plein-air (2023) builds on the connection between Geyer’s personal history with those of political issues, such as facism and the patriarchy. She uses the past to reframe the present, with the news articles alluding to the exploitation of nature, and suggesting doing so will impact our future and our environment’s as well. The works on view seem to be referring to when the forest had been exploited by white supremacists to justify constructs of Social Darwinism and binary gender norms. She questions the role of today’s social construct, capitalism and facism in U.S. culture and everyday life. With an extended visit, viewers can begin to completely understand the impact of these political and social ideologies.

- Rose

Jennifer Bartlett: Works on Paper

Viewing Jennifer Bartlett’s solo show Works on Paper, 1970-1973 at Marianne Boesky Gallery, it was as if I had happened upon a conspiracy theorist’s red-stringed evidence board. The artist is working out a grand idea that is truly understood only by her. The show features 77 small paper works from early in the artist’s career that explore color and form in Bartlett’s recognizably minimalist visual language. 

Austere, yet surprisingly hypnotizing, Bartlett’s array of deeply systematic drawings stand at a crossroads of abstraction and representation, nearing the illustration of objects in space while remaining distinctly non-objective. Bartlett's house maps depict rows of tiny, colorful houses created from a few vertical and horizontal lines and two diagonals to show the triangular roof. The artist includes one-word notes delineating the locations of various elements of the house like the doors and bushes. The house drawings are reminiscent of rudimentary architectural diagrams when viewed up close, yet upon taking a few steps backwards and looking again, the same drawings feel as non-representational as the artist’s purely abstract compositions. 

Using readymade graph paper, Bartlett achieves a level of stylistic uniformity that exposes her rigid process. Unlike her 1976 work Rhapsody, which spans 153 feet and contains an extraordinary variety of painting styles and color, these works on paper feel intentionally restrictive. Nonetheless, seeing these small, early works helps contextualize the massive, wall sized works that Bartlett would go on to make. 

Katherine Bernhardt: I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?

    Bernhardt’s show at Canada invites the viewer into an acid pipe dream world of neons soaked in 80’s nostalgia. Viewers are greeted by bright yellow half-moons of character Bart Simpson, as well as glowing mushrooms, toilet paper, cigarette butts. Even ET, Garfield, and Pink Panther are featured. Bright pinks, oranges and yellows splashed and soaked into canvas against dark backgrounds evokes strong references to 80’s childhood of arcades, laser tag and unnatural food dyes. Bernhardt plays with her format of oval moon Bart on canvas with a 7.5 foot tall wooden cut out sculptural painting of Bart mooning the viewer out in our world. This particular piece brings the character off the canvas to confront viewers while maintaining a two dimensional nature. The pushing of scale is explored even more in the main gallery with the largest piece in the show, which takes up an entire wall and is full of all aforementioned characters. This piece really shows what Bernhardt is all about: paint. She is masterful at letting paint bleed, run, mix and glow. The exploration of the medium through this subject matter of icon Bart Simpson, a true representation of rebellion, is very refreshing. The show cuts loose from the tightness that can be brought to painting and is a must see. Bernhardt is majorly successful with this body of work and brings a strong bold voice to the contemporary painting scene.

Neil Welliver - Selected Works by the Alexandre Gallery

     The Welliver Woods are unlike any other, distinct not only in technique and composition but in the energy that perfuses from the canvas.  This energy is kinetic, perpetual, and psychedelic: you are listening rather than looking- melting into the scene in front of you.  The Alexandre Gallery presented 25 paintings spanning three decades of the artist's career.  Each painting is large- square panels 72 inches tall- and stands alone on the wall.  HOwever, his paintings don’t appear on the wall at all, but rather doorways to another world. 

    Quotes posted between the artwork provided helpful insight into the method and priorities Welliver had when creating a painting.  In one quote he denies having a method at all, relating himself to de Kooning's improvisational approach. Welliver usually worked en plein air, hiking through the woods “loaded down with easel, canvas, brushes, oil, thinner, and tubes of color, to the spot where he will paint.”  There he would stay for hours creating a study, which he will then use to make a large drawing before and then a large painting.  His final paintings contain very few layers; every stroke stands alone and unmuddied.  Even the smallest blade of grass in Marsh Shadow works in harmony among the thousands of others to create a story of light and flow.

Renata Bonfanti: The Art of Weaving

Bringing together mechanical work and handmade craft, textile designer Renata Bonfanti weaves a variety of colorful wall hangings that capture viewers' attention. The works, which consist of nine large scale woven pieces, cover the gallery space in warm gradient tones that create a comfortable environment. These brightly colored wall pieces are eye-catching from a distance due to their bold, simple shapes, but upon closer inspection, or incredibly complex, and their weaving techniques and textured materiality consisting of raw wool, linen and meraklon. The precision of Bonfanti’s designs are  impeccable, and mimic the density of a modern day city skyline. 

Bonfanti’s work demands attention and questions the role of women in artmaking. By revamping the traditional rug and making a soft sculpture wall hanging with sharp architectural features, she transforms something originally viewed as feminine into something more masculine. Bonfanati proves that the craft done by woman’s hand is important and especially cannot be replaced by machine, and by doing so, insists that woman’s crafts have an essential role within society. The creativity and ingenuity needed to design these pieces have been created through the lens of someone who continuously proves that woman's craft is essential. She does so with her innate ability to create mathematically complex designs that cannot be manufactured by machine or easily invented without years of dedication to the craft. Textile works need to be treated with as much dignity and respect as those of traditional fine art.

-Erin Benard

Alex Prager's Part Two: Run at Lehmann Maupin

     One is greeted by a life-size sculpture of a woman getting crushed by a chrome ball when viewing Alex Prager’s Part Two: Run at Lehmann Maupin. The representational nature of the work makes the piece captivating, but the lack of realness is what increased my intrigue. If this woman was getting crushed, there would be blood. Every aspect of the sculpture is hyperreal, but there is no blood to be seen. This piece is a representation of a continuing theme in Prager's work: the everyday disrupted by the nonsensical. Prager's work is digestible and keeps the viewer at a distance by excluding all gore and replacing it with a 1950s aesthetic. The sculpture is a physical representation of a moment in Prager’s film Run, where civilians are being chased by a chrome orb. 
    On the surrounding walls are photographs from the film. Each has the power to stand alone as a still image independent of the film. In one of the stills, Sleep, dozens of people are laying on the ground and the framing of this moment brings to light the absurdity. When watching the film we know that all of these people get up after a couple of moments, but in the photograph time is infinite. Prager, by playing into a sterile aesthetic and absurdity, brings to light how an ordinary day can change into a ludicrous one.

David Kordansky Gallery: Tom of Finland

Sex and sexuality have long been depicted in visual culture, from Titian's Venus of Urbino to the phenomena of the pin-up girls, love and lust have been linked across the centuries. Tom of Finland takes this idea through an explicit homoerotic view. Exhibited at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea, Tom of Finland’s pieces such as Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and others show men “engrossed in acts of homoerotic joy and ecstasy.” Be advised, this is not a show I would take my grandmother to, but Tom’s pieces exhibit exquisite control of line, gesture, and expression. What’s nice about his work is that there are narratives happening. Down the walls of the gallery, each image shows a progression of a story, albeit a very sexually-explicit one. His pieces are quite beautifully done: some aspects are hilarious and others incredibly brave. It takes a lot to put your desires down on paper, especially ones that at the time were seen as immoral. 

I see this exhibit as an unabashed showing of love and enjoyment with zero shame or apologies. Done in a time of hate and repression towards the LBGTQ+ community, it is clear his pieces have influenced and echoed sentiments for queer liberation and pleasure. Free of judgment, censorship, or societal restrictions Tom of Finland's work demonstrates very human emotions of sexually-liberated pleasure.

- Emily Burak (edited 3/2/22)

Ed Ruscha- Parking Lots

Ed Ruscha’s show Parking Lots displays photographs from 1967, consisting of 30 images of parking lots taken from an aerial perspective, mapping car culture that’s dominant within the urban landscape of modern and developing cities. They are printed on a smaller scale, with simple black frames, giving all the attention to the images. In black and white, the photographs begin to resemble a topographical map of parking lots. 

When looking at this show, the viewer is faced with lots that are almost entirely empty, prepared for human activity to take place, ready to perform their duty as parking lots. In Gilmore Drive-In Theatre, 6201 W3rd St., it’s clear that a parking lot is vital to the function of the drive-in theater. State Dept. of Employment 14400 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, shows the pattern of traffic, showing a trail of human life in a transient place. The gallery was small and cramped– the frames were nearly touching. The lack of space forced prevented the images from becoming independent of each other. The work shows how barren spaces designed for the public can feel when not in use and how urban landscapes have been designed to accommodate human life.

-Victoria Andrew

"Future Shock" at Lisson Gallery

 The human experience is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, shaped by a variety of external forces that influence our perceptions of self and others. From the media we consume to the technology we use, our understanding of the world is often mediated by external factors, calling into question the very nature of our own identity and agency. The ‘Future Shock’ exhibition at the Lisson Gallery invites us to contemplate the impact of these external forces on our own perceptions and to explore the ways in which we construct and deconstruct our own sense of self. 

The exhibition shows a wide range of artists and mediums. Such as Tony Oursler's video installations "Keep Going (little man)"(1995) and "Animal III" (1994),  Trevor Shimizu's 2013 oil painting "Times Square Shrek, Minion, James P. Sullivan", and Josh Kline’s 2019 sculpture ‘Submersion’. All these works share a common thread in their exploration of the human experience and the impact of external forces on an individual.

The works in the gallery are mostly large and in your face demanding your attention. This alone translates the thesis of the exhibition as being a viewer you are assaulted by an assortment of external pieces. This idea is clearly demonstrated in Tony Conrad’s exhibited work ‘WiP’ which confronts the viewer with a life-size jail cell and flashing LED projection. 

‘Future Shock’ at the Lisson Gallery acts as a catalyst for self-reflection on how much our rapidly expanding exteriors affect our sense of self.