Exhibitions
Current
October 19 - December 21, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from October 19th through December 21st, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 19th, from 4-6pm.
Ahmadi masterfully uses her formal skills to invigorate challenging subject matter, blending free-flowing strokes with vibrant bursts of color to captivate viewers through unexpected contrasts—whether in sculpture, painting, or animation. Painting serves as her vehicle for truth-telling, where luminous colors and mystical figures intertwine with violent imagery to illuminate pressing global issues such as migration, war, and the brutal treatment of marginalized people. Tangle features her new works, which focus on female figures immersed in fantastical landscapes of land and water." Ahmadi's technical mastery of watercolor—a medium celebrated for its unpredictability—allows her to explore themes of covering and uncovering. By incorporating screenprints into her paintings, she adds temporal and physical layers, creating a dynamic dialogue between the real and the imagined. Through her inclusion of ruins or clues to a deeper story, Ahmadi encourages viewers to probe beneath the surface of the narratives we inherit, from ancient myths to childhood memories to the modern news cycle.
Born in Tehran, Iran, Ahmadi grew up in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The roles imposed on women in Iranian society, including the mandate to wear the hijab, were formative influences on her development as both a woman and an artist. Drawing from mythological figures such as Medusa and Artemis—who symbolize the enduring strength of women despite societal oppression—Ahmadi portrays women in her paintings in positions of physical struggle, contending with vicious animals, walking through fire, and being weighed down by the weight of their own hair, bodies, and surroundings. Her paintings examine the history of patriarchy's surveillance and control over women's bodies, from the mandatory hijab in her homeland to the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights in her adopted country, the United States.
In her Pressure Cooker series, Ahmadi explores the transformation of domestic objects into instruments of violence. Traditionally seen as a symbol of nourishment and care, the pressure cooker has been repurposed in terrorist attacks as a bomb, recontextualizing it as a tool of brutality. Her commentary on women's autonomy extends into this series, where intricate intaglio hand-etching celebrates the domestic role of this everyday object. By aesthetically enhancing the pressure cooker, she invites viewers to confront the unsettling juxtaposition of war and violence against the mundane comfort of its domestic function.
Ahmadi's latest animation, Marooned, delves into the destabilizing effects of politics and war on ordinary people, with a particular focus on the struggles of immigrants and refugees. Composed of 5,172 hand-painted frames, the animation tells the story of people working tirelessly to build a pathway of large rocks leading to a stranded oil tanker in the ocean. As they near completion, ominous figures emerge and seize the tanker, leaving them with nothing.
Ahmadi has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Manetti Shrem Museum in CA (2024), The Rubin Museum in New York City (2021), the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, CA (2017), the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2014), and the College of Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, OH (2012). In addition to holding regular solo exhibitions at galleries in NYC, LA, London and San Francisco, her works have been included in many curated museum group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Notable shows include the "Rising Sun" at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, (2023) "Being and Belonging" at the Ontario Museum of Arts in Toronto, Canada (2023) “Epic Iran” in Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2023); “A Boundless Drop in A Boundless Ocean” Orlando Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida (2021), Catastrophe and the Power of Art”, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019), “Revolution Generations”, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2019) among others.
Ahmadi’s work is part of permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Arts; the Crocker Art Museum; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Asia Society Museum in New York; the Manetti Shrem Museum in California; the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; the Grey Art Museum in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University; The Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the Farjam Collection in Dubai; the TDIC Corporate Collection in Abu Dhabi; and the private collection of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
Upcoming
Past
2024
November 7th - 11th, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the Salon Art + Design Fair at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, opening to the public November 8th, with a presentation of works by Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Ashwini Bhat, Chie Fueki, Rachel Lachowicz, Anina Major and Gil Yefman.
The selection for the Salon Fair will include a selection of recent works by each of the artists.
The fair runs from November 8 to 11, with VIP previews taking place on November 7. Shoshana Wayne Gallery will be located at booth D2.
August 27 - October 11, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Dinh Q. Lê: Survey 1998-2023. This is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery, and the gallery’s first posthumous showing of Lê’s work. Survey 1998-2023 serves as a memorial exhibition celebrating Dinh’s life and legacy. The exhibition will be on view August 27th through October 11th.
Survey 1998-2023 traces the arc of Lê’s career, beginning with works shown in 1998 at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies and concluding with the artist’s most recent and final works from the Cambodia-Reamker series. Bringing together work from Lê’s series: From Vietnam to Hollywood, Persistence of Memory, A Quagmire This Time, Empire, and Cambodia Reamker, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s investigations into memory and homeland. It also honors the relationship Dinh had with Shoshana Wayne Gallery, presenting previously exhibited works alongside pieces never shown by the gallery.
The main exhibition space features a selection of photo-weaving works by Lê, exemplifying the work he was known for. Inspired by a traditional Vietnamese matmaking technique taught to the artist by his aunt, Lê’s woven works exposed contradictions between American depictions and memories of the Vietnam War, and the lived realities of those who experienced it. By uniting disparate images, Dinh exposed western audiences to the reality of the war (called the American War by the Vietnamese people) and the long shadow it cast over his homeland. Hollywood productions, victims of the Khmer Rouge, and archival images of war are some of the many images Lê mined to force viewers to confront these truths.
Survey 1998-2023 is the first exhibition of Lê’s work following his death in April 2024, and it showcases a decades-long relationships between the gallery and the artist. This relationship was cultivated by trips to Vietnam over the years, where Lê shared the beauty and culture of his home country, and a mutual collaboration to found San Art. Dinh was not only an incredible artist, but also an incredible human being. His absence is felt by everyone who had the privilege of knowing him.
Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at prestigious venues including: Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Mori Art Museum, Japan; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Solo exhibitions include: Projects 93: Dinh Q. Lê (MoMA, New York), True Journey Is Return (San Jose Museum of Art, California), Photographing the thread of memory (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France), and Memory for Tomorrow (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fukuoka Asian Art and the Mori Museum in Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst many others. Lê has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Award and the Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Development amongst others.
June 29, 2024 - August 17, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Anna Lukashevsky: The New Immigrants. This is the Haifa-based artist's first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view June 29th through August 17th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 29th from 4-6pm.
Anna Lukashevsky is interested in the psychological and sociological aspects of the traumatic events, especially in portraits. Over the past two years, she has painted portraits of new immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. Lukashevsky’s subjects abandoned comfortable lives in Russia because their beliefs were no longer tolerated in the place they called home. The cast of artists, writers, journalists, and filmmakers seen in Lukashevsky’s paintings make up a fraction of the 70,000+ Russian and Ukrainian immigrants to Israel, and each portrait relays the subject’s story. As Lukashevsky speaks with her subjects during lengthy portraiture sessions, their experiences transform her images from an archetype to an individual.
The New Immigrants project began in 2022 with paintings of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, but after October 7th Lukashevsky was instilled with a desire to capture the emotional impact of Israel’s war against Hamas. These new portraits depict the trauma, depression, and sadness that Israelis have felt since the war with Hamas began. Lukashevsky imbues her paintings with a sense of empathy and fear, portraying an uncertain future and viewing the work as warning signals to the cultural world.
As an immigrant from the USSR herself, Lukashevsky has felt an intrinsic connection to her subjects, and viewed herself as an outsider in the Israeli cultural world. Lukashevsky is a part of the New Barbizon Group, a collective of five Israeli painters born in the USSR who offer a contemporary version of the tradition of painting en plein air. Following in the footsteps of the 19th century Barbizon School, the artists attempt to hold a mirror to contemporary life and highlight the lived experiences of those around them. In The New Immigrants, Lukashevsky utilizes this philosophy to represent the beauty and trauma of the present through those living in it. By deeply engaging with and sharing the stories of her subjects, the artist humanizes the refugee crisis and the effects of war.
Anna Lukashevsky was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and studied at HaMidrasha Art School, Israel. She has had solo exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art, and Bat Yam Museum of Art. Lukashevsky’s work can be found in the collections of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum; Haifa Museum, Israel; and numerous private collections.
May 18, 2024 - June 22, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Brad Spence: FantasyBoatLoveIsland. This is the California-based artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm.
This series takes the fantasy of tropical romantic getaways as the subject of inquiry and the backdrop for painterly gestures. The canvases are mostly improvisations, composed in solitude, yet picturing moments of social ceremony, celebration and excess. Figures are suggested through layers of finger-painting that upon close inspection dissolve into primitive marks. Airbrushed sprays of iridescent pigment bath these presences in colored lights. There is a prevailing lack of clarity mixing memory and its erasure with collaged rectangles hinting at photographic mementos that fail to come into focus.
The compositions suggest tsunamis of conflicting emotions in works that are both fantasies and mediations on the nature of fantasy. The identities of the social events pictured are elusive and changing, shifting between celebrations, rites of passage and rituals of the carnal and carnivalesque. These moment of revelry and abandon are as well shadowed by crisis both personal and global.
Entertained here are unmoored desires, like the decadent dreams of tourists. In the end the place fantasy shipwrecks upon empty shores is where transcendence can begin. Meanwhile an endless procession of mud baths, mediation retreats, nightclubs, destination weddings, coverbands, cruiseships, bachelorette parties, hottubs, beach fireworks and the threat of a morning light with no Advil at the bottom of the purse.
Brad Spence holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Spence lives and works in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of painting at California State University, San Bernardino. Solo exhibitions include CSUSB Gallery, San Bernadino, CA; Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernadino, CA; and University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach, CA. Spence’s work has been included in group shows in venues such as the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Centre d’art Passerelle, Brest, France; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA, Los Angeles, CA.
May 18, 2024 - June 22, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Zadok Ben-David: From Here, There, and Everywhere. This is the London and Portugal-based artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm.
From Here, There, and Everywhere contains over seventy hand-cut aluminum sculptures from Ben-David’s ongoing series People I Saw But Never Met (2015-present), bringing together a heterogeneous cast of characters based on real people. Each work is inspired by a passerby the artist discreetly photographed while traveling, sketching their likeness before rendering the drawing in aluminum. The installation includes strangers from Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica in an attempt to chronicle the breadth of the human experience. A metaphor for the diversity of our world’s population, Ben-David’s sculptures materialize our shared humanity, allowing viewers to empathize with strangers from around the globe.
People I Saw But Never Met has travelled the world and grown with each presentation, as the artist adds new figures for each exhibition. The work has been shown in Japan, Portugal, Siberia, Ecuador, Tel Aviv, Australia, and South Korea; and now includes over 8,000 sculptures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, People I Saw But Never Met took on a new meaning, becoming a powerful symbol for humanity’s isolation and communication and demonstrating that we are more alike than different. Work in From Here, There, and Everywhere encompasses the 9+ years of Ben-David’s series, placing early work in conversation with new sculptures.
Against the backdrop of environmental disasters, wars, and global crises that threaten humanity’s continued survival, Zadok Ben-David presents a message of optimism and hope. A lack of hierarchy between the sculptures gives dignity and respect towards every stranger whose likeness is captured, regardless of origin. Ben-David believes communication and empathy are the solution to many of the problems humanity faces, and the installation visualizes human beings as a collective, emphasizing that our similarities are greater than our differences.
Zadok Ben-David lives and works in London and Portugal. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia including: Itchimbia Cultural Center, Ecuador; Kew Gardens, London; Centro de Arte Contemporanae Graca Morais, Bragança, Portugal; Kenpoku Art Festival, Irabaki Prefecture, Japan; The Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent; Singapore Botanical Gardens; and The Tel Aviv Museum amongst many others.
Ben-David has participated in group exhibitions, biennials, and museum shows worldwide including recently at The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; Arts Maebashi, Japan; and Breda Photo Biennial, Netherlands (2020). Additionally, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Cerveira Internatonal Art Biennale Cerveira, Cerveira, Portugal (2022, 2020); Busan Biennial, South Korea (2010); Wonder Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2008); and the Venice Biennale, Italy (1988). His art can be found in the collections of museums and public sites across Europe, East Asia, Australia and America including: Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; among others.
April 6, 2024 - May 11, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Yveline Tropéa’s work in the United States: Between Two Worlds. The exhibition will be on view April 6th through May 11th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 6th from 4-6pm.
Drawing inspiration from dreams and folklore, Yveline Tropéa creates paintings that defy explanation. A man and woman are wedded on a floating slug, an eyeball-shaped kite pulls miniature figures out of frame, and creatures melt into each other in Tropéa’s surreal scenes. The artist abandons notions of perspective and scale to produce dream-like compositions against backgrounds resembling cosmic ripples or oceans of sand. Working between Paris and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Tropéa’s paintings are influenced by the myriad of cultures and traditions that surround her. Tropéa transcribes events from everyday life and mythology into her canvases, attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible.
Tropéa skillfully mixes hand-beading and embroidery, hiding motifs in plain sight and creating kaleidoscopic backgrounds. Her process begins with free drawing, autonomously transcribing dreams and fantasies onto paper. The artist digitally enlarges the image and maps out color choices and patterns for beading and embroidery. Selections of glass beads and threads draw from local beading techniques and source material from craftspeople in Ouagadougou. Tropéa charts out the direction of each strand, resulting in richly textured imagery that animates the mystical narratives.
Combining traditional materials with a surrealist and spiritual approach to production allows Tropéa to create a world ruled by irrationality, which we are invited into. Much like contemporary life, Tropéa’s work exists in a space of ambiguity, but by venturing into these dream-like images viewers can find inspiration and meaning, widening their own worlds in the process.
Yveline Tropéa (b. 1962) was born in France and lives and works between Paris and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Tropéa’s work has been included in exhibitions at Centre André Malraux, Agen, France; Ouagadougou Biennial, Burkina Faso; Il giardino di Daniel Spoerri, Seggiano, Italy; Château de Montbron, Montbron, France; Biso Biennial, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Institut Français de Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Musée de la toile de Jouy, Jouy en Josas, France, among others.
February 3, 2024 - March 29, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Gravity of Color by Rachel Lachowicz. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view February 3rd through March 29th, 2024, with an opening reception Saturday, February 3rd from 4-6pm.
Lachowicz’s newest body of work utilizes materiality as a lens to examine our reality through color and geometric abstraction. Materiality has been a through line in Lachowicz’s work, and through her use of cosmetics the artist attempts to break down strict and outdated binaries of gender. Where previous works have addressed these topics through direct representation and interpretations of the western art historical canon, Lachowicz has shifted her focus to geometric abstraction in an effort to make sense of the systems and laws which define our existence.
Many of the works in The Gravity of Color were born from the artist’s interest in quantum physics and cosmology, and showcase a desire to illustrate the intangible. Works like Time (2024), Deep Weave (2024), and Radiofrequency (2024) are abstract representations of longitudinal waves, multiverse theory, and radiofrequency radiation. Depicting these monumental ideas through her signature medium of pressed-eyeshadow allows Lachowicz to examine them at a granular level, shifting the scale to something relatable. Etymology further strengthens a connection between cosmetics and cosmology, as both words share the Greek root of cosmos/kosmos. This shared root roughly translates to ‘order’ or ‘proper arrangement’ and by representing the forces which order our universe through makeup, Lachowicz illuminates and strengthens these connections.
Lachowicz’s engagement in geometric abstraction and desire to experiment with materials situates her in a lineage of California artists stretching back to the 1950’s. Abstract eyeshadow pieces in the gallery’s main space are reminiscent of works by Southern California’s Abstract Classicists, while also drawing inspiration from Victor Vasarely and Joseph Albers. In the second gallery, Lachowicz has created two sculptures: Granularity of Space (2024) and Packets of Light (Yellow Field) (2024), which feature powder-coated eyeshadow tins. The two works evoke the Finish Fetish movement of the 1960’s, but the artist’s decision to combine cosmetic tins with industrial material puts a feminist spin on this male-dominated movement. While previous exhibitions sought to directly recreate iconic works of art, works in The Gravity of Color are wholly original outputs.
Material relationships lie at the center of Lachowicz’s newest pieces, and by showing the links between paint and cosmetics the artist further blurs the line between the two. While materiality has always been central to her practice, recent work sees Lachowicz taking this interest a step further and creating ‘hybrid’ pieces that combine lipstick and oil paint. These are unlike the lipstick-coated canvases and sculptures present in past bodies of work, and appear closer to gestural works of abstract painting than anything Lachowicz has created before. Powder-coating sculptures of enlarged eyeshadow tins furthers the artist’s explorations of material relationships, as Lachowicz sees a link between the industrial practice and her use of eyeshadow powder as paint. A guiding principle of Lachowicz’s work is her use of ‘other’ materials, which she sees as a way to ‘other’ her oeuvre within the art world due to the materials she employs. In The Gravity of Color, Lachowicz continues to make a case for the inclusion of cosmetics as a form of painting, and demonstrates how structurally similar the two mediums are.
As Lachowicz investigates the makeup of our universe in her signature medium of lipstick and eyeshadow, she represents larger-than-life ideas on a human scale. Varying relationships between scale lie at the heart of The Gravity of Color, and by shedding light on these relationships Lachowicz helps viewers ask philosophical and scientific questions about the nature of our existence. The eyeshadow dust that comprises the colors in Lachowicz’s work is not unlike the cosmic dust which forms our universe, and illustrating this allows us to see the gravity that color holds.
Rachel Lachowicz (b. 1964) lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. She received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and is currently a professor of studio art at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Her work is currently included in ‘Inner Worlds: Sigmund Freud and Art’ at Kunsthalle Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany. Lachowicz has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; ICA, London; Benaki Museum, Athens; AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Tianjin, China; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; New Museum, New York City; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Venice Bienanale (1993). Her work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, among many others.
2023
DECEMBER 2nd, 2023-JANUARY 27th, 2024
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce Storyteller Yellow, Jiha Moon’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Storyteller Yellow will be on view from December 2, 2023 through January 27, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, December 2, 2023 from 4-6 PM.
Jiha Moon’s ceramics and painting draw from Korean folklore, Western contemporary art, and popular culture to create hybrid forms with a vibrant and personal visual language. Born in Daegu, South Korea and recently moving to Tallahassee, Florida after living in Atlanta for 18 years, Moon’s iconography speaks to the complexity of human experience in a globalized world where images are easily shared and recontextualized. She is a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker of cultural landscapes, including symbols from American and Korean culture to produce works that look both familiar and unconventional. In Storyteller Yellow, Moon’s visual vocabulary includes dumplings, fortune cookies, peach, Haetae, banana peels, Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, Milagro, and fireworks along with images of the artist’s son and pets to connect these motifs to her personal history. Embracing contrasting ideas and imagery is a way for Moon to subvert commonly held stereotypes of Asian and Asian-American communities, instead celebrating Asian culture by putting traditional symbols in conversation with emblems of contemporary pop-culture.
The title Storyteller Yellow is drawn from Moon’s interest in the color yellow, which she investigates in both aesthetic and racialized contexts. Moon uses yellow for its “social, political, or cultural point of view,” acknowledging an association between the color and racial slurs towards Asian-Americans. Through abundant and prominent uses of yellow in her work, Moon subverts biases against the color and transforms yellow into a point of joy. The blossoms of chrysanthemums, broad strokes of yellow dancing between visual references to landscape painting, the inclusion of a banana peel stretching across a canvas, and the bold use of yellow as a vibrant base become points of exuberance in these works. By centering and celebrating yellow, the color becomes a piece of conversation through Moon’s work, forcing viewers to acknowledge its presence and conjure positive associations with yellow, such as sunshine.
Moon’s work acknowledges the multicultural world taking shape around us, and her mixing of iconography asks the viewer to reflect on how art and society can benefit from this fusion. Posing the question of where someone or something “comes from” is not simple – and often times not important – in the 21st century. All of the works in Storyteller Yellow push the boundaries of categorization, inhabiting many identities at once and reflecting the diversity of experiences and cultures in our world.
Jiha Moon (b. 1973) lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received a BFA from Korea University, Seoul, an MFA from Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Moon is a 2023 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Fine Arts. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the Asian Art Museum, San Fransico, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Fransico, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Asia Society and Museum, New York, NY; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, among many others.
SEPTEMBER 23th - NOVEMBER 22th, 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce tomorrow is just a thought, Terri Friedman’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. tomorrow is just a thought will be on view from September 23 through November 22, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 23 from 4-6 PM.
Terri Friedman’s work responds to internal and external uncertainty through woven tapestries. Seeing the act of weaving as a unification of warp and weft – or left and right brain – Friedman attempts to weave new neural pathways on her loom and in her brain, combatting a climate of anxiety and instability with fiber. The human brain is wired for negativity and catastrophe, with our fight or flight responses being our first reaction to anxiety. Neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to repair neural pathways has informed Friedman’s work. If tomorrow is just a thought, then Friedman encourages viewers to ask themselves ‘what can go right?’ instead of considering what will go wrong.
The work presented in tomorrow is just a thought explores the relationship between mind and body, considering the effects brain chemistry has on creating elevated emotional states and utilizing color, fiber, language, and abstract gestures to activate chemicals like Serotonin, Endorphins, Dopamine, and Oxytocin. Cultivating these elevated states and happy hormones is a political and personal weapon for Friedman that serves as barrier against indulging in despair. Though not representational or figurative, the work is imbued with an organic quality: orifices, uvulas, eyes, intestine-like cords, veins, and hair are primary in the work. Holes and cracks within the work allow light to penetrate each piece.
Weaving has become an extension of Friedman’s practice of exploring methods of painting without using paint. In previous bodies of work the artist explored painting through the use of everyday material, and Friedman brings her experience in painting, kinetic sculpture, and installation to the loom. Her meticulous process begins by drawing a work on her iPad and selecting fibers before weaving. These “yarn paintings” undermine a traditional hierarchy of materials, incorporating objects like painted piping, hemp cords, and stained glass with naturally dyed wools and acrylic threads. The warp and weft of these threads carry equal importance, as the artist embeds stripes or plaid into each piece. By strategically placing fibers of varying thickness and texture, Friedman creates pieces that appear multi-layered and borrow from other artistic practices: black lines allude to the solder of stained glass while disparate patterns placed side by side recall quilting techniques.
Language and color are employed in Friedman’s work to create somatic posters of urgency. Words like ‘heal’ ‘alive’ and ‘refresh’ can be found in these pieces, alongside a palate of acid yellows, dirty ochres, reds whites and blues, and hot pinks that envelop and camouflage their meaning, acting as a suggestion rather than a lecture. Friedman is drawn to abstraction because it “creates the most powerful picture of the unexplainable and unknowable.” It allows the artist to make sense of personal and world events, exploring places where the political and emotional bodies intersect. A response to anxiety, anger, and grief; each weaving is an agitated yet affirmative scream.
Terri Friedman lives and works in El Cerrito, California. She is Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where she has taught both undergraduate and graduate students for the past two decades. Born in Colorado, Friedman received her BA with Honors from Brown University and MFA from Claremont Graduate School. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; CUE Art Foundation, New York City; CODA Museum, Netherlands; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the San Jose Museum of Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California. Friedman has received numerous awards including The San Francisco 2021 Artadia Award, Facebook Artist in Residence, CUE Art Foundation Grant, Santa Barbara Arts Fund Grant, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Grant, Albin Polesak Award. In 2022 the De Young Museum acquired her seminal work ‘ENOUGH’ (2021).
NOVEMBER 10th - 13th, 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the Salon Art + Design Fair at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, opening to the public November 10, with a presentation of works by Orly Maiberg and Anina Major.
Orly Maiberg is a Tel Aviv-based abstract painter, whose process begins on the studio floor and combines elements of collage to create visually rich works. At first glance, Maiberg’s works seem like abstract spaces, raw matter touched by delicate gestures of paint; but a closer look reveals complex landscapes populated by fragile figures which define the painted space. Maiberg’s work is currently on view at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The gallery’s booth will also feature a new book of Maiberg’s work, published for the occasion of her show at the Israel Museum.
Anina Major is a Bahamian artist living and working in New York City. Major transforms the artistry of basket- weaving and straw-work from her Bahamian ancestors into clay vessels. Basket-weaving and straw-work are traditions performed primarily by women for economic needs, but one which Major treats with care and reverence through the art of plaiting strands of clay in and out of each other. Major is the recipient of a 2023 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and currently has work on view at the MFA Boston and the RISD Museum, and is in the collection of LACMA, the MFA Boston, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and others.
The fair runs from November 10 to 13, with VIP previews taking place on November 9. Shoshana Wayne Gallery will be located at booth B11.
AUGUST 5th - SEPTEMBER 15th, 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce It Ain’t Necessarily Soft, Gil Yefman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. It Ain’t Necessarily Soft will be on view from August 5 through September 15, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, August 5 from 4-6 PM. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of performances and walkthroughs, including a conversation between Gil Yefman and Norman Kleeblatt, former chief curator of the Jewish Museum (New York, NY), on August 10.
In his debut solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Yefman exhibits sculptural and two-dimensional installations created over the past decade. Yefman’s practice explores a unique artistic language defined by brightly colored knitted sculptures of grotesque, fluid, multi-organ beings. The knitted work becomes an extension of the body, and felting becomes a memorialization of the experiences held within that body. Though knitting and felting are commonly associated with female, queer, and domestic tasks that would traditionally fall into a strictly decorative category, Yefman redefines them into works that honor a memory within the individual to provide a sense of justice and new presence in the world. These soft objects that were once read as defense mechanisms representing a vulnerable or threatened body are transformed into a new relationship with social injustices.
In Yefman’s work, there is a constant state of transformation – of an interdependence between history, memory, and imagination – which contributes to the remission of personal and social hurt. At the center of this investigation into transformation is Tumtum (2013), a crocheted sculpture which hangs from the gallery’s ceiling. The work’s title originates from a pre-medical biblical term used to describe the gender of an individual with ambiguous genitalia. However, in modern Hebrew the term is a common curse referring to stupidity. Yefman’s sculpture investigates the evolution of the term, positing that the contemporary meaning may be the result of political agendas of separation and control, coding non-binary forms of identity as transgressive. Throughout It Ain’t Necessarily Soft, Tumtum will be activated by artist performances.
It Ain’t Necessarily Soft draws attention to the relationship between fiber arts and language by emphasizing the textual and narrative sources embedded in Gil Yefman’s artistic objects. The words “text” and “texture,” which share the same root, emphasize the crossing and interweaving of personal, mythological, historical, and political narratives in his work. Identities dissolve and reappear in constant flux, from the particular to the universal. Yefman’s work points to the continued existence of identities that have been ‘othered’ throughout history, connecting echoes of the past to today’s political landscape.
The uncanny, and even romantic, nature of the nostalgia exemplified in Yefman’s work is both familiar and strange, standing in contrast to human nature. It Ain’t Necessarily Soft presents a body of work both grounded in history and looking forward. It demands a new relationship to difficult realities of the past, and requires that something beautiful must be made from that pain.
Gil Yefman (b. 1979) lives and works in Tel Aviv. He earned his BFA at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel and was a recipient of a two-year fellowship from Alma College for Hebrew Culture Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel. Yefman was the 2017 recipient of the Rappaport Prize for a young Israeli artist, and has completed residencies at the ISCP, Brooklyn, NY; Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Japan; and the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2018) and Haifa Museum, Israel (2017-18). Yefman’s work has been included in group shows at the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; The Jewish Museum, New York City; Espace culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; and MOCA Museum, Taipei, Taiwan; among others. His work can be found in the permanent collections of The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; The Herzliya Museum, Israel; Shocken Collection, Tel Aviv, Israel; and Bronner Family Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany.
JUNE 10th - JULY 22nd, 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce Frock-Conscious, Elaine Reichek’s 5th solo exhibition with the gallery. Frock-Conscious will be on view from June 10 through July 22, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 10 from 2:00–5:00 PM.
Frock-Conscious explores the relationship between textiles and painting through nearly 50 works produced over the past 5 years. Although the exhibition is primarily grounded in Reichek’s signature medium of embroidery, it also expands spatially to restage the studio itself as a blended site of artistic production, domestic life, intergenerational conversation, and critical investigation.
In the large gallery is a salon-style installation of 24 embroideries, featuring images of clothing or textiles that Reichek has appropriated from a wide assortment of paintings, drawings, and designs. Collectively these art-historical sources — ranging from Michelangelo to Kerry James Marshall — read like an associative mini-survey of the artistic pleasures and challenges in rendering costume, drapery, and pattern. Whether full-bodied or a tight crop, each image has been re-created entirely in thread, by either digital or hand-sewing techniques. Reichek thus engineers a cyclical translation of depicted fabric back into actual material, as well as a conceptual inversion of the distinctions between the fine arts and craft.
Reichek’s investigation of the semiotic repertoire of fabric also examines its function as a second skin, whether through haptic textures or with an embroidered text that conjures the erotics of touch. Coding is another through-line, as she compares darning patterns to Sol LeWitt’s systems- work seriality.
The largest works in the exhibition, JP Textile/Text 1 and 2, reimagine Jackson Pollock’s legacy as a collision of metaphors and materials. Each unfurls a considerable length (12 and 17 feet, respectively) of fabric commercially printed in 2 colorways with a pseudo-Pollock pattern — Spatter, by Kravet Inc. — over which Reichek has digitally sewn 25 citations selected from Pollock’s critical bibliography. Each citation is embroidered in a distinct typeface and appears randomly at least 3 times in each work, as Reichek cheekily literalizes the idioms “an embroidered reputation” and “art by the yard.”
Rounding out this associative exploration of the repressed connections between Pollock and the decorative is a triptych of 3 silk charmeuse scarves that reproduce Cecil Beaton’s 1951 photoshoot, for Vogue, of models in couture gowns posing against Pollock’s drip paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery.
The small gallery space stages a conversational installation devoted to Henri Matisse and the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. Although Matisse profoundly influenced the Bloomsbury artists, their entrepreneurial efforts actually anticipated his own forays into commercial decoration and textiles by nearly two decades. Along the right as one enters, 4 embroideries reflect on the Bloomsbury artists’ sustained engagement with fabrics and patterns, both in their paintings and through their short-lived but influential design business, Omega Workshops. Reichek also displays 2 dresses sewn from Omega fabrics (now marketed by The Charleston Trust) featuring painterly patterning by Bell and Grant. Both dresses are made in a modern high-waisted, corset-free style, for which Bell herself was widely known within her social milieu. To each is pinned an embroidered remembrance of Bell’s fashion sensibility from her daughter, Angelica, and her granddaughter Henrietta, respectively.
In a similar spirit of cross-pollination, Un petit salon après Matisse is a staged mashup of current-day commercial product adapted from Matisse’s work, intermixed with vintage items that evoke his extensive and eclectic personal collection of textiles and furniture. A double-sided green-velvet folding screen, entitled Screen Time with Matisse, serves as a kind of Warburgian atlas of printed archival images, assorted fabric swatches, and miscellaneous merch. And in another related mode of deconstruction, Scattered “Sheaf” with Felt and Fabric reimagines Matisse’s 1953 ceramic tile mural The Sheaf as fabric cut-outs pinned around a tricolor, imitation-block-print floral pattern.
As Reichek brings each new round of conceptual and material repartee back to her own artistic production, she reveals herself as both subject and object, maker and viewer, fan and critic, engaged in an ever-renewing reflective dialogue.
Elaine Reichek (b. 1943) lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and a BFA from Yale University. She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, with solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; the Tel Aviv Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Jewish Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Dallas Museum of Art; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, among others. Reichek’s work was included in Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum in 2022; Venedigsche Sterne at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland, in 2022; Art_Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, in 2015; Art/Histories at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, in 2014; the 2012 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil; and the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
APRIL 29th - JUNE 1st, 2023
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “Black & White,” an exhibition of works by Beverly Semmes, Dinh Q. Lê, Jeanne Silverthorne, Nardeen Srouji, Rakuko Naito, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, Tadaaki Kuwayama, and Yoko Ono. On view from April 29th to June 1st, 2023.
Works included in Black & White explore the possibilities created by strict aesthetic guidelines. Beverly Semmes’ seminal work ‘Buried Treasure’ (1994) will be presented in the first gallery space, while the second space contains a selection of ‘white’ works.
MARCH 4th - APRIL 22nd, 2023
In the third of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the paintings of Chie Fueki and the paintings and drawings of Joshua Marsh.
Chie Fueki
If one of the ways in which we’ve exacerbated the environmental crisis has to do with assumed hierarchies in which animals, plants, and the objects of the earth are valued principally for how they serve human beings, the so-called apex species, then Chie Fueki’s art is tonic— and timely. The filmmaker Agnès Varda once noted that “If we opened people up, we would find landscapes.” Fueki’s paintings, in which the outlines of human figures can contain green leaves or midnight blues, is a case in point. Made during the pandemic in the especially lambent light of dawn or gloaming, Fueki’s new body of work radiates emotional tones that twine longing and pathos.
Human figures, architectural graphics, symbols, and pattern fields coexist as a pluralistic, integrated painted organism. Pervading her figurations are radiant lines of energy, colorful swaths of abstract ornamentation, and variant but simultaneous perspectives. None is more central or more important than the others. There is even a democracy of material and method in Fueki’s approach to art making. What we call her painting is really a collaborative endeavor between wood panels, mulberry paper, glue, rubbings, drawing, collage, brushwork, pour, and acrylic paint. The realms we often assign to “inside”— our emotions, for instance, or our living room— and “outside”— the landscape, other people— have no clear boundaries in Chie’s work; they are one and the same. In most of the paintings in this show, inside— Fueki’s Hudson Valley apartment with its many curiosities— and outside— Mt. Beacon in the near distance—present themselves in an alliance with decorative motifs. The result is a radical, non-logocentric realism, where objects, figures, world, imagination, ornament, and lines of energy harmonize in a multi-perspectival mutuality we might recognize as actual experience.
Joshua Marsh
A body of Joshua Marsh’s small— 5” X 4”—graphite drawings share their image repertoire with two sets of paintings roughly five times the size of the drawings. In both, we see still life arrangements of apples, spools of thread, flasks, skulls, drawers, pipes, a bee, occasional scrawled words, and curious image rhymes that link, for instance, the springy wire doodle in one image with the curlicue hairs of a satyr’s soul-patch in another. There are also more ambiguous objects and shadows or ghosts of objects, and nascent faces— and we’re given (by their titles) to connect them to the Faust legend, that drama of lust for knowledge and pleasure, and its tragic repercussions. Often, it seems as though an object is appearing playfully next to the idea it generates. The congeries of images unsettle us; we don’t know how to categorize their roles in this context of conflicted relations. Rather than sating our desire for immediate satisfaction, Marsh’s work insistently introduces strategies of incongruity, perspectival and graphemic play, humor, and restraint that end up intensifying the fulfillment of our looking.
The acrylic paintings generally hew to a color palette of brown, green, grey and blue, with the blues sometimes enacting contradictory perspectives, morphing between sky-like space and the clearer shape of an object. The ambiguities invite our extended attention as our eyes restlessly negotiate the intervallic leaps between conventional (skulls), personal (pipes), and inscrutable (cubes) object-symbols. What invests those symbols with significance is repetition and secrecy. In Marsh’s visual panoramas, our encounters with various symbols offer us the peculiar sense of wild disjunction tempered by meticulous detail. They are never a means for arriving at some predetermined, politically expedient, or instrumental supposition. Instead, we find that we keep coming across human absence and human trace: what we find in the paintings are hauntings.
We see the trace of the human, for instance, in the assemblages of flasks, vapors, and scale levers that are missing their Faustian alchemist. If Faust used alchemy to arrive at answers, Marsh is drawn to alchemy because he’s fascinated by questions, by the processes of transformation. What do we witness in his still lifes but mutability, the apples rotting, the blocks melting into biomorphic shapes. Marsh’s still lifes aren’t still at all. While we watch, they are turning into landscapes.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Chie Fueki (b. 1973) lives and works in Beacon, NY. Fueki was born in Yokohama, Japan, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. She earned her MFA at Yale University and her BFA at The Ringling College of Art and Design. She is an inaugural recipient of the 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2022), and the Purchase Prize (2021, 2004), and Rosenthal Family Foundation Award (2004) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo exhibitions include the Orlando Museum of Art, FL (2014). She has public artwork at PS 92Q, Queens NY, and HHS Lerner Children Pavilion, New York, NY. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Orlando Museum of Art, FL; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; the Hirshhorn Museum, D.C.; and the Pizzuti Collection at Columbus Museum of Art, OH.
Joshua Marsh was born in Pennsylvania in 1973, receiving an MFA from Yale University in 1997 and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995. His paintings and drawings have been included within exhibitions at Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, and the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT. In 2015 his paintings were included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. His paintings and drawings have been reviewed in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America among others. His work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA, Woodmere Art Museum, PA, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
As a Couple: Chie Fueki and Joshua Marsh met in graduate school while studying painting at Yale University in 1996. They have lived and worked together in Brooklyn, NY, next to a wooded preserve in West Chester, PA, and currently in the Hudson Valley town of Beacon, NY. Chie was Born in Yokohama, Japan, and moved at the age of three to Sao Paulo, Brazil where she lived until the age of 19. Fascinated by the appearance of the city from her family’s apartment, Chie would often stand by the window entranced by the patterns, structures, lights, fog and traffic movements of the city. Joshua grew up in Pennsylvania, where he often dwelt around streams, observing the flows, reflections, and intersecting processes that have remained inquiries within his work. Maintaining neighboring studios in all the places they have lived and worked, Chie and Joshua have continuously engaged in close artistic conversation, intertwining interests while exploring their distinct practices.
Written by Forrest Gander
JANUARY 14th - FEBRUARY 25th, 2023
In the second of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the artwork of Ashwini Bhat and the poetry of Forrest Gander. Bhat and Gander’s work will be on view until February 25th, 2023, with an opening reception on January 14th from 2pm to 5pm.
Ashwini Bhat grew up in rural, South India where she trained in a 2000-year-old dance form, Bharatanatyam, before coming to tour internationally with a contemporary Indian dance company. Her tumultuous, color-dappled ceramic sculptures relate the fire-and-earthquake-altered landscape of her adopted home, California, to female nature spirits of India. Bhat says she learned from dance how to keep her energy rippling and visible, even when her body is still, and only when her sculptures do the same does she think of them as finished. The large sculptures, which dominate the first room at Shoshana Wayne, appear to have been heaved upward from the earth, twisting, turbulent, merging sensual corporeality with tectonic drama. It’s as though the human body and the geologically active California landscape have become one thing. The smaller works in the second room bring into play thread— used in India to assign sacrality to objects— and Calla Lilies, symbols of regeneration whose orange-yellow spadices contain both male and female flowers in a spiral pattern. Bhat’s labor-intensive process involves the manipulation of soft clay slabs directly over her own body in an act of transformation and translation. She says the work in this show “responds to the phenomenon of the rift, the rupture, and the renewal of nature, body, clay, and self.” Her practice, and its attentive focus on the mutuality between human and non-human, comes to serve as a radical revision of our exploitative and transactional relation to a world of complex interrelationships.
Forrest Gander’s poems appear in both rooms of the show, in the first as a kind of word-detritus strewn along the central rift of a fault zone created by the sculptural components of Bhat’s wall installation, and then— in the second room— as vinyl text on the walls and in an invocational lenticular print. Gander, who has a degree in geology and a long practice as an ecological writer, traveled with Ashwini Bhat exploring many sections of the 800-mile-long San Andreas Fault. Each short poem, with its left margins stepped to enact the horizontal movement of a strike-slip fault, hovers behind a sculpture “perhaps like,” he says, “the low rumbling vibration that accompanies an earthquake.”
Both Bhat and Gander are interdisciplinary collaborators whose lives are intertwined by their mutual interest in ecology and place, emphasizing species interconnectedness. They live in the foothills of the Sonoma Mountains in northern California.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ashwini Bhat grew up in Southern India, studied literature and classical Indian dance, and later traveled the world as part of the radical modernist Padmini Chettur dance company. After sustaining injuries, she began working with clay and apprenticed with the architect and ceramicist Ray Meeker in Pondicherry. Bhat works in sculpture, ceramics, installation, video, and performance to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. She’s the recipient of fellowships from the Howard, the Pond Farm Julia Terr, and the McKnight Foundations. Her work has been exhibited nationally & internationally and can be found in collections at the Newport Art Museum, USA; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan; FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum, China; the Watson Institute at Brown University, USA; New Bedford Historical Society, USA; Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre, Latvia; and in many private collections.
Forrest Gander, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Twice Alive; Be With; and The Trace, a novel hailed as one of fifteen recent books that have “revived America’s Quintessential Genre, The Western.” Among Gander’s many translations are It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Best Translated Book Award), and Then Come Back: the Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda. Gander frequently collaborates with artists, including Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Ann Hamilton, Eiko & Koma, Kay Rosen, and Jack Shear. He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.
Written by Forrest Gander
Click here to WATCH the walkthrough with Ashwini Bhat and art historian Jenni Sorkin
2022
OCTOBER 29th - DECEMBER 22nd, 2022
In the first of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the paper constructions of Rakuko Naito and the paintings of Tadaaki Kuwayama. Naito and Kuwayama’s work will be on view until December 22nd, 2022, with an opening reception on October 29th from 2 to 5pm.
The auras radiated by Tadaaki Kuwayama’s smooth-surfaced paintings transform rooms and routine experience. They meet the eye with peaceable intensity. They are, perhaps, as much objects as gestures— if there were gestures equivalent to someone extending their mind like a hand. If you look at Kuwayama’s evenly-hued paintings for thirty seconds and think you’ve seen them, let yourself look longer. Look for three minutes and the color begins to adjust— like a body shifting its weight. If you’re standing directly before the painting and you take a step to the left or right, the aluminum strips between panels wink at you. Then lighter swaths of color suggest themselves in what you took, at first glance, to be sustained monochrome; other panels seem to darken ever so slightly. Or is this a trick of the mind or the light as your eyes keep pulling toward the center of the four-panel square, toward the hub, the cynosure? The gravity is strongest there. You feel its pull, its invitation. The subtlety of the painting draws you as a chimney is said to draw, at once into its color field and into yourself.
In another part of the gallery, we find Rakuko Naito’s boxed paper assemblages. One looks like the cross- cut of a hive or a bed of ooliths. Another like white cocktail umbrellas pressed flat. One like a constellation of baby octopus suckers. Another looks like a handmade Japanese go game board. Still another like the silence of a Phillip Glass composition playing in your head. Like and like and like. And yet, Naito’s art is gloriously independent of analogy. There is no nature, no narrative, no figure, no line, no colors, no titles. Her art doesn’t provoke likeness so much as it enacts its own distinct, insistent mode of intoxication. A signal blend of imagination and labor. Naito’s lushly exacting, iterative work is a paean to the hand and eye, and to the joy of repetition. Finger-torn and delicately arranged, her pieces of mulberry-bark paper take on the gorgeous rigor of the Fibonacci number sequence. Pressing outward, toward the edges of the white frames that contain them, Naito’s constructions give no quarter. Because there is no foreground or background, every element is equally essential. Her method, then, involves the highest degree of risk per unit of space. Every aspect is alert, on point.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Together, Rakuko Naito and Tadaaki Kuwayama immigrated from Japan to the United States in the late 1950’s and quickly found their place in New York City’s artistic avant-garde. Naito, the daughter of a doctor and amateur architect, has long worked abstractly using mulberry bark paper colored with plant pigmentation. Kuwayama’s large metallic color paintings, critically celebrated since his first New York shows in the 1960’s, rigorously upend conventional painting techniques and ambitions as they instigate an impervious aesthetic concentration.
Naito and Kuwayama live and work in New York City. Naito received her BFA from Tokyo National University of Art in Tokyo, Japan in 1958. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Tokyo International Biennale; Karuizawa New Art Museum, Karuizawa, Japan; and Museo D’arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy. Naito’s work can be found in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and The Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
Kuwayama received his BFA in painting from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo, Japan in 1956. He has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including The Museum Modern Art, Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and Rupertinum Museum, Salzburg, Austria.Kuwayama’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY, USA; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN.
Written by Forrest Gander
NOVEMBER 3rd - 6th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the prestigious ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, opening to the public November 3rd, with a solo presentation of works from Bahamian artist Anina Major.
The practice of making, the legacy of labor and the entanglement of personal and shared histories are at the heart of Major’s work. Major transforms the artistry of basket-weaving and straw-work from her Bahamian ancestors into clay vessels. Basket-weaving and straw-work are traditions performed primarily by women for economic needs, but one which Major treats with care and reverence through the art of plaiting strands of clay in and out of each other.
For Major, clay acts as an ideal archival material to capture the labor of these traditions. Clay is simultaneously malleable and permanent, displaying traces of the artist and the history in which she is intervening. The organic forms of her ceramic vessels look distorted under the weight of history and take on the appearance of surviving artifacts. They signal the continuity of cultural memory and the endurance that is cultivated through the processes of displacement.
Anina Major is a Bahamian born artist currently living and working in New York City. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has been exhibited internationally in the United States, The Bahamas and Europe. Her work can be found in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, RISD Museum, and the National Gallery of the Bahamas. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; New Museum, New York, NY; National Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; and DeCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Major is also the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship and serving as a mentor for the Saint Heron Ceramics Residency Program.
SEPTEMBER 17th - OCTOBER 22nd, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present ‘Inheritance’ by Anina Major. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. ‘Inheritance’ will be on view from September 17th through October 22nd, 2022, with an opening reception on September 17th from 2-5 pm.
The decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which Major was born and raised (The Bahamas) motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place. In search of a place to articulate the essence of her practice, the artist returns to the inspirational source of her work—the straw market, an actual place that possesses metaphorical meanings, to further explore her own migration and the emotional complexities of transactional relationships between people and places. At its juncture a sense of belonging is generated from a combination of characteristics, core values and deep-rooted histories that are often undervalued in the context of tourism.
In the desire to fabricate her own terms of cultural integrity and its defining influence, viewers experience sculptural works that act as present-day manifestations of the traditional weaving technique known as plait, taught to Major by her grandmother. Beach balls and straw bags collide into forms that through the material transformation of clay, exemplify the power of legacy building through making. And vintage postcards provide composition for the performative video work, Heavy is the Head as an alternate narrative to the utopian landscapes promoted.
As a counteraction to culture erasure, the work is a continued celebration and reclamation of the ideas behind ‘women’s work’, specifically regarding expressions of identity and imagination. Layering references to post-colonial themes, cultural commodification, feminism and migrational experiences, the abstract nature of the work has the capacity to exist in both traditional and contemporary realms.
Anina Major was born in Nassau, Bahamas. She lives and works in New York. Major received an MFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI, and a BS in graphic design from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; New Museum, New York, NY; National Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; and DeCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Major’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.
AUGUST 6th - SEPTEMBER 10th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present the LIFE II by Jinyoung Yu. This is the Korean artist’s first solo show with the gallery. the LIFE II will be on view from August 6th through September 10th, 2022, with an opening reception on August 6th from 2-5 pm.
Working with a cast of semi-transparent sculpted characters, Jinyoung Yu explores the disparity between the outer and inner self. Yu’s work acknowledges the anxiety of social situations and exposes implicit acts of cover-up one engages in when adhering to social conventions. This critique of social modes is developed using two opposing materials: vibrantly painted plaster and transparent PVC.
The weight of the hardened façade of these figures is carried by their thin bodies, and some even appear to carry the weight of others. As the artist captures the many faces we have created for ourselves, she implores us to examine who we truly are. Behind the flamboyant exterior, outside of ever-present hierarchies and oppressive social structures, we may be left with a hollow shell conditioned to be invisible.
Jinyoung has dealt with immense social anxiety and avoided being the center of attention from a young age. Though she as an artist utilizes extroverted expression to convey narratives, her introverted nature manifests in the transparent bodies of her sculptures. The subtle, nearly impassive expressions on the masks relate to the artist’s childhood, where she had to quickly notice subtle differences in the facial expressions of her parents to avoid being berated.
The artist’s exploration of family dynamics and ego ultimately led her to delve into the insecurities and inequalities prevalent throughout society. She shifts her focus from the individual, to society, to the world, and reflects on our reality where no one can escape the weight of ‘life’. Jinyoung Yu exposes the dualities that exist within us all, urging viewers to look inward for a solution to break this cycle.
Jinyoung Yu was born in Seoul, South Korea, where she lives and works. Yu received an MFA and BFA in sculpture from Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Vestfossen Museum, Norway; the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; the Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT; Gyeongnam art museum, Gyeongnam, South Korea; and Woljeon Museum, Icheon, South Korea.
the LIFE II is in collaboration with CHOI&CHOI Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; and Cologne, Germany.
Philip Argent, James Richards, Brad Spence
AUGUST 6th - SEPTEMBER 10th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Inquiries in Abstraction featuring Philip Argent, James Richards, and Brad Spence. The exhibition brings together the work of three California-based painters who use abstraction to investigate materiality, the human condition, and the digital world. Each artist has presented two paintings created in the past year, which reflect the turbulence and uncertainty of the present moment. Inquiries in Abstraction will be on view from August 6th through September 10th, 2022, with an opening reception on August 6th from 2-5pm.
Philip Argent’s paintings present an interpretation of the swift flow of experiential and technological influences. They also offer a counter to that rapidity; their meticulous surfaces and processes invite a slow read. Paint is applied using a variety of methods (masking, printing, atmospheric and linear) and allows for an intuitive selection of forms that often mutate, reappear, and transform as a series develops. The use of vivid color relationships stem from observations of natural phenomena, personal memory, and the influence of commercial or screen-based sources. Color plays an intrinsic role both as an indicator of depth and shape and as a referent for a non-objective internal logic.
Brad Spence’s paintings are improvised abstract spaces for fantasy projection. Viewers’ bodies are mobilized in search of a distance where the scenes come into focus. However, clarity is just out-of-reach as what resembles human forms dissolves into fingered smudges at close inspection. The mingled clusters of marks suggest social events, the nature of which is elusive and changing. They shift between celebrations, rites of passage and rituals of the carnal and carnivalesque. The paintings are intended to provoke viewers’ subconscious yearnings as expressed in social ceremonies and unsober excess. They are meant to activate both memories and their erasure.
James Richards’ two paintings initiate a new body of work inspired by the building technique of wattle and daub. Instead of mud on top of woven branches, paper-mache is applied to the expanded weave of the canvas. The paper-mache is then treated to look like unfired clay. An open structure of various materials including repurposed fabric, painted areas that mimic pen and ink drawings, and an ample amount of negative space contribute to an alchemy of surface and support.
Philip Argent received an MFA from UNLV and a BA with honors from Cheltenham School of Art. Argent lives and works in Santa Barbara and teaches in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. James Richards holds an MFA from Art Center of College and Design, Pasadena, CA and a BFA from California State University, Fullerton, CA. Richards lives and works in Los Angeles. Brad Spence holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Spence lives and works in Los Angeles.
JUNE 18th - JULY 30th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Lompoc Stories by Shirley Tse. This is the Calfiornia-based artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery. Lompoc Stories will be on view from June 18th through July 30th, 2022, with an opening reception on June 18th from 2-5 pm.
Continuing on the concept of “Stakeholders”- a solo exhibition representing Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019- Tse wants to bring to attention the biggest stake we all hold as stakeholders is anthropogenic climate change. Her current work contemplates all form of sustainability: our environment, our energy use, our mental health and our economic disparity. Tse has relocated to Lompoc – “stagnant waters, or lagoon” in Purisemeño language by the Chumash people - in search of a model for a sustainable art practice.
Non-human stakeholders of Lompoc- animals, minerals, flower seeds, rocket- enter into her studio. Incorporating shed snake skin, diatomaceous earth, tar and charred wood from wild fire into her sculptures, Tse makes palpable the fragility of our life-world.
Hong Kong–born, California– based artist Shirley Tse works in the media of sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She at once deconstructs the world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs models in which differences might come together. To visualize heterogeneity, Tse conflates different scales, fuses the organic with the industrial, moves between the literal and the metaphorical, merges narratives, and collapses the subject and object relationship. Tse received a Master of Fine Arts degree from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including: M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong (2020); the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004/2017); Osage, Hong Kong (2010/2011); K11, Hong Kong (2009); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2009); the Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk (2006); the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2005); Para Site, Hong Kong (2000/2005); the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2003); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002); the Bienal Ceará América, Fortaleza (2002); the Biennale of Sydney (2002); Capp Street Project, San Francisco (2002); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2002); MoMA PS1, New York (2002); the New Museum, New York (2002); Palazzo dell’Arengo, Rimini (2002); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001); TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam (2001); and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2000). Her work is held in the permanent collections of M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, among others. Tse represented Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Tse received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and has been on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001.
JUNE 18th - JULY 30th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Living in the End Times by Thordis Adalsteinsdottir. This is the Icelandic artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Living in the End Times will be on view from June 18th through July 30th, 2022, with an opening reception on June 18th from 2-5 pm.
Taking inspiration from her personal surroundings and current events, Adalsteinsdottir’s surrealist paintings let go of any notion of sense or reason. Living in the End Times, whose title is inspired by its biblical theme and a Slavoj Žižek book of the same name, is comprised of paintings created between 2020 and 2022.
Works included in Living in the End Times display scenes from everyday life: a man uses his phone in bed, a boy smokes a pipe, two figures play badminton; but Adalsteinsdottir makes sure these events are anything but ordinary. Animals often cohabitate with humans, vacuuming our floors and wearing our clothes, often appearing so large that seem like our equals. Figures are set against vivid colors and beautiful patterns, making these routine events into dreamlike compositions.
A lack of separation between an inner world and our environment, and portraying the inappropriate desire to define reality, is at the heart of Adalsteinsdottir’s paintings, and much of the work deals with spectatorship. Humans and animals peak into the windows of these interior scenes, becoming part of the composition as they watch from the background. The inclusion of security cameras and cellphones reinforces this ill-defined boundary between public and private life, hinting that these moments are much less intimate than they appear.
To summarize the experiences and feelings that inspired the works in Living in the End Times, the artist has prepared a statement for the show’s press release:
I am with everyone at once and never with anyone. Kissy-wink-face, heart emoji, thumb up my butt. I live in someone’s diary, it’s written in 1898. The world will never be the same. A large window is open and someone plays an instrument on the cobblestoned street. I check my phone, longing for nighttime and longing for sleep. Luckily the days rush past at lightning speed.
Someone goes out running, his woolen socks make a thump thumping sound on the cobblestones. He is building up strength and stamina, it is important so that he can run with other people who have built up strength and stamina. This seems to be a great year, a good diary; the smog is thick, the injustice is endless. I keep planting strawberries and the cats keep pooping on them. Thump- thump-thump- thump-
This man is very good at running and knowing what is important.
Finally, an angry pigeon closes the window from the outside, and I cannot hear the musical instrument anymore. I turn up the news and realize that the world will never be the same. Someone looked up and everyone was dead.
In a square meant for young people drinking and old people kissing, I kiss a running man on the lips and realize that the world will never be the same.
Thordis Adalsteinsdottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland and splits her time between Reykjavik and Rennes, France. She received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY after graduating from the Icelandic Academy of Arts and the Universidad de Barcelona, in Spain. Adalsteinsdottir has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally with exhibitions at The Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik Iceland, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, LA, Myokos Biennale, Greece, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Luis, MO, Chiang Mai Art Center, Thailand, and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York.
APRIL 30th - JUNE 11th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Revival by Max Colby. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Revival will be on view from April 30th through June 11th, 2022, with an opening reception on April 30th from 2-5pm.
Revival highlights two mature bodies of work by the artist. Colby’s most ambitious and prominent work to date, They Consume Each Other - an installation comprised of 42 meticulously crafted sculptures atop custom glass plinths - sits majestically in the main gallery. In the second gallery, new work from 2022 titled Shrouds connects Colby’s interest in material relation to the body in disquieting ways. The title, Revival, references Colby’s interest in mundane objects, aesthetics, and excessive consumption in contemporary culture’s relationship to normative, violent systems.
They Consume Each Other explores the body and its relation to material through references to ceremony and ritual, evoking a monumental altar. Her subversive and campy usage of mundane material seduces the viewer into complex dialogues on the role of aesthetics in binary, cultural constructions of gender, class, and taste in this playful, yet unsettling installation. With a focus on material, Colby’s approach is research-oriented, utilizing Western and American textiles, crafts, and everyday objects. The application is tender and careful, lush and highly embellished, opening a lens to reframe oppressive structures embedded in these materials from a trans and non-binary perspective.
Shrouds connects primary conceptual threads in Colby’s practice to the body through familiar objects - quilts. These works begin with reclaimed ‘Crazy’ quilts from 1900- 1950. The movements style uses a hodge-podge of fabrics lacking repetition and highly embellished embroidery, leading to an aesthetic of visually and culturally conflicting fabrics spliced together piecemeal. Colby’s quilts provide a remarkable overabundance of reclaimed materials sewn and embroidered on top. From party supplies to complex hand embroidery, connections drawn in Shrouds focus on reimagining relationships to popular culture and consumption through common associations with quilts of comfort, embrace, and home. Some ominous in scale, others small, the title Shrouds reflects the works anthropomorphic and haunting presence.
Colby has been exhibited internationally including at Wave Hill, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling and Museum Rijswijk, among others. She has completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Wassaic Project, MASS MoCA and a Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellowship. In 2022, Colby exhibited a campus-wide public commission for Art in Focus at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Art Production Fund.
Colby (born 1990, USA) lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2012.
MARCH 12th - APRIL 19th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Scarce Material by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the Los Angeles based artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from March 12 through April 19, 2022, with an opening reception on March 12 from 2-5pm.
For this exhibition, the artist looks back to the earliest iterations of the cinematic form, during the Silent Film era. Using black and white 35 mm film, video, silver gelatin photography, and fabric, Gschwandtner offers an alternative to the male-dominated history of film, and a literal mending and repairing of film history. “Scarce Material” refers both to a quilting term for anything that can be stitched together into a quilt, and to the archived early cinema made by pioneering women filmmakers that is in short supply.
The artist worked with local and international film archives over three years to source digital copies of some of the earliest films made by women cinema pioneers, whose work from the late 1800s - early 1900s is woefully under-recognized. She prints these movies onto black and white 35 mm film stock, and then cuts and sews the film into configurations based on quilt motifs. She intermingles footage to create a dialogue between the images inside the frames and the overall patterns of the quilt designs. The artist’s sewing of film is a three-dimensional form of cinematic editing and a reconfiguration of the notion of "filmic suture" (the use of editing to draw audiences into a story). It is also a way to center marginalized material histories of cinema, in which women with sewing skills translated their handcraft to film editing, and certain early film technology was based on the mechanical advancements of the sewing machine.
Many movies made by pioneering female filmmakers were never archived, and have been lost to history. To honor these works, the artist hand-embroiders filmmaker’s names and hand-writes the titles of their films and the dates the films were made onto blank film. The time she invested in handwork gives permanence and gravity to lost narratives by directors like Fatma Begum, India’s first woman director, who pioneered the fantasy genre in 1926, and Mimí Derba, a pioneering actress, writer and director from Mexico. Gschwandtner’s silver gelatin photos and video evoke cinema’s earliest origins in stop motion photography through a translation of moving images into patterns of women’s self-portraiture.
Gschwandtner has exhibited internationally at museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among many others. Her 3 channel video “Screen Credit,” commissioned by LACMA, is currently on view at the museum’s Stark Bar. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public and private collections worldwide. Her ‘zine KnitKnit is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University. She received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Bard College.
The artist wishes to thank: EYE Filmmuseum, the Netherlands; Gaumont-Pathé Archives; British Film Archives; Kino Lorber; Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Film Archive; Women Film Pioneers Project; Gregory Yee Mark; Suzan Mischer; Aimee Mann, and Maia Julis.
View the ‘Scarce Material’ Walkthrough & Conversation between Sabrina Gschwandtner and film historian Jennifer Peterson on April 2nd, 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLJye6oigQ4
JANUARY 29th - MARCH 5th, 2022
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at our new location on West Adams, Where Do We Go From Here an exhibition of new works by Tel Aviv-based artist Orly Maiberg.
The exhibition opens January 29th, 2022 and runs through March 5th, 2022. Where Do We Go From Here is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in the United States.
At first glance, Orly Maiberg’s works seem like abstract paint spaces, resembling satellite images. Raw matter touched by delicate gestures of paint. A closer look suggests a topographic map, patches that form landscapes, mountaintops, deserts and seas.
Maiberg’s work begins in dipping the naked canvas in a tub of ink, allowing the appearance of initial contours of fluid, topographical marks. Then the artist collages pieces of canvas, covering parts of the painting and creating frayed geological layers of states and textures. From that point onwards, her treatment of the canvas resembles a musical arc: actions lead to actions or a pause – an empty space within the painting. Any suspension demands another action and thus, repetitively, the painting is being created, variation upon variation.
The movement in the studio evolves intuitively, with moments of alertness that allow the mind to capture the story that emerges from the painting and illuminate it. Slowly, the arbitrary makes room for the rational, and the unconscious - for the conscious. Premeditation and randomness are being merged into a complex artistic progression, combining the pre-structured outline with that which appears out of the blue.
This repetitive process is evident in all Maiberg’s works. Wandering among them enables the viewer to weave fragments into an incomplete body, hallmarked by tear, disruption, scars and fragmentation, implying the complexity of our life’s reality. An event, a narrative-led occurrence begins to emerge from the painted scene. The eye wanders upon the canvas and what seems to be an overview of the abstract, the elusive and infinite, focuses at once when a fragile figure appears and forces a scale, sharpens the perspective, permitting the gaze to hang on to it for a short while and linger. Emerging like that, the figures define the painted space, which is bound by somewhat vague rules. The human presence disciplines the painted reality.
The works in the current exhibition were all created during the latest period of lockdowns, isolations and restrictions. As a way of challenging our restraining reality, the processes in the studio sought a release, spreading while the correlation between their fragmented forms and their inner chaos grew, gradually. In Sitting on a Branch the canvas’ boundaries are broken; the painting splits and branches out, as if it could go on growing.
Maiberg draws her themes from within the world’s onwards movement and lets them mirror for us, make us confront their – our – loneliness. They require us to pour our own notions onto the canvas, in order to stitch it together, raise questions and reassess, where do we go from here?
Orly Maiberg received her B.F.A. at the New York School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited her work extensively in Israel and internationally, and can be found in museum collections including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Maiberg lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Text by: Tal Bechler
2021
DECEMBER 1st - 23rd, 2021
ONLINE-EXCLUSIVE EXHIBITION
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Holiday Gift Show, an exhibition of works $500 or below from December 1st to December 23rd, 2021. The exhibition brings together the work of 11 artists creating 25 works of ceramics, collage, drawings and paintings.
For more information please contact the gallery at mail@shoshanawayne.com
SEPTEMBER 21st - NOVEMBER 30th, 2021
ONLINE-EXCLUSIVE EXHIBITION
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “Uncommon Ground,” an online-exclusive exhibition of works on paper available online from September 21 to November 30, 2021. The exhibition brings together the work of 17 artists, most if not all of whom are better known for their work in other art forms, such as painting or sculpture, but also actively made or make drawings or works on paper.
Each of the artists approach the medium of drawing in different ways, experimenting in media, techniques and materials to explore concerns, themes and ideas which range from identity, race and the body to social, economic, gender, and political issues. For each of these artists drawing is a language in which to speak, to speak out, speak up.
The works in the exhibition are drawn mostly from gallery artists, but also several others who have made outstanding contributions to the field of drawing over the years. The artists include: Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Jim Shaw, Yoko Ono, Russell Crotty, linn meyers, Shiva Ahmadi, Nicole Eisenman, Joshua Marsh, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Keinholz, Tom Burckhardt, Nancy Baker Cahill, Harry Roseman, Max Colby and Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Yuken Teruya.
The works on view speak for themselves, as each was made in a different time and place with different motivations in mind. Some are figurative, some partly abstract employing marks, forms, colors and patterns, or even whimsical, but all share a love of the hand-made, of visual beauty and sensuality even if each of the 17 artists conceptualize these concepts in wildly different ways. Within this group, however, there is a collective interest in the unconscious mind and inner desires, a recognition that the power of an artwork is to be felt, deep onside, as well as seen.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the Salon Art + Design at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, opening to the public November 12, with a presentation of sculptures by four women artists — Ashwini Bhat, Kathy Butterly, Anina Major, and Beverly Semmes.
Each artist has dedicated themselves to working in three dimensional forms, in clay and glass. The artworks radically disrupt conventional art historical categories of sculpture, ceramics as well as decorative art. Concept dictates aesthetics, with each artist creating subtle if imposing objects defined by their process of making.
The selection for the Salon Fair will include a selection of recent works by each of the artists— Anina Major is inspired by Bahmanian art traditions of basket making; Kathy Butterly looks to a history of western painting; Beverly Semmes rethinks ideas of form and functionality in contemporary art, and Ashwini Bhat is inspired by the natural environment around her.
The fair runs from November 12 to 15, with VIP previews taking place on November 11. Shoshana Wayne Gallery will be located at booth B8.
For all sales or media inquiries please contact:
Benjamin Genocchio | Director at Large
bgenocchio@shoshanawayne.com
Sean Hutton | Gallery Director
director@shoshanawayne.com
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the prestigious ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, opening to the public November 4, with a solo presentation of works from the past 3 decades by prominent American artist Rachel Lachowicz.
Lachowicz has dedicated her career to confronting gender norms and what she sees as the fallacy of gender neutrality in art history. Lachowicz uses cosmetics as a social signifier for feminine allure and sexuality, but also as a radical disruption of dominant paradigms, at times translating seminal objects in art history into feminist statements via the creative materials she uses.
The selection for the Art Show will include a group of iconic works from the early 1990s onward. One of the highlights is one of her popular sculptures of Duchamp’s urinals, made of red lipstick, which are today part of several museum collections. Also on display will be two new eyeshadow paintings, a medium she has worked in for three decades, and the installation artwork “Forensic Projection”, for which the artist created 3 life-sized versions of her head shown at successive stages in the aging process. Also on view will be a video of a seminal 1992 performance, “Red Not Blue”, which is part of the canon of feminist art history.
For all sales or media inquiries please contact:
Benjamin Genocchio | Director at Large
bgenocchio@shoshanawayne.com
Sean Hutton | Gallery Director
director@shoshanawayne.com
JUNE 15th - AUGUST 21st, 2021
Max Colby, Terri Friedman, Jeffrey Gibson, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Dinh Q. Lê, Anina Major, Madame Moreau, Elaine Reichek, James Richards, Frances Trombly, Yveline Tropéa, and Gil Yefman
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce “Above & Below,” an exhibition of work by 12 artists working with fabric, cloth, beads and woven materials. The exhibition opens to visitors June 15th and runs through August 21st, 2021.
The exhibition title refers to the process of weaving—threading above and below lines of thread to create a fabric. Though the use of weaving and woven materials is what unites each of these artists, they employ a diverse range of artistic processes and practices from weaving, quilting, sewing, needlepoint and felting to assemblage and threading.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery has a long history of showing artists using woven practices. Most artists in the show previously have exhibited or continue to exhibit with the gallery: these artists are Gil Yefman, Dinh Q. Lê, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Elaine Reichek, Frances Trombly, Anina Major, Jeffrey Gibson, Terri Friedman, and James Richards. In addition, Madame Moreau, Max Colby, and Yveline Tropéa are all showing their work in our Los Angeles gallery for the first time.
This is not a textile art exhibition. Much of the artwork has less to do with conventional ideas of weaving or an affinity for textile art as such and more to do with a sense of craftsmanship and process in art making. Major for instance works in clay, her process inspired by Bahamian basking weaving techniques. African beads and beading similarly underscore the work of both Moreau and Tropéa, while Gibson takes inspiration from Native American beading.
It is curious to observe that much of what you might call the ‘assembly language’ of each of the works tends to follow a basic pattern, the design made of successive foldings above or below a line. This harkens back to early human craft practices and even resembles in some respects the systemic architecture of initial, low-level computer programming languages. Machines, it would seem, were first taught to learn and perform basic tasks in ways which mimicked creative human thoughts patterns.
Making is the key here, with individual pieces carefully, sometimes painstakingly arranged, stitched, woven, handcrafted or embellished through loving labor. Several of the artworks were produced over a few months, sometimes in the studio or via social collaboration as in the case of Gil Yefman who worked with the Kuchinate, an African Women’s collective in Israel on the initial wet felting for his artworks, created originally for his exhibition “Kibbutz Buchenwald” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Form, scale and color are the considerations of utmost importance for all these artists, as much as materials and process in the works. Gschwandtner, Richards, Lê, Trombly, and even Friedman embrace abstraction to some extent: weaving or related techniques are used to obscure or to abstract raw, even sometimes graphic social and political visual source material ranging from posters and film stills to text, rope and printed bolts of fabric.
Colby and Reichek are conceptual artists who consciously work in decorative art styles with prosaic, malleable materials. Their artwork is intended to evoke an immediate association with domesticity, gendered labor, or women’s work specifically, and is therefore political in its orientation, if not intention, as a statement of social and cultural identity and gender (and ongoing fluidity) in contemporary culture.
The identity of the artist is a latent subject in a good deal of the artwork in this show, making many of the works autobiographical as in the case, most visibly, of Gibson, Lê, Colby, Major, Moreau, and Tropéa. To engage with their artwork is to enter their minds, to see a world anew through their eyes. Working above and below the line becomes a formal vehicle for a process of subjective storytelling, a way of ordering information to make sense of who they are, why and where they belong.
Appointments encouraged, but no longer required.
For more information please contact Rosie Morales at director@shoshanawayne.com
JANUARY 22nd - MAY 15th, 2021
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce, ”Yellow Haze,” an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Kathy Butterly. The exhibition opens at the Los Angeles gallery January 22nd and runs through May 15th, 2021. This will be the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, since joining in 2003.
Kathy Butterly creates ceramic sculpture and yet she combines it with a painters’ intuitive process of experimentation of color through glazes. Her latest body of work, made over the past 12 months in her New York studio, pushes her practice in a new direction— slightly larger clay forms are in evidence, to give herself, Butterly says, “a bigger canvas with which to work.”
Butterly has chosen to work with a restricted scale for over 30 years. “I find a strength in the intimate,” she explains, “I find power in scale shifts within the works, I enjoy making works that are not rushed and demand a lot of skill and knowledge. The small scale is very demanding. I have a deep understanding and relationship with my materials and this skill allows me to work with passion and allow humor to flow. Beauty, humor, awkwardness are all important to me. Humor is a gateway to provoking deeper thoughts, tough thoughts.”
Working with restricted scale is also, she says, a conscious social and political statement. ”I choose not to take up a lot of space with my artwork, to impose, but rather to engage the time and thinking of viewers. The works sort of demand you look at them and you take time to look at them —smaller forms pull you in and you spend a lot of time looking at them, they keep unraveling information. Environmentally I also do not want to create a large footprint, that is important to me as a world citizen.”
The variation in the scale of her clay forms is matched by a simultaneous expansion in the complexity of formal schemes. Colors are familiar, but mixed or sometimes muted to cover or to occlude sculptural detail, such as her trademark minute hand beading, that remains a feature. Her latest forms are at once more ambitious and more subtle, the artist totally in control of her media.
Butterly is creating artworks which can be appreciated fully from all sides. Her artworks have always been able to be contemplated in the round, but these pieces are striking in so far as they have no front, or frontal aspect, with each and every angle designed to give the viewer a perspective on the same object.
Not surprisingly her new clay forms take almost twice as long to produce. Partly it is the scale shifts and complexity of designs, but simultaneously it is because she has allowed herself a greater freedom of decision making. Butterly attributes this change in part to a year of being at home, and deeper, unavoidable thoughts about life and art.
Over the last 12 months she has renewed her interest in poetry and jazz, both highly improvisational, abstract art forms. The artist explains that in poetry and jazz she found a companion during protected periods of lockdown but also, creatively, a growing “comfort and freedom with abstraction rather than complete thought- rather than a song with words I felt connected to sound, to flow, staying away from fact and enjoying the freedom of not knowing.”
Symbolic connections between color and emotion can no doubt be made, for each piece seems to have its own temperament or mood. But that’s not the goal, just as pure abstraction conversely does not interest her. These objects are about feeling, about being human in the world—as complicated, painful, messy and joyous as that can be and often all at the same time.
Kathy Butterly received her MFA from the University of California, Davis and her BFA from Moore College of Art, Philadelphia. She has exhibited extensively and her work can be found in numerous museum collections including, MoMA, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX amongst many others. Butterly has been the recipient of prestigious awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship (2017), Siena Art Institute Artist Fellowship (2017), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2014), the Moore College of Art & Design Visionary Woman Award (2013), the Smithsonian American Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award (2012), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011) amongst many others. In 2017, Butterly was inducted as a fellow into the National Academy of Design. The artist lives and works in New York.
MARCH 5th - APRIL 30th, 2021
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Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present an online-exclusive exhibition by Japanese born and New York-based artist Rakuko Naito. This is her first solo exhibition with a Los Angeles gallery. The show will be live online March 5th through April 30th, with selected artwork available for viewing at the gallery.
Rakuko Naito was born in Tokyo and in the 1950s studied Nihonga painting at the prestigious Tokyo National University of Art. In 1958 she moved permanently to the US with her husband, Minimal painter Tadaaki Kuwayama, settling in New York where for more than 30 years she has worked exclusively with hand-made natural papers.
Naito uses paper the way a painter manipulates oil paint. Her vision is always two dimensional, she says, and her breathtaking, painstakingly detailed work is conceived to hang on the wall much like a painting does. She is interested in she says, “the simple beauty of shapes, both shapes of nature and geometric forms” and strives above all else in her art for “appealing forms as well as the tactile qualities of the surface and the texture.” Color is intentionally, rigorously restricted to focus the viewer on the formal elements of her designs.
Her latest body of artwork made over the last 12 months in her New York studio deepens her love of natural and geometric forms, texture and surface qualities in art. Her paintings are aligned formally with Minimalism, but the processes, materials, inspiration are entirely different—even unique. She does not begin with a drawing or a sketch in mind but she prefers to allow an image, often found in nature, to imprint itself on her mind and then to recreate it from memory.
She begins work in the studio with a box like frame, usually a square, and decides what shape to place on top of it. She then chooses the paper—always Japanese, white or off-white, hand-made and 100% natural and archival, but she does not work with the usual, known traditions of Japanese paper art like Origami. She prefers to casually tear or cut up paper she uses. The design evolves as she goes, but she tries to keep close to the original idea in her head. She explains, “A line formed naturally is not the same as a line drawn by hand. I try to experiment and manipulate materials to create my own world.”
Every work has a different image, a different inspiration even if they superficially look the same. This is not art about repetition or Zen or meditation. Nor is it artwork with a message or didactic quality. “I’m not trying to tell people what they should think or should see,” she says “it’s up to them. I always try to find beauty in simplicity and so for me that is the hardest thing to do, to do something complicated that looks more straightforward. My concern is purely art and visual stimulation.”
Rakuko Naito has presented more than 25 solo exhibitions over the last half century and participated in more than 50 group shows in a dozen countries. Her work is held in numerous museum collections including The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires Argentina; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.
JANUARY 7th - APRIL 3rd, 2021
Please click here to inquire
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present an online-exclusive exhibition of the work of New York-based painter Elena Sisto, “Empathy Machine,” and her first solo show at the gallery, consisting of over 20 graphic, gleeful paintings in India ink and graphite on masonite made in response to the rapidly changing social, cultural and political events of the past few months and years.
Women are the protagonists in her paintings, of all ages and types and engaged in everything from climbing mountains, brandishing weapons, to responding to threats of global warming, the trials of quarantine and social distancing along with civil unrest during the Covid 19 pandemic. Themes of bravery, caring, companionship and solidarity abound in these paintings coupled with a more subtle message of strength and resilience.
Sisto describes the central female character in her paintings as an anima or avatar, loosely modeled on events and feelings from her own life but also the imagination and news media images as well as dreams. “I think of my character as a loose proxy, a being of internal feeling rather than external looks that I can send into the world to do things I've never done, will never do, and that can enter difficult situations I'm interested in—sort of an empathy machine.”
The formal female figure evolved from cartoon characters of compelling women, especially Olive Oyl, girlfriend of Popeye, though greatly simplified, abstracted, exaggerated or made indeterminate to better slip in and out of different social roles and situations. The artist’s idea was to create immediate character recognition for the viewer but with sufficient ambiguity, verve and wit so as to enable broader, even universal identification. She is an everywoman, one with power and vulnerability but also potential.
Besides Olive Oyl, Daisy Mae from Li'l Abner is frequently referenced in these works, albeit in an elliptical fashion along with other popular cultural characters like Snow White, Annie Oakley, Nancy or the warrior women starring in films like the Hunger Games and Wonder Woman. The graphics of Matisse also remain a formal touchstone for the artist not surprisingly. “I go back to him always,” Sisto says, “the brilliance and joy of his work and the idea that the pose of the figure is the sign for the movement of the space.”
Sisto works these paintings using a subtractive process of her own invention. The figures are drawn up with pencil on an all black ground, built with layers of India ink, and then are subsequently carved out with a sharp instrument similar to the process of etching or dry point. The graphic intensity of the final images coupled with restriction of color gives the paintings an editorial quality, as if the artist is bearing witness to events. Equally important is the relationship between negative and positive space, the artist throwing her figures and their actions into sharp, almost heroic relief resembling monochromatic mythological scenes depicted on Grecian vases.
Elena Sisto lives and works in New York. She received her BA in Art from Brown University and studied at the New York Studio School. Sisto has exhibited at numerous museums including the Miami Dade Museum of Art + Design (2012), Katzen Museum of Art at American University, Washington, DC (2008), Maier Museum, VA (1999), Greenville County Museum, SC (1997), and Wexner Center for the Arts (1992), among others. In addition, she was included in the 43rd Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC (1993-94). She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2013), the Inglis Griswold Nelson Prize from the National Academy Museum and School (2008), and the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist's Fellowship (1984-85 & 1989-90). In 2015, she was inducted as a fellow to the National Academy of Design.
2020
DECEMBER 15th, 2020 - APRIL 3rd, 2021
Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Shiva Ahmadi, Nicole Eisenman, Chitra Ganesh, Angela Heisch, Orly Maiberg, linn meyers, Bridget Mullen, Rebeca Puga, Fiona Rae, and Beverly Semmes.
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE EXHIBITION
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce “UnRealism,” an exhibition of over 30 paintings by 11 women artists that reflect their own highly personal response and attitude to the ‘unrealism’ of our times. For some of the artists this has been a moment of existential crisis requiring bold statements and reflection on our place in society and the world, while for others ‘unrealism‘ has meant a doubling down on the role of art as a space for quiet, peaceful contemplation.
Drawn from different generations and backgrounds in Europe, Asia and America, what connects the artists is their difference: Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Shiva Ahmad, Nicole Eisenman, Chitra Ganesh, Angela Heisch, Orly Maiberg, linn meyers, Bridget Mullen, Rebeca Puga, Fiona Rae, and Beverly Semmes. Together they take the pulse of painting in the world today, reflecting what is being made now, among women painters, as well as in the art world more broadly at a time in which no particular art style or movement dominates and everything seems to coexist and mingle.
The artwork speaks for itself. But there are commonalities. Each of the artists in their own distinct way is socially minded. A commitment to painting is also unwavering and paramount— even if the materials and the surfaces which they use in their work clearly differ. So too is a commitment to realism, as a mode of expression, although this varies in the work from painterly forms of figuration to a new surrealism and expressionism bordering at times on abstraction. Unrealism is therefore reflected not just in the chosen content or subject matter of their work but a straddling and confusion of formal lines between figuration and abstraction. To all of the artists the distinction does not seem to be a hard or fast one but evocative of the doubts and questions we all face today.
Realistic depiction is a starting point for Ganesh, Rae, Adalsteinsdottir, Eisenman, Ahmadi, Semmes. The body in particular is the preferred subject, usually women’s bodies but not in a conventional sense of a female nude: these are bodies in transition, dissolution, movement, wracked with conflicts from within and out. Bodies of the past mingle with present life to forge a vision of what could or should be, at the least according to the artist. There is always something that disturbs us in these paintings, repressed or forgotten feelings welling up.
A similar evocation of energy and tension characterizes the artwork of the other main group of artists in this exhibition, Heisch, Puga, Mullen, Maiberg and Meyers who tend to abstract their focus with forms that defy easy categorization. The landscape or some kind of space emerges tangentially as a theme here, though frequently one has a feeling when looking at this work of falling into or through space.
WORLD VIEWS: HORIZONS AND LOOKOUT TOWERS
NOVEMBER 20th, 2020 - FEBRUARY 28th, 2021
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of over 30 photographs by the Los Angeles-based British-Mexican-American artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, selected by the artist from his ongoing and iconic series Horizons, as well as a new image series Lookout Towers. Shown at a time when confinements and lockdowns have increasingly constricted us into looking near, these two series explore the opposite: the act of looking far. The exhibition opens online November 20 and runs through January. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong’s artistic practice focuses, he has previously written, “on how we see, understand, and belong to the world.” His Horizons, begun in 2001, are a series of photographs taken throughout the globe of the line of sight separating ground from sky, and at the same time, on a more cognitive level, they are “an exploration of the horizon as the limit of what we can see and know, that questions the boundaries separating the present from the past, near from far, familiar from foreign.”
Mr Leong’s Horizons presented in this exhibition again reiterate his exploration of the range of environments within which our lives and histories unfold, and highlight, in addition, connections between abstraction and landscape, the picture plane almost dissolving into vast fields of color. Among the works on display here are horizons taken this year at Playa del Rey in Los Angeles, capturing the turquoise light generated by bioluminescent algae found in the ocean—the algae absorbs light during the day and gives off a bright glow at night.
Lookout Towers is a new series of black and white photographs of a building type particular to the Hoiping and Toisan regions of Canton, which emerged in the 16th century and reached an apogee of construction volume during the early 20th century. While these lookout towers served a defensive purpose against bandits and often functioned to represent social standing (whether of a family or a village), as a genre they are built expressions of diaspora—enabling, both literally and metaphorically, the act of looking out to distant horizons, and embodying the changing nature of living in and belonging to the broader world. Funded by remittances from communities in cities as dispersed as Mexicali, Lima, Caracas, San Francisco, Liverpool, Johannesburg, Kolkata, and Singapore, the towers symbolize an emerging form of global identity and cross-cultural melding that challenges ingrained assumptions about fixed borders and identities.
Much like the contemporaneous Beaux Arts movement, these towers mined historical architectural styles to create new forms from an eclectic mixture of influences—from Greek and Roman columns, to medieval turrets, to Fung Seoi geomancy, to Spanish arches, to Han dynasty watchtowers, to classical Han script and iconography. Growing internationalism, aided by migration, cultural exchange and integration, education abroad, the rise of the World Fairs, along with the increased distribution of books, postcards and magazines, all influenced and encouraged this stylistic diversity. For Leong, Lookout Towers is also a personal exploration into ancestry, as his grandfather emigrated from Toisan to England during the First World War and sent money back to construct such buildings.
Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong was born in Mexico City, where he spent his childhood as well as in London and Los Angeles, and has lived and worked in those cities as well as in New York, Rome, Houston, and Beijing. His visual practice has, over the past two decades, focused on creating new pictures of the world, whether by assembling together a new landscape that uncovers unexpected relationships, as in his series Horizons; by revealing how a society can be reshaped through the erasure of its history, as in his series History Images; or by surveying the newly unfamiliar terrains of a political map discolored by isolationism and nationalism, as in his series Atlas. His work has been exhibited internationally; reviewed, published, and written about extensively; and is included in numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Gallery of Canada, the Getty Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome. His books include History Images (Steidl, 2005), Horizons (Hatje Cantz, 2014), and the forthcoming Paris, Novembre (Steidl).
NOVEMBER 17th, 2020 - JANUARY 8th, 2021
Stephen Antonakos, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Ashwini Bhat, Nancy Baker Cahill, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Orly Maiberg, Anina Major, Rakuko Naito, Jolie Ngo, and Shirley Tse.
Being at home for much of 2020 has changed our sense of space and place in the world. This show is about that adjustment, in a loose way, bringing into focus selected artwork by gallery artists reflecting their current thoughts and feelings about their own relationship to home.
AUGUST 25th - DECEMBER 31st, 2020
Online Exclusive
In the beginning, there was earth. Humans have made functional objects and symbolic, spiritual forms in clay for thousands of years, and while today that tradition continues, more conceptual and aesthetic outcomes tend to motivate artists working with earth. Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “Forms Fired”, a collection of over 40 contemporary sculptures in clay on loan from galleries, collectors and artists worldwide.
Earth and fire unifies the 18 artists here. They all make fired forms, but unlike traditional ceramics their objects eschew functionality—relationships between a viewer, object, and space often define the meaning, sometimes in order to make social or political statements or in an attempt to stretch formal, conceptual or material boundaries. In sum these are sculptures in the round that inspire us through imagination, ideas, skill and beauty.
“Forms Fired” includes several artists who have an existing history with the gallery over its 35 years in Los Angeles, and its longstanding commitment to the support of women artists, such as Arlene Shechet, Kathy Butterly, Ann Agee, or Beverly Semmes, as well as some well known artists who are showing at the gallery and in some cases in Los Angeles for the first time. These include New York sculptor Petah Coyne, the renowned Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, UCLA Arts Professor and conceptual provocateur Rodrigo Valenzuela, the German painter and sculptor Anselm Reyle, New York conceptual artist Nicole Cherubini, Korean Yeesookyung, who showed at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and Copenhagen-based Israeli artist Tal R, whose ceramics are a study in contrasts, between form and formlessness, precision and imprecision, abstraction and figuration, raw structure and polished finish. They inhabit gaps, gleefully, celebrating ambiguity.
The gallery is also extremely proud to present the work of several young and up-and-coming artists new to the Los Angeles gallery scene. Zachary Leener makes highly-stylized, geometric, candy colored sculptures of prosaic structures or pop forms in his hometown of Los Angeles. Stella Sujin is a young Korean artist based in Paris who blends investigations of the female body, classical motifs and biology to conjure organic, hybrid and surreal forms. Similarly, Jolie Ngo, a graduate of RISD, and current MFA student at Alfred University in New York, harnesses 3D-printing technology to create wonderfully lively, vibrant, colorful and inventive vessels.
Anina Major is one of a group of talented young artists working primarily in clay, drawing widely on anthropological research and oral histories of African Americans to inform fragile, loosely thatched structures that resemble textiles. Born in India and now based in Northern California, Ashwini Bhat draws inspiration from nature, dance, music. Her layered, intricate sculptures resemble free form poetry in clay. Nigerian-born Ebitenyefa Baralaye, an artist, designer and educator in Detroit works in multiple media but often restricts himself to a monochromatic palate of raw clay from which to shape symbolic and socially motivated forms and statements. Lindsey Mendick, an artist based in London, was recently selected as a finalist for the prestigious Future Generation Prize—finalists participate in a group exhibition in Venice during the Biennale. She finds inspiration in daily life, emotions, feelings, simple things around her which she channels, and then transforms as sculptures. Her work is so honest and yet fragile at the same time.
“Forms Fired,” currently on view online, is the last exhibition that’s planned for our temporary space before Shoshana Wayne Gallery moves to a new permanent gallery home on Jefferson Boulevard, opening late fall with a solo show of the work of Kathy Butterly. Currently showing in the gallery is “The Art of Collecting” which is now available for viewing by appointment through the website.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery would like to thank Glenn Adamson for his strategic advice in preparing this exhibition as well as several art galleries and their wonderful staff for helping to arrange loans including Victoria Miro, Choi & Lager, Locks Gallery, Galerie Lelong, Almine Rech, September Gallery and P.P.O.W.
MAY 26th - NOVEMBER 14th, 2020
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “The Art of Collecting” a selection of highly desirable individual artworks assembled from private collections and artist studios over the past 12 months. The artists are all from different generations and are wholly unalike, in approach, media and materials, and yet share a commitment to formal beauty based on exquisite execution and making as well as a strong conceptual foundation.
The exhibition features work mostly of artists who have shown or been associated with Shoshana Wayne Gallery over 35 years, as well as new artists the gallery is proud to present for the first time. The artists include Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Stephen Antonakos, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Kathy Butterly, Michael Joo, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Orly Maiberg, Anina Major, Rakuko Naito, Jolie Ngo, and Yu Jinyoung.
This is the third exhibition at the gallery’s temporary space on West Jefferson Boulevard in anticipation of the opening of a refurbished 7,000 square foot dedicated gallery a few doors down the street in late spring. “In anticipation of our move to the new space we wanted to highlight the depth and quality of artists with whom the gallery has worked over the past 35 years here in Los Angeles as well as point towards some of the new and exciting directions in our program for the future,” says gallery owner Shoshana Blank. The artists and works span the past 50 years of art making with the earliest work from 1968 by Tadaaki Kuwayama, who along with his partner Rakuko Naito both began their careers as Minimal and Conceptual painters in the 1950s in New York and refined their techniques and skills over the following decades. Kuwayama’s TK8339-3/4-'68 (Mustard Yellow) retains the vibrancy and freshness of when it was painted in 1968, with the newly introduced material of acrylic paint, given to Kuwayama by painter Sam Francis to, he recalls, “try out and see how it looks”. The exhibition includes the works of another senior, important New York City artist from the later 20th century, Stephen Antonakos. For this exhibition one of his signature works on paper from 1970s, Untitled Cut JU#5, echoes his seminal neon canvasses of the same period that employ offset strips of light against an abstract painted backdrop. Maiberg is a gifted Israeli artist showing in Los Angeles for the first time. “‘The Art of Collecting’ is about slowing the viewing of art down, taking time to really contemplate individual works in a gallery. But it is also about discovery, which has been a part of the DNA of the gallery since the beginning,” Mrs. Blank says.
MAY 26th - AUGUST 31st, 2020
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce our online exclusive exhibition, "The Life of Things" featuring paintings by 12 artists exploring ideas of space and place - the spaces that we inhabit, the things which surround us, and a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging.
Domesticity is a recurring theme coupled with rigorous execution and a deep conceptual foundation. None of the artists simply depict things, or worlds they inhabit, but imagine, extemporize, embellish their subject matter in ways that conform to hopes and dreams.
The exhibition includes Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Ann Agee, Kathy Butterly, Sarah Cain, Jay Davis, Nicole Eisenman, Jane Freilicher, Carla Klein, Orly Maiberg, linn meyers, Michal Rovner, and Jorge Tacla. All of them are painters, but not all of them use paint on canvas to make art. Butterly and Agee for instance work in clay but employ paint and painting techniques.
Meyers, a Washington, D.C. based artist, is showing in Los Angeles here for the first time. She paints space, literally, but it's also an interior world that envelops and hypnotizes the viewer, while Tacla is a history painter, taking us to real places under threat of destruction. For Davis, Cain, and Klein, and even Eisenman, spaces are inherently social, contested.
Michal Rovner is a painter with light. Her recent, narrative video installations created from customized, computer programs take us into the future, visually and technologically. For Rovner, an Israeli, space is already and always synonymous with identity, deeply layered.
Dipping canvas in buckets of diluted ink, Orly Maiberg creates panoramic compositions that appear chaotic at first, purely abstract landscapes and yet have a basis in studies of biology, environmental politics, and a tension between nature as both a home and threat to humanity -- small insect-like figures populate her pictures, alone, seemingly lost and vulnerable at the edge of vast and foreboding environments which resmeble topographic maps or panoramic scenes viewed from above. But life is born here from death, figuration from abstraction.
Jane Freilicher and Thordis Adalsteinsdottir adhere to documenting intimate personal space. Adalsteinsdottir paints interiors, or more correctly interiors of interiors. She looks inward into her own mind to paint intense, arresting, psychological portraits of herself and others, frequently women. Freilicher paints interiors looking outwards to a landscape beyond her New York apartment or home on the eastern end of Long Island.
The gallery is open by appointment Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am – 5 pm.
For more information please contact Rosie at director@shoshanawayne.com
FEBRUARY 13th - MAY 26th, 2020
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “The Art of Collecting” a selection of highly desirable individual artworks assembled from private collections and artist studios over the past 12 months. The artists are all from different generations and are wholly unalike, in approach, media and materials, and yet share a commitment to formal beauty based on exquisite execution and making as well as a strong conceptual foundation.
The exhibition features work mostly of artists who have shown or been associated with Shoshana Wayne Gallery over 35 years, as well as new artists the gallery is proud to present for the first time. The artists include Stephen Antonakos, Nicole Eisenman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Michael Joo, Nina Katchadourian, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Rachel Lachowicz, Orly Maiberg, Mariko Mori, Rakuko Naito, Kiki Smith, and Yu Jinyoung.
This is the third exhibition at the gallery’s temporary space on West Jefferson Boulevard in anticipation of the opening of a refurbished 7,000 square foot dedicated gallery a few doors down the street in late spring. “In anticipation of our move to the new space we wanted to highlight the depth and quality of artists with whom the gallery has worked over the past 35 years here in Los Angeles as well as point towards some of the new and exciting directions in our program for the future,” says gallery owner Shoshana Blank.
The artists and works span the past 50 years of art making with the earliest work from 1968 by Tadaaki Kuwayama, who along with his partner Rakuko Naito both began their careers as Minimal and Conceptual painters in the 1950s in New York and refined their techniques and skills over the following decades. Kuwayama’s TK8339-3/4-'68 (Mustard Yellow) retains the vibrancy and freshness of when it was painted in 1968, with the newly introduced material of acrylic paint, given to Kuwayama by painter Sam Francis to, he recalls, “try out and see how it looks”.
The exhibition includes the works of another senior, important New York City artist from the later 20th century, Stephen Antonakos. For this exhibition one of his signature works on paper from 1970s, Untitled Cut JU#5, echoes his seminal neon canvasses of the same period that employ offset strips of light against an abstract painted backdrop.
Gallery artists Rachel Lachowicz and Sabrina Gschwandtner complement the exhibition along with significant works by Michael Joo, Orly Maiberg, and Yu Jinyoung. Maiberg is a gifted Israeli artist showing in Los Angeles for the first time. “‘The Art of Collecting’ is about slowing the viewing of art down, taking time to really contemplate individual works in a gallery. But it is also about discovery, which has been a part of the DNA of the gallery since the beginning,” Mrs. Blank says.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is delighted to return to ZONA MACO in Mexico City. As part of our commitment to presenting important and challenging contemporary art, we will feature a presentation of photography by Yvonne Venegas, one of Mexico's leading contemporary photographers. The artist has curated her own booth, an unusual creative gesture for an art fair, and will be installed as if it is a wall in her nearby Mexico City studio.
The booth will present close to a dozen images from an evolving series of work, "The pencil of nature," in which the artist explores gender, in particular masculine and feminine subject positions through, primarily, photographic poses. One group of pictures here can be described as gender fluid self-portraits and another group is portraits of women, the artist using professional actresses based in Mexico City to enact or play out different subject positions and poses.
Writing about this series of work, the artist has said:
"In this series I revise female poses when photographed by men, re-visiting the work of photographers that have been important in my practice through the years as well as discovering new ones. Also, I reenact male poses in the form of self-portraits, working from images that have represented important or celebrated men as well as photographers representing themselves. My interpretation of these works intends to question if gender is really a quality conferred to us by nature."
The photographs are linked by an overall exploration of the body in movement and in transition. They are all black and white to signal the way in which the artist is interested in referencing photographic history, as well as social and cultural history, along with her own personal history as an artist -- Venegas started taking photographs with black and white film and is using the same materials she used when she first began in the 1980s.
The artist looks forward to welcoming old friends, clients and new visitors to the booth.
2019
June 23rd – September 21st, 2019
Opening Reception: Sunday, June 23rd, 2-5 pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present, New Faces: Mid-Career Artists LA/NY, a pop-up show featuring works by a selection of artists based in Los Angeles and New York, including Ann Agee, Nancy Baker Cahill, Jennifer, Boysen, Tom Burckhardt, Lisa Hoke, Carlson Hatton, Salomón Huerta, Christy Matson, Sangram Majumdar, Sarah Peters and Elena Sisto. The exhibition will be on view June 23rd through September 21st, 2019, with an opening reception on Sunday, June 23rd, from 2-5pm.
Inspired by a drawing the artist found in her mother’s diary, Ann Agee’s Negishi Heights 1957 (2015) is a re-imagined interior of an apartment in Japan in which her parents lived before she was born. Her father, a civil engineer and her mother, an artist, transformed their modernist military housing using Japanese paper lanterns, ceramics, baskets, and tonsus. Her work often expands upon the connection between women and the domestic sphere.
Jennifer Boysen’s meditative and sculptural canvases push the conversation surrounding the nature of painting. By stretching canvas over a variety of found or fabricated objects, cultural detritus is allowed to remerge in unexpected ways. Layers of egg tempera paint imbue the surface with a matte texture, and objects push outward to produce pieces that are both feminine and masculine, a defiant rejection of global consumer culture, and a simplification of form.
Tom Burckhardt’s work is known for its subversion of the boundaries between representation and abstraction. Resisting the institutionalized model of abstract painting while embracing the medium’s humorous potential, his paintings invite prolonged analysis, a visual and cerebral experience in which the viewer can delight in the ways the artist has fitted seemingly unrelated things together, leaving the viewer unable to resist the pull of pareidolia.
For Nancy Baker Cahill, the human body is a site of ongoing struggle and resistance. Her graphite “Surd” drawings, with their twisting, corporeal and sinewy forms are punctuated by colored circles of varying sizes. The “Surds,” a concept found in mathematics, are a metaphor for life’s unpredictable and often irrational influences. Here though, the “Surds” serve to impose order as the figures’ organic forms intertwine, pull apart, and emerge in a graceful yet tense kind of dance, floating in the space between masculine and feminine.
Carlson Hatton’s mixed-media tableaus seamlessly integrate acrylic, graphite, and paper with printmaking techniques to create dense environments which are layered with form and figuration. While slipping in and out of abstraction, Hatton presents the viewer with a world that is fragmented and frenetic, both real and imagined. Inspired by Cubism, cartooning, and Japanese woodblock prints, Hatton seeks to capture what he calls the “psychedelia of everyday life.”
Lisa Hoke’s intensely-colored murals and freestanding sculptures are comprised of, of all things, refuse - cardboard, felt, wire, packaging, foil containers, wood. Each piece is a kind of reflection of the places from which she collects the materials, a reminder of the sheer amount of excess we produce on a daily basis. As with all of Hoke’s wall pieces, The Taste Of (2019) expands and contracts with the site in which it is installed, while exuberant colors and rich textures propel her pieces into the realms of mosaic, sculpture, and assemblage.
Salomón Huerta’s paintings of Mixed Martial Arts fighters are an extension of his series of works depicting bloodied and battered boxers. The figures, rendered in loose, expressive strokes of muted grays, represent violence against men of color in our society, specifically black men, but can also be interpreted more broadly to underscore the public’s prurient interest in depictions of violence in general.
Sangram Majumdar’s paintings speak to in the slippage of meaning that comes from both mistranslation or misinterpretation. The repeated image of a raised palm derives from representations of Rama killing the demon Tataka in the Ramayana Epic, and a particularly powerful symbol of the demonization of women throughout history. Hands are an extension of the body, of a person, of how humans relate to each other, and in our current political climate, hands are also representative of the ways in which the bodies of women and people of color are under attack.
Christy Matson’s understated woven works utilize yarn of varying textures in soft, muted colors, and hand-weaving using a highly-specialized loom. Her textiles, more akin to abstract paintings, draw inspiration from ethnographic textiles, the history of modernism, and their converging histories. A celebration of attention to detail, each piece is the meticulous result of knot-tying, dyeing yarn, drawing and painting, and drafting weave structures.
Sarah Peters’ bronze sculptures such as Figurehead (2018), bring to mind a variety of inspirations ranging from Assyrian figureheads to Greco-Roman masks, to Egyptian funerary figures, combined with elements drawn from the artist’s imagination, and the history of sculpture itself. Here, the figures’ soft, almost angelic expression suggests both peace and euphoria, sharply contrasted with the heavily-stylized waves of flowing hair. Her work re-imagines and merges outwardly disparate parts into one harmonious whole.
Elena Sisto’s As We Dream (2017) takes its title from the jazz classic Lazy Afternoon, by Jerome Moross and John La Touche. Borne of her intuitive process, it speaks to a heightened sense of awareness in which small animals and insects are buzzing, flying and crawling about with an urgency that is both a reflection of the artist’s own personal thoughts, dreams and memories, and a counterpoint to our own mortality. A kind of vanitas, in As We Dream an orange sunset peeks out above saturated green grass, a reminder that day is almost done.
For more information, contact Rosie at director@shoshanawayne.com
2018
An online exhibition - view on Artsy
2017
October 7th - December 19th, 2017
Opening Reception: October 7th, 5 - 7 PM
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Scrolls: Distortion by Dinh Q. Lê. This is the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view October 7th through December 19th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday October 7th from 5-7pm.
The Scrolls: Distortion is a new body of work and a cumulative exploration of Lê’s oeuvre to date, putting his series such as Persistence of Memory, From Vietnam to Hollywood, A Quagmire This Time, and Remnants, Ruins, Civilization, and Empire in conversation with one another. Key to this body of work is Lê’s attention to memory. Whereas previously Lê’s work dealt with fragmented memory and processes of piecing together or reconciling painful and traumatic histories, here he is presenting memory as landscape.
The main gallery features eight photo scrolls installed in the center of the gallery. For these works, Lê stretches an image to about 164 feet resulting in an elongated and distorted but still recognizable representation of that image. Lê’s technical strategy is directly indicative of his subject matter, which deals with the ways in which memory becomes distorted over time. Just as landscapes shift and change over time, so too does memory.
Lê’s use of the scroll format draws on ancient Chinese scroll paintings, which typically depicted landscapes. As the scroll is unrolled only a small portion of the painting is revealed at a time. Lê’s own photo scrolls refer to traditional scroll paintings while at the same time encouraging a more dynamic and conceptual conversation about landscape and the various iterations it can embody.
While Lê’s scrolls present photography as abstract object and sculpture, the artist’s woven photographs in the west gallery present photography as tactile. Utilizing his signature Vietnamese mat weaving technique in a larger format than ever before, these photographs collage imagery of murals of the Cambodian epic poem Reamker, based on the Sanskrit Ramayana epic, with portraits from the S-21 prison and images from the Cambodian Civil War.
Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at prestigious venues including, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Mori Art Museum, Japan; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany, and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy to name just a few. Lê has an upcoming exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Cordoba, Spain. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Mori Art Museum in Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst many others. Lê has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio residency award and the Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Development amongst others. The artist lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
September 2nd - September 30th, 2017
Opening Reception - September 9th, 5 - 7 PM
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Salon 2017 a group exhibition featuring work by Chie Fueki, Rachel Lachowicz, Abdul Mazid, Dakota Noot, Izhar Patkin, Jeanne Silverthorne, and Shirley Tse. Each artist is guided by a desire to decode and problematize visual and linguistic signs and symbols. The exhibition will be on view September 2nd through September 30th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday September 9th from 5-7pm.
Chie Fueki’s intricately patterned and detailed mixed media paintings have references to her multi cultural background (the artist was born in Japan, raised in Brazil, and received her MFA from Yale) while also exploring the artist’s critical interest in how information is decoded through texture, light, color and surface. Fueki begins each painting by staining Japanese Mulberry paper with colored inks, layering them with many washes of pigment and often using iridescent materials. Using a rubbing technique areas of pattern are rendered in graphite. Fueki then cuts, collages and mounts her work on wooden panels over which she applies glitter, colored pencil and dots of acrylic paint.
Rachel Lachowicz’s new series of eyeshadow paintings features imagery of flowers and draws on Kant’s analytic of the beautiful and Baudrillard’s conceptualization of simulacra. In this exhibition, Lachowicz presents viewers with a flower found in nature and one that exists only in the virtual space of online gaming—discerning real versus copy is almost impossible. The slippage between real and copy relates to Lachowicz’s career-long desire to dismantle binaries and rigid demarcations of gender, pushing toward more inclusive signifiers.
Abdul Mazid’s diamond shaped glitter paintings open up a conversation about the effects of structural and systemic power/knowledge. Using a multi-step silk screen process, the artist appropriates recognizable scenes then abstracts them with the application of glitter. Selecting his references carefully and intentionally, here, Mazid pulls imagery from two iconographies of global economic power: the New York Stock Exchange trading floor and the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas.
Dakota Noot explores his own hybrid identity as he reconciles the relationship between his rural North Dakota roots with his Los Angeles-based life. Noot’s dynamic canvases are saturated with color and rich visual and linguistic signs and symbols. The artist presents his own portrait in various states: between man and woman, human and animal, abstract and figurative all the while suggesting the grotesque, the humorous and the pleasurable are one and the same.
Izhar Patkin’s paintings from his “Gardens for the Global City” series embodies the artist’s interest in cultural pluralism. These works employ a reverse painting method with the artist starting from the back pushing paint through the front of the wire mesh screen to achieve a carpet effect. Patkin’s paintings emphasize the artist’s hand and the physical act of painting while, at the same time, revealing his ambivalence toward globalization.
Jeanne Silverthorne’s cast rubber Venus Flytrap with Xeres Blue (Extinct) sets forth the artist’s preoccupation with death and desire. What might be mistaken for melancholy can also be read as imbued with vitality and humor. For Silverthorne, the seemingly mundane contents of the studio and its various states of disarray are rich sites for excavation.
Shirley Tse’s vibrant yellow sculpture titled Varicella Zoster occupies the west gallery as its title suggests with thousands of zip ties radiating from a single nucleus. True to her practice, Tse visualizes heterogeneity through sculpture and installation. From multiplicities of difference on the same plane to the negotiation of an integrated whole, Tse examines the semiotics of plastics and expands the language of movement using common objects to suspend subjectivity, destabilize categories, and call attention to the interstitial.
For more information please contact Alana Parpal: alana@shoshanawayne.com
June 3, 2017 - August 26, 2017
Opening Reception: June 3rd, 2017 5 - 7 PM
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Hands at Work by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view June 3rd through August 26th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday June 3rd from 5-7pm.
Hands at Work is a study of hands, craft, and montage, composed of eleven quilts constructed from 16 mm film presented in light boxes, and a large-scale video. The film footage comes from a collection of 16 mm educational films that were de-accessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology and given to Gschwandtner by Anthology Film Archives. Since 2009, when she first began cutting and sewing them into configurations based on popular American quilt motifs, these films have served as rich source material for the artist. The films describe the making of textiles for cultural, political and daily uses.
Building on her previous exhibition, Film Quilts (2015), Gschwandtner continues to explore possibilities precipitated by the demise of celluloid and the proliferation of the digital moving image. As Gschwandtner’s work traces the transition from analog to digital technologies, it explores tactility, the relationship between still and moving images, and the often opposing spheres of craft and concept in art.
For this exhibition, Gschwandtner has selected footage of hands at work—weaving, knitting, sewing, dyeing cloth, tying string, spinning yarn, and feeding fabric into machines. The artist’s decision to focus on hands, the way they move, perform their craft, and enact their labor, underscores the action of handcraft as both physical and metaphorical. There are pairs of works, signifying left and right hands laboring, and the making and unmaking of meaning. Gschwandtner’s work emphasizes undervalued female labor, paying homage to the historical lineage of female film editors who stitched together movies.
While Gschwandtner’s film quilts present photography as a physical, three-dimensional site, the artist’s video connects women’s work and formal histories of abstraction with digital technology. For this piece, Gschwandtner transferred film footage to video and edited laboring hands, film leader and film credits into 35 layers that form a triangle quilt in motion. Displayed on an Ultra-high-definition monitor, the piece ruminates on the roles of materiality and tactility in a technologically mediated future.
Sabrina Gschwandtner has exhibited widely in the United States as well as internationally at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her film quilts are currently on view in permanent collection exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the RISD Museum, and the Mint Museum. Gschwandtner’s work is also included in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among many other public and private collections worldwide. Gschwandtner received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Bard College.
For more information please contact Alana Parpal: alana@shoshanawayne.com
The artist wishes to thank director Pat Ferrero for use of footage from her films "Quilts in Women's Lives " (1980) and "Hearts and Hands" (1987). The films are in active distribution and are available from New Day Films.
April 8th - May 27th, 2017
Opening April 8th, 2017, 5 - 7 PM
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present People I Saw But Never Met by Zadok Ben-David. This is the London-based artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view April 8ththrough May 27th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 8thfrom 5-7pm.
People I Saw But Never Met (2015-2017) is Ben-David’s latest ongoing body of work, which, to date, includes over 3,000 chemically etched miniature figures and 45 larger hand-cut figures made from aluminum. Culled from photographs the artist took of people he encountered from a distance as a result of his travels to Europe, The United States, Central Asia, Far East Australia, and Antarctica, the installation brings together an unlikely assemblage of global citizens. Ben-David’s sculptural milieu comes at a critical point in our current socio-political climate where heated debates about exclusion and borders versus inclusivity and multiplicity are part of our daily experience.
Multiplicity as an organizing principle has played a significant role in Ben-David’s work starting with Evolution and Theory (1995) to his two previous exhibitions at the gallery Blackfield (2009) and The Otherside of Midnight (2013). Known for creating multiple versions of a singular natural form such as flowers or butterflies, each variation bearing a unique gesture by the artist, Ben-David’s installations create an alternate amplified viewing space where the relationship between viewer (human) and artwork (nature) is both sacred and destabilizing. Where multiplicity differs in People I Saw But Never Met is in the artist’s approach toward an ethos of pluralization. Ben-David’s accumulation of real-life global people suggests the ways in which we are both isolated yet always in relation to one another. The sand which anchors the figures acts also as a collective ground on which we stand or as the substance from which we all spring and despite variations in scale, there is no hierarchy, each figure no matter his or her origin is treated with dignity and respect.
Zadok Ben-David has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia including, Kenpoku Art Festival, Irabaki Prefecture, Japan (2016); The Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent (2015); National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana (2014); Singapore Botanical Gardens presented by Sotheby’s (2013); and The Tel Aviv Museum (2009 and 2010) amongst many others. Ben-David has participated in prestigious biennials worldwide including, Busan Biennial, South Korea (2010); Biennale Cuveé (2009); Wonder Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2008); and the Venice Biennale, Italy (1988). He is the recipient of both the Grande Biennial Premio at the XIV Biennale Internacional de Arte de Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal (2007) as well as the Tel Aviv Museum prize (2005). The artist lives and works in London.
For more information, please contact Alana Parpal at alana@shoshanawayne.com
January 21 - March 25, 2017
Opening reception January 21, 2017 5 - 7 PM
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Lay Back and Enjoy It by Rachel Lachowicz. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view January 21st through March 25th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday, January 21st from 5-7pm.
Lay Back and Enjoy It is both the title of the exhibition and of the large-scale installation modeled after three prominent structures from the 1973 Clint Eastwood film, High Plains Drifter. The artist has completely covered two structures - the Sheriff’s Station and the Church - in red lipstick to represent different pillars of historical patriarchal power: Law and Order, Religion, Markets and Domesticity. At just under full-scale, viewers are completely immersed in the seductive aesthetics of red lipstick, visually, physically and olfactory, while viewing their own reflection in the red mirrored windows of the buildings.
This new work is a revisitation for Lachowicz, who in 1996 created a series of video-stills from the film that depict the town after it was painted red. Initially struck by the film’s two rape scenes, and the classic Hollywood trope of submissive female characters, Lachowicz sought to address the archetypal notion of architecture as being historically masculine. Her use of translation and appropriation reaches new levels of scale with this work, offering a “feminine” covering which repurposes and repositions the buildings. Lay Back and Enjoy It places the structures within a context that critiques social constructions of the contemporary, by combining a western town with high modernism and minimalism.
In the Eastwood film, the town painted red acts as a metaphor for the changing psyche of its inhabitants and even the identity of the town itself. Lachowicz offers a similar psychic change where our historical institutional memory can progress to an unspecified place where women have greater agency. Lipstick and cosmetics are not inherently gendered, but they have been culturally coded as feminine. The application of lipstick offers us a potentially revealing and celebratory moment by re-contextualizing the structures to have a feminine identity. To those who fear the empowered feminine, the work suggests that they perhaps should “Lay Back and Enjoy It”.
Lachowicz has exhibited extensively both in the United States and internationally. Her work will be included in three forthcoming exhibitions: “No Place Like Home” at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (2017), “Some Aesthetic Decisions: A Centenary Celebration of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain,” at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (2017), and “Forms of Identity: Women Artists in the 90s” at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California (2017). She has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Musuem of Art (2014), the Denver Art Museum (2009), the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts (2008), the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece (2006), the ICA in London (2005), the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York (2005), the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2003), the New Museum in New York (1999), the Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Brenenz, Austria (1995), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1994), and the Venice Bienanale (1993). Lachowicz was the recipient of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2003) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1995). She is the Chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University. She lives and works in Santa Monica, CA.
For more information, please contact Rosie Morales at alana@shoshanawayne.com
2016
November 19 - December 17, 2016
Opening Preview - November 19, 5 - 7 PM
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Salon 2016, a fall group exhibition featuring work by Philip Argent, Zadok Ben-David, Kathy Butterly, Russell Crotty, Victor Estrada, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Rachel Lachowicz, Dinh Q. Lê, Abdul Mazid, Elaine Reichek, James Richards, Michal Rovner, Yuken Teruya, and Shirley Tse
September 10 - November 12, 2016
Opening Reception September 10th 5 - 7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Hack the Analog by James Richards. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view September 10 through October 22, 2016 with an opening preview on Saturday, September 10th from 5-7pm.
Hack the analog refers to the concept of confounding the standard notion of what a painting (as object) is and how it is made. The work in this show explores new iterations of the material components of a painting and how they are assembled.
Several freestanding pieces have had their “stretchers” replaced by metal shelving units and plastic crates. The canvas has been hand woven into the structure using rope and strips of cloth creating a heavily textured surface upon which thick layers of paint are applied, creating, as it does, the effect of encasing hours of activity in a plastic coating.
Wall paintings in the show exhibit a new weaving technique where the rope/yarn is woven between two stacked picture planes creating what Richards likes to think of as a 3rd axis surface. There is a shallow space created which does not easily resolve itself. The effect produces a surface that seems to be alternating between forming and dissolving through some sort of chemical process. This mix of crudely hand crafted object and taut compositional surface plays with notions of negative and positive space, both physically and pictorially.
While the objects themselves pay homage to the satisfaction of viewing physical objects in real space, aspects of the digital world are evident in the flat, hard edge compositions painted on top of the rough surface – compositions that have their origins in computer drawings executed with a digital pencil on an iPad. These objects fall in to the category of artworks that are difficult to categorize, having elements of drawing, sculpture, painting, craft and furniture in them, not to mention the domestic and the industrial. There is a hyper-physicality to these objects-as-paintings which employ more of a maximization of materials and labor than the more ephemeral nature of the artist’s previous bodies of work.
James Richards holds an MFA from Art Center of College and Design, Pasadena, CA and a BFA from California State University, Fullerton, CA. He has exhibited in several group exhibitions including, Woven at the Sturt Haaga Gallery, Descanso Gardens; Floor Flowers, Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont Graduate University; Electric Mud, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston; and Plane/Structures at Otis Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
Gallery hours are Tuesday though Friday 10am to 6pm, and Saturday 11am to 5:30pm.
July 09 - September 03, 2016
Opening Preview July 09th 5-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Lift Me Up So I Can See Better by Shirley Tse featuring over thirty new sculptures and a hand-made collaborative book. This is the Los Angeles based artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view July 09 through September 03, 2016, with an opening preview on Saturday, July 9th from 5-7pm.
Taking Oscar Wilde’s 1888 book “The Happy Prince and Other Tales” as her point of departure, Tse’s new body of work evokes the form of eyeballs as her sculptures address both seeing and the position from which one sees. As an adult re-reading this story, Tse was struck by the Prince’s ability to see “all the ugliness and misery of [his] city” once he was set up high on a column outside the walls of his Palace. Tse perceives Wilde’s parable as particularly prescient of our socio-economic climate, where gaps between classes and cultures are widening at an alarming rate. Analogous to Wilde’s townspeople, who were gifted the Prince’s sapphire eyes and rubies from his sword, Tse received an unexpected gift of blown glass remnants from the Estate of Miriam Wosk, a recently deceased artist. Contemplating the possibility that generosity may flow if one is able to see from a different vantage point, Tse utilizes the gestures of ascending, reaching and telescoping with the incorporation of C-stands, boom microphone stands, tripods, and stadium bleachers throughout the exhibition. Seeking a broader perspective also suggests the possibility of turning passive spectatorship into active spectatorship. Various colors of glass chunks housed in different materials exhibit themselves as heterogeneous sculptures hovering between the figurative and the abstract, the found objects and the imagined forms, the literal and the metaphorical.
“J....” a limited edition hand-made artist book, is exhibited for the first time in the West Gallery. At the invitation of Gervais Jassaud, Tse collaborated with French writer Michel Butor whereby she produced a visual response to Butor’s poem, “J….” In Tse’s words, “I usually work with sculpture and installation. The prospect of making “work on paper” was liberating for me. Literally, textually and metaphorically, Butor’s words provide the architecture for these sculptural explorations on paper. I want to honor the sense of place, the richness of texture, and the obliqueness in “J….” My artwork may not be congruent with the mental images evoked by the words. When the reader/viewer negotiates between the two modes of experience, it is where richness resides.”
For more than twenty years, Tse has dedicated her practice to visualizing heterogeneity through sculpture, installation, photography, and text. From multiplicity of difference on the same plane, to negotiation of an integrated whole, strategies are as various as putting competing aesthetics under the same roof, examining the semiotics of plastics, expanding the language of movement, using found objects as suspension of subjectivity, researching concurrent narratives, conflating scales, destabilizing categories and calling attention to the interstitial.
Shirley Tse has exhibited extensively at venues in the United States and abroad including, the House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, NY; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; the Wexner Center for the Arts, OH; The Biennale Ceara America, Brazil; MoMA P.S.1, NY; The New Museum, NY; The Biennale of Sydney, Australia; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art amongst many others. Tse has been the recipient of prestigious grants and awards such as the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2012) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2009). Tse lives and works in Los Angeles.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
Gallery hours are Tuesday though Friday 10am to 6pm, and Saturday 11am to 5:30pm.
May 07-July 02, 2016
Opening Preview May 07th 5-7pm
Show Press Release
All research begins with an anxiety and finishes with an imbalance.
— Leon Chestov, 1938
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Minoan Girls by Elaine Reichek featuring sixteen new works, including three large-scale tapestries. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The “Minoan Girls” series (2011–16) continues the exploration of Greek myth that Reichek began in her previous body of work, “Ariadne’s Thread.” It centers on the narratives of lust, seduction, betrayal, bestiality, and abandonment that determined the fates of four mythic women of Minos: Europa, Pasiphae, Phaedra, and of course Ariadne. Thread is once again the foundational conceptual link running through the series, echoing Ariadne’s gift to Theseus of the ball of thread that enabled him to navigate the Cretan labyrinth. In “Minoan Girls” Reichek focuses on the ways in which the Greek myths are continually retold and reenacted over the centuries, in the same way that sewing doubles a thread back upon itself repeatedly.
Reichek employs a wide range of mediums, including both hand and digital embroidery, silkscreen, beading, digital photography, and tapestry. She uses these methods to re-create works by artists ranging from Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt to Gustav Klimt, Eugène Atget, André Masson, and Anni Albers, and pairs these images with quotations sampling a wide variety of literature, from Ovid, Plutarch, and Nonnus to Giorgio de Chirico, Stevie Smith, and Erika Mumford. The tones of these texts are by turns speculative, propositional, anticipatory, and ruminative. Each Minoan Girl is conscious of the part she plays and of the trajectory of her story. “You were the heroine,” says one narrator to Ariadne, who replies, “Yes, so I was and am.” This Ariadne is a diarist, shaping her own version of the narrative. Even the male protagonists—Zeus (taking the appearance of a bull), King Minos, the Minotaur, Theseus, Hippolytus—try on a succession of changing and often contradictory roles: father, son, sailor, rapist, seducer, bedfellow, husband.
Reichek helpfully supplies a Minoan Family Tree, decked out as Klimt’s “Tree of Life.” One of the best-known mythic scenarios, the Rape of Europa, is subjected to an almost diagrammatic exploration of the possibilities of narrative meaning and poetic appropriation. One pair of embroideries humorously translates the temporal layering of the “back story” into transparent needlepoint canvas. In another embroidery, the four women of the Minoan family are imagined walking hand-in-hand against a blood-red garland. This chain represents their connected fates and links their archetypal stories to countless possible future reinterpretations. Various formal and visual devices parallel the ways in which the ancient myths have been reinterpreted across centuries. For Reichek, the reiterative processes inherent in translation and interpretation are creative acts, and the movements they initiate among languages, disciplines, and materials open possibilities for new readings and meanings.
Elaine Reichek has exhibited extensively at institutions in the United States and abroad, including the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin; and the Tel Aviv Art Museum. She has participated in biennials worldwide including, the Whitney Biennial, New York (2012); the 30th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil (2012); and the Cheongju International Craft Biennial, Cheongju, Korea (2011). Reichek has been the recipient of prestigious grants and awards such as the Francis J. Greenburger Award (2013); the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2011-12); the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2005); and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1993). The artist lives and works in New York.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
February 27-April 30, 2016
Opening Reception February 27th 5-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Material and its Making a new exhibition by Frances Trombly. This is the artist’s second show with the gallery. In her work, Trombly has focused on making textiles by hand to represent often ephemeral and disposable industrial objects. She began to pare down the role of detail and color in her 2010-2011 series of handwoven canvas paintings, a shift that emphasized the sculptural and conceptual field of her work. The minimalism also allowed space to consider the importance of the breaks and shifts in the textiles.
In her latest work these variables within the fiber open up the conversation about the fabrication process: irregularity, asymmetry, glitches, pulls, and tears reveal the manual labor of weaving, standing in contrast to the industrial perfection of commercial cloth and emphasizing the artists intimacy with the material.
With no work wider than the width of her loom, there is a re-introduction of color and a new acceptance of the cloth as the work itself. Considering this focus on the material and its making, the works contain a timeline of their own construction, a transcription of the gestures of working and constructing a structure in space. As Trombly works, mistakes are left and patterns are switched as errors dictate, allowing a composition to build through unforeseen events in the process. The color is also woven in the process, but the fiber used is dyed far in advance and usually produces irregularly colored material. As she works, those irregularities reveal themselves and produce organic striations in the woven color fields.
These purely textile forms, rest, drape, and stretch on a series of industrial structures as a way to amplify the sculptural quality of the fabric. Scaffolding, wooden stretchers, and plywood pedestals subtley act as a departing reference to the textile as stretched canvas for painting. Here Trombly pushes the textile beyond just another material to sustain the art and into the "canvas" taking its overdue role as the work on its own.
Frances Trombly has exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger, Norway; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA; and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY. Her work can be found in the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL, and the University of Maine, Museum of Art, Bangor, ME. She is a co-founder and co-director of Dimensions Variable, an artist-run exhibition space in Miami.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
February 27-April 30, 2016
Opening Reception February 27th 5-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Film Stills a new exhibition by Peter Hutton in the west gallery. This is the artist’s second show with the gallery.
In the artist’s words: “Film is like amber. It's organic, made from animal bones, and a bit like human skin. As we age it wrinkles and shrinks. Our bodies are maps of our lives and visual evidence of lives lived. Like amber, the traditional material of film --celluloid --is a record of time. Linear and relentless, it captures our dreams and continues to live as a record of our evolving visual culture. Electronic media has devoured film and transformed time into a complex prism of non-linear wonder.”
Filmmaker Peter Hutton presents a selection of photographs that are digital blow-ups of 16 millimeter film frames from a selection of images made over the past 40 years. Digital printing has enabled Hutton to freeze time and provide the viewer with a sustained moment of reflection. Through these images, one can contemplate a new iteration of cinematic time. They offer a visual archeology of the landscapes and cityscapes of the world.
Peter Hutton received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied painting, sculpture, and filmmaking under Robert Nelson, Bruce Nauman, and Bruce Conner. Hutton is a professor in the department of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. His films have garnered national and international attention and he has shown in major museums and film festivals, including the Whitney Biennial (1985, 1991, 1995, 2004); a retrospective at MoMA, NY (2008); Les Rencontres d’Arles, Paris (2010); and the Toronto International Film Festival (2013) to name just a few. Hutton is the recipient of grants from, the National Endowment of the Arts, DAAD Berlin, Rockefeller Foundation, Dutch Film Critics Prize, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation amongst others. The artist lives and works in Tivoli, NY.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
January 9 - February 20, 2016
Opening Reception: January 9, 2016 / 5 - 7 PM
Show Press Release
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Misaligned a new solo exhibition by Philip Argent. This is the artist’s fourth show with the gallery. Misalinged continues Argent’s refined interpretation of the swift flow of digital information and tempers that rapidity with his meticulous handmade acrylic on canvas paintings. Balancing digitization with traditional painting has become Argent’s signature and this new body of work takes the artist’s interest in spatiality, temporality, and digitization further as he exhibits a more experimental painting style. The subtle texture and randomness are a result of new methods employed by Argent who, for example, has used rubber dipped in paint to apply a sort of “print” to many of the paintings surfaces.
For Argent, Misaligned refers to the proclivity of the new work to suggest a tenuous relationship between different spaces and surfaces coexisting in one painting; a relationship that questions the stability of the overall composition as a whole, whilst inviting questions as to what is revealed and what is hidden. For example, in Untitled (Displaced) a flat and off-centered coral-colored surface cuts through the painting from top to bottom, as it does so it covers or conceals an implied space on the left side while on the right edge, curvilinear shapes or remnants suggest the inclusion of further abbreviated imagery or forms. Here, the possibility of some sort of continuation or disruption is key.
Concerned with the current cultural landscape, Argent’s Misaligned also suggests a cultural phenomenon that we are all familiar with as we scroll, flip, and touchscreen our way through the image glut—the slippage between which any sense of a stable or logical whole is left unchecked and unresolved. Argent’s painterly iteration of such slippage rests in his use of black space—a spatiality that is both present and absent as it exists in plain sight on the canvas but is also boundless paving the way for all sorts of information (tangible and intangible) to stand in its place.
Philip Argent received an M.F.A. from UNLV and a B.A. with honors from Cheltenham School of Art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such MOCA, Cleveland; the Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; Mannheim Kunstverein; and the Young Eun Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwangju, Korea. This spring twelve of Argent’s paintings will be in DATAStream at the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. His work can be found in the permanent collection of MoMA, NY; Albright-Knox, NY; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The artist lives and works in Santa Barbara and teaches in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
2015
November 7 – December 24, 2015
Opening Reception November 7th 5-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Weight of Color a new solo exhibition by Kathy Butterly. This is the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery. Continuing and developing an idea she began for her 2014 New York show, Enter, Butterly builds on the concept of color heeding its visual, physical, and psychological weight. Paying attention to how color works in each piece, Butterly thinks of herself as a “collector of color” and explores how each hue relates to the other, the tensions that are created between colors and the ways in which they become equal.
The sixteen ceramics that comprise The Weight of Color are each intricate assemblages of multiple narratives and personal moments. Every crease, fold, frill, and ruffle has a purpose beyond aesthetic delight for they create small spaces where color can be collected giving each piece a unique personality. For example, Koolaide has a palpable tension. On the one hand its frills make it look dainty yet on the other hand, the vivid reds and oranges pool along the frills making the work appear sinister. The unexpected twists, turns and appendages in each sculpture are the result of Butterly returning again and again to a piece bringing to it new experiences sometimes over the course of a year and a half as was the case with Middleclassiness her most complex work to date, which in its finished state resembles a rorschach test—almost symmetrical, half green with white crackle and half yellow divided by a green middle with wild limbs. For Butterly the ways in which color can and does work is crucial and her conceptualization of color lends itself to the idea that color is a character in narrative.
Kathy Butterly received her MFA from UC, Davis and her BFA from Moore College of Art, Philadelphia. She has exhibited extensively and her work can be found in numerous museum collections including, MoMA, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; MFA Boston, MA; and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX amongst many others. Butterly has been the recipient of prestigious awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2014), the Moore College of Art & Design Visionary Woman Award (2013), the Smithsonian American Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award (2012), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011) amongst many others. The artist lives and works in New York.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
September 5 - October 31, 2015
Opening Reception Saturday September 12th 5 - 7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Another Green World, a new exhibition by Russell Crotty. This is the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery. While following the trajectory of his previous work, namely the study and cataloging of places and a deep interest in astronomy and the environment, Another Green World introduces audiences to a new direction in Crotty’s work where process is less controlled, thus making way for chance. In the main gallery, there is a series of bioresin collages: crude stick drawings on paper collaged with common plastic objects from the grocery store, tinted bioresin (made from renewable pine sap), and fiberglass. Crotty, showing an influence by the Supports/Surfaces Movement, explores process as well as image in this body of work. Beginning with sticks dipped in ink, Crotty draws structures such as oil derricks, dilapidated piers, and lander spacecraft. He then integrates smaller detailed drawings into the larger stick drawings along with plastic containers. Crotty notes “the final effects are somewhat unrestrained when the bioresin hits the paper and pools, spreading the color into atmospheric fields, and the plastic creates a sculptural relief of transparent air pockets, acting as distorted windows to the drawing beneath.” In the west gallery, Exoplanet Interfusion, a multi-panel collaged mobile is suspended from the ceiling. While complex in structure, this work is unrestrained and fluid. Each panel presents an interpretation of an imagined planetary element on one side and a word or phrase relating to star systems on the other. The movement of the panels is lyrical and mesmerizing, creating a revolving dialogue between image and text. As such, Crotty gently nudges the viewer’s perception by contrasting the fantastical quality of the art with the mundane astronomical nomenclature of the science. As a whole, the power of Crotty’s work rests in his ability to begin with the real and push it to the brink of other worldliness. Integrating the known with the perceived, the structures presented in the bioresin and mobile works are familiar objects that Crotty takes to a nuanced imaginary place where they have the potential to become scenes from science fiction. Furthermore, his deliberate choice of content, materials, and color palette calls attention to the effects of environmental degradation. Russell Crotty has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. His work can be found in the permanent collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; MoMA, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the New York Public Library, MOCA, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City amongst many others. Russell Crotty is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as an artist-in-residence at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz and the Lick Observatory. His residency project received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to support his upcoming solo exhibition at the San Jose ICA in 2016. The artist lives in Ojai and works in Ventura, California. For more information, contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
July 11 – August 29, 2015
Opening Reception: Saturday July 11, 6-8pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Observations in Nature by Abdul Mazid. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Comprised of sculpture and painting, this body of work continues Mazid’s exploration of global economies, wealth accumulation, power dynamics, and structures of value. Observations in Nature is bound thematically by the metaphor of the shark. Influenced by philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of the film “JAWS” (1975), Mazid’s conceptualization of the shark refers to society’s tendency to insist upon the “othering” and villification of people, ideas, and practices. As such, the artist’s use of the shark stands in for all foreign and domestic “threats” to normative ideological pedagogies. The artist selects his references carefully and intentionally, pulling imagery from the iconography of global economic power structures such as the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, trophy shark fishing, Disney’s Fantasia, professional sports, and military fighter jets. Mazid’s glitter paintings reproduce familiar imagery while at the same time destabilizing their conventional meaning. Using a multi-step silk screen process, the artist appropriates recognizable scenes/images that can be found in media or on the internet, he then abstracts them with the application of glitter. Similar to the effects of Mazid’s use of glitter, his shark fin, manta ray, and fighter jet resin coated sculptures attract and bounce light drawing the viewer in. It’s not until the viewer gets closer that he or she notices that the surface is covered with collectible holographic baseball cards. Mazid’s conceptual angle: an obsession with hyper-masculinity, bodies as economy, the commerce of collect-ability, and idolatry, aligns with his choice of materials and his overall investigation of micro vs. macro politics and the idea of surface as seductive illusion or distraction. In the west gallery 100,000,000 Years, a shark jaw made from rebar and steel stands 7’ high casting ominous shadows around the room. Simultaneously alluring and dangerous, the shark jaw features sharp teeth yet exposes the foundation of a structure that is completely man-made. While the first impulse might be fear, Mazid insists upon a more complex relationship to the shark—one that demands a consideration of how fear is reproduced and the ways in which we blindly follow and support destructive ideologies. Abdul Mazid has an MFA from Claremont Graduate University (2014) and a BA in Economics from University of California Santa Barbara (2003) and. Mazid lives and works in Los Angeles.
April 25 – June 19, 2015
Opening Reception: April 25th, 5-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Oliver Michaels: “Fill: Content-Aware.” This exhibition brings together three bodies of the artist’s photographic work and three videos. Michaels’ photographs are created through an extensive process of photographing, archiving and manipulating bits of buildings and materials, producing a final result that blurs the demarcation between painting, sculpture and photography. Referring back to art historical predecessors including the Bechers, Fischlii and Weiss, Stephen Shore and Gordon Matta-Clark, Michaels’ works reinvestigate traditional practices under the persuasion of digitization. “Composite Exteriors” is an ongoing series in which the artist photographs architectural elements and composites them together into a single structure. The viewer encounters images dually imagined and real of bricolage buildings that can only exist within the framework of the photograph. “Incidental Composites” follows this same concept, focusing on minimalist spatial details such as corners, sidewalks, and passageways. Michaels offers viewers the opportunity to appreciate form and space as it is rearticulated through photography on a more intimate scale. “Clay Composites” juxtaposes sculpting by hand with “sculpting” in Photoshop. Beginning with the traditional creative springboard of a block of clay, Michaels physically molds and adorns it, then digitally builds a conglomerate formal work. The result of his laborious process is deftly contradictory as the artist manages to produce works that seem both traditional and oddly unfamiliar. The exhibition’s video works employ multiple split-screen editing techniques, each dealing with space, material, humor, and banality. “Tube Balloon Thing” shows a self-functioning machine spitting out everyday objects. “A Journey Between Two Fixed Points” enters and exits public and private space, giving viewers fragments of various people’s lives. “Rotating Sculpture” makes its debut in this exhibition and brings together materials that elicit a sense of place through incongruous form. Oliver Michaels is a graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art in London. He has exhibited at P.S.1, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, and Tate Britain, London. His works belong to many permanent collections including MOMA, New York, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Germany. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
February 21-April 18, 2015
Opening reception: Saturday, February 21, 2015 5pm-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Film Quilts, a solo exhibition of new work by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Film Quilts features fifteen quilts constructed from celluloid and presented in framed light boxes. Gschwandtner’s work engages viewers on multiple levels; from a distance, bold textile patterns glow like light filtered through stained glass. Up close, individual strips of film converge to form narratives about materiality, labor, and handcraft. Since 2009, Gschwandtner has been working from a collection of 16 mm films that were de-accessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology and given to her by Anthology Film Archives. These short films, dated between 1950 and 1980, are educational documentaries about textiles as art, craft, fashion, military camouflage, political expression, and scientific metaphor. The artist makes new meaning out of this source material by cutting and sewing it into configurations based on popular American quilt motifs. Gschwandtner’s work connects experimental filmmaking methods to the forgotten history of early cinema, in which cameras were constructed from modified sewing machine parts and women with agile sewing fingers were employed as editors. Images of hands at work – weaving, dyeing cloth, feeding fabric into machines – are repeated throughout the exhibition, reminders not only of the artist’s labor and the handcraft history of film editing, but also of the tactile quality of film. To further underscore her treatment of film not as a projected image but as a series of tactile prints, the artist freely uses countdown leader, her own footage scrawled with film lab notations, and film she has marked with lithography ink. In each work, Gschwandtner creates a dialogue between the images inside the frames and the symbolic and historical meanings of the quilt patterns, thereby engaging the notion of filmic suture in a reconfigured form. By pairing the centuries-old craft of quilting with the near-obsolete medium of celluloid, Gschwandtner presents viewers with a new kind of montage. Sabrina Gschwandtner received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Bard College. Her work has been exhibited in the United States as well as internationally at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her film quilts can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the RISD Museum, the Philbrook Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among many other public and private collections worldwide. The artist lives and works in New York. For more information please contact Alana Parpal:alana@shoshanawayne.com
Curated by Alana Parpal
January 17-February 14, 2015
Reception January 17, 2015 5pm-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Rhizome: Multiplicities of Abstraction, a group exhibition featuring work by gallery artists including Philip Argent, Tomer Ganihar, Rachel Lachowicz, Dinh Q. Lê, Abdul Mazid, Oliver Michaels, Izhar Patkin, Elaine Reichek, James Richards, and Beverly Semmes.
This exhibition explores the notion of a non-centered structure, the mulitple, the ever in flux, and the inter-connected. It encourages non-linear thinking and emphasizes the surprise encounter in an effort to illuminate how each impression and exchange shapes ideas. Building on critical theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the paintings, sculptures, and photographs in this exhibition emphasize the potential of abstraction and encourage the viewer to pause and reflect. As such, each work creates a disruption to the constant flow of information and the visual, symbolic, and linguistic cues which articulate a specific linear historicity.
Philip Argent’s saturated paintings cull their imagery from the digital realm yet the artist’s hand is ever present reminding the viewer of the skill and patience it takes to breathe life into the artificial. Argent’s methodical renderings of imaginary haphazard landscapes become real and tangible and draw linkages between past, present, future, and fantasy.
Tomer Ganihar’s I Can See us Living Here was photographed in the Arava Desert of Israel. Ganihar achieves the gradations of color in his imagery by long hang held exposures. He shoots with 35mm film, uses a mechanical camera and develops the film in a dark room himself.
Rachel Lachowicz’s eyeshadow painting of dehydrated earth depicts a dual catastrophe of climate change in the form of drought and glacial melting where one phenomenon informs the other. Lachowicz captures the simultaneity of each process in one fell swoop as her individual tins of eyeshadow, which are in fact, miniature paintings, come together as parts to a whole.
Dinh Q. Lê’s woven floral photograph is one part to a series titled “Wreaths and Bouquets” in which he imagines a poetic way of remembering the 1999 Columbine massacre with wreaths for those who have passed and bouquets for those who live. Here, the fraught relationship between past and present is rendered lyrically by Lê’s hand utilizing a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique.
Abdul Mazid’s glitter painitng from his CBOE series continues his exploration and dissection of value as the paintings open up a conversation about the effects of structural and systemic power/knowledge. In Mazid’s work, materials and ideas work hand in hand to both distort perception and emphasize the seductive nature of commodification. Mazid’s sculpture functions in a similar way with multiple metallic wood beams piercing a reclaimed chandelier, the artist’s critique of the economy of art.
Oliver Michaels’ photographs are from his “Square in Square” series in which the images are produced by compositing photographs from numerous buildings to create a square structure within a square frame. Beyond the neat composition, Michaels’ work creates a space where documentation and fantasy are mutual, which in turn subverts a rational reading and celebrates the absurd.
Izhar Patkin’s paintings from his “Gardens for the Global City” series embodies the artist’s interest in cultural pluralism. These works employ a reverse painting method with the artist starting from the back pushing paint through the front of the wire mesh screen to achieve a carpet effect. Patkin’s paintings emphasize the artist’s hand and the physical act of painting while, at the same time, revealing his ambivalence toward globalization.
Elaine Reichek’s Richter/Reichek consists of digital embroidery on linen an appropriation of Gerhard Richter’s Color Fields. 6 Arrangements of 1260 Colors (Red-Yellow-Blue), 1974. At the bottom of Reichek’s work is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. For Reichek, the relationship between past and present is rich and complex. She illuminates the potential of the past and shows how it informs the present while, at the same time, paving a new way of thinking about particular histories.
James Richards’ sculpture #247 invites viewers to think about painting in a new way and explores the symbiotic relationship between an unlikely combination of materials: acrylic, polypropylene rope, linen, wood, and plastic fencing. Key to Richards’ work is the correlation between surface and supporting structure. Here, materials and vision work together to subvert easy assumptions thus shifting existing rigid categorizations of painting versus sculpture.
Beverly Semmes’ Mouth is an embroidered print related to her Feminist Responsibility Project, a series of tear-outs from pornographic magazines in which she blots out the graphic image with abstract paint or ink drawings as a way to both protect the subject and the viewer. This particular work is a detail from Semmes’ Mouth Pot drawing on view at Tang Museum. Here, Semmes “draws” over the appropriated image with red thread an act that functions as a cover-up on top of a cover-up while, also referring to her roots in fabric sculptures.
For more information please contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
