PICKS: Steve Kado on Seth Price at SMission Rd, Los Angeles

356 S. MISSION RD.
356 South Mission Road
January 30–April 3

Seth Price’s exhibition “Wrok Fmaily Freidns” all but begs you to make this terrible pun: Has Price pushed the envelope too far? Having already produced countless prints, paintings, and images, as well as clothes, based on envelope security patterns and their unfolded shapes, the artist marshals these motifs into a few last stands here. They appear silk-screened over spilled paint in Spill Test, 2015, as if finally losing all physical coherence. The most notable extension of this focus on wrappings is his new take on those that we meatbags wear. Giant light boxes with images of minutely photographed human skin—taken by a camera that spends hours capturing an area about a foot long and even longer to finish stitching the thousands of images together into a composite—line the back wall for Bob, Danny, Ariana, and Brad, all 2015. The microscopic and intricate patterning of skin resembles the fine and repeatable details of the security envelope, but here it feels oddly vulnerable—the human pelt as an insecurity envelope, if you will.

The rest of the show is filled with a consideration of work in the latter’s most general sense. Construction fencing affixed to two by fours marks a path through the space as in Sentimental Construction Barrier, 2016, and offcuts from a PVC printing and signage place are tacked up here and there. Presiding over all this is Price’s own logo, a kind of face equipped with a pencil, penis, and vagina that is printed across a group of PVC sewage pipes, suggesting an icon of a self-fertilizing system grafted onto its own waste conduit. As a metaphor for what Price is up to, it has the effect of getting out ahead of his audience and acting as an a priori guide to interpretation. Thanks, Seth.

— Steve Kado

DEL VAZ PROJECTS
1600 Westgate Avenue, Apt. 208
January 15–April 15

Living with design objects imparts a unique sense of possession, one distinguished from that of sharing space with a painting or sculpture. Works of applied art are less intimidating and imposing; they do not have to be admired at a distance for fear of fingerprints or dings. Functionality entails tactile appreciation and the pragmatic expectation that forms will age along with us. The masses of raw industrial matter, plywood, and bits of various fibers installed in this apartment gallery are conceptual domestic objects by Jessi Reaves and Sophie Stone, paired here to make a home complete.

In this Los Angeles debut for both artists, woven works by Stone, consisting of color-block-painted and deconstructed carpets resting either on the walls or floors, hesitantly engage with Reaves’s gutted, skinned, or skeletal chairs and shelves. The heavy structural bones and foam fat of Reaves’s Life is getting longer/baguette chair, 2016, appear to have left a line of entrails down the hallway—Stone’s Untitled (carpet with silk edge), 2016, featuring sewn and painted runny pinks, reds, and nudes on a carpet much too wide for the hallway where it lies. In the dining room, Reaves’s His and Hers Ferraris (Ignazio Giunti), 2014, a pair of delicate frame chairs, is enmeshed in an inner-cheek-hued, tissue-thin membrane pierced by blood-red arabesque tracings so delicate they could have been rendered with a scalpel. Patchwork palimpsests, lovingly worn and mended together, line the hearth in this visceral valentine to a corporeal home. It’s where the heart is.

— Jennifer Piejko

JENNY’S
4220 Sunset Boulevard
January 23–March 5

The titular characters of Julien Ceccaldi’s exhibition “King and Slave” touch, glance, mutate, and recoil across seven paintings and drawings that use the grammar of manga to hyperbolically depict desire and disgust, confidence and shame—often all at once.

See, for example Bed, (all works 2016) one of five drawings that employ animation materials, layering acrylic on acetate and pencil on tracing paper over vinyl on board. In the foreground, a thick-necked hunk kisses the bony cheek of his wizened companion, whose cocked smile and sideward glance signals pleasure. But the background, which functions like a separate panel in a comic book, features the same figures in a different pose. Sunk into an expanse of sheets, they turn away from each other, with the skeletal figure in the fetal position and the powerful man hiding his head below a pillow. Anxiety and affection overlap.

Angst also suffuses a room-dominating acrylic wall mural, Subway Cumrag, which depicts a train car with the same scrawny figure from Bed, naked and sitting alone on the far right while on the left, three smartly dressed and improbably toned riders withdraw in apparent disgust. Though the line work, proportions, and eyes still recall anime, the theatrical, shallow sense of space and flatly painted cobalt windows puncturing the otherwise muted palette evoke iconic frescoes such as Giotto’s Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel, 1305, or—with the dramatically posed figures on the left covering their faces and turning away, as if ready to jump out of the picture—Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1425. Summoning these primal scenes might seem overloaded, but then again, raw emotion can use some muscle in the age of Grindr.

— David Muenzer

BEN MALTZ GALLERY AT THE OTIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
9045 Lincoln Boulevard
January 23–May 15

There’s nothing more satisfying than a grid, at least for those daunted by the blank page of unfettered creative freedom. But perhaps the latter is an illusion, and no attempt at creativity exists without constraint. The sixteen artists in “Performing the Grid,” for instance, take full pleasure in being line-bound.

Most of the works here encourage proximity not only to the object displayed but to the practice behind it as well. For example, Charles Gaines’s triptych portrait Faces: Men and Women, #14 “Charles Hanzieck,”, 1978, draws viewers toward Gaines’s tiny handwritten numbers in hundreds of pixel-like squares. Xylor Jane’s manic accounting of time—in which the artist assiduously charts days, years, moons, and millennia—manifests itself in a series of eleven drawings, each wild and beautiful. And straight from the artist’s notebook is Kelly Nipper’s Floyd on the Floor: Performance Notes, 2007: six framed pages including scrawled texts on dance theorist Rudolf Laban’s principles of “Space Harmony”—Laban is also in the show—next to collaged cutouts of geometric patterns and crystalline gems.

Emily Roysdon’s compelling video diptych, Sense and Sense, 2010, features an aerial shot of artist MPA’s attempt to walk while lying on her side. Taking place on the ground of a Stockholm public square known for political protests, Roysdon captures a clash between bodies and the way space is engineered to contain them, which is decidedly different in tone from the harmony evoked by other pieces in the exhibition. In all these divergent works—and there are more notables to be named—the grid becomes a measure of time, movement, and labor as well as a source of pleasure and generation. Fueled by the slow and steady ticking of practice and research, these pieces are the fruit of sustained experimentation, and spending time with them feels equally productive.

— Samara Davis

CHRISTOPHER GRIMES GALLERY
916 Colorado Avenue
January 9–March 5

On March 18, 1990, two men dressed as cops famously boosted thirteen artworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Partly because Gardner’s will allows no changes to the displays, partly in hopes that the stripped canvases will return, empty frames remain on view. Such an abstraction holds evident interest for Kota Ezawa, who, for his exhibition “Gardner Museum Revisited,” employed his signature reductive technique, similar to rotoscoping, for a salon-style hang of light-box replicas of the missing works. Here, the seasick dynamism of sight lines still crisscrosses The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (all works 2015), after Rembrandt’s only known ocean scene, of the same title; gone, though, are the brushstrokes and built-up layers of pigment. A Lady and Gentleman in Black, also after Rembrandt, is a study in staid fabric, and in Program for an Artistic Soiree I and II, even the sprightly pencil lines of Degas are rounded down to textureless fields of black and gray.

This partial revival is possible insofar as the Gardner works continue to syndicate; Ezawa’s glowing transparencies are based not on observing the actual pieces but on tracing forensic photographs distributed by the FBI. Thus the two 3-D pieces that were stolen—a Shang dynasty vase, circa 1200 BCE, and a nineteenth-century eagle finial—are just as flat in Ezawa’s hands as the paint daubs in a Manet caf scene. Taken from view, the Gardner group has entered a postauratic state, where recursion has no originals to face. The artist’s redux follows the logic of technological reproducibility to the point where the least possible amount of information can still make a recognizable image—and stops there. Indeed, to pursue this abstraction further would only produce what the thieves gladly left behind: blank rectangles of wall behind gilded frames.

— Travis Diehl

ART + PRACTICE
4339 Leimert Boulevard
December 12–February 27

“Packages travel like people” reads a luggage tag affixed to John Outterbridge’s sculpture Case in Point, ca. 1970. A flat piece of brown painted canvas is buckled around seven stuffed oblong objects whose limb-like dimensions suggest the reverse of the tag’s claim. The work embodies a thinly veiled metaphor for the representation and treatment of black people as objects, and encountering it today insinuates an unsettling continuity between the eras of Black Power and Black Lives Matter. It’s a fitting point of entry into Outterbridge’s incisive and socially conscious work.

This artist’s practice is often contextualized in light of the 1965 Watts rebellion and his subsequent work as director of the Watts Towers Art Center, as well as his uninhibited synthesis of artistic movements such as Dada, junk, funk, and assemblage. His survey exhibition at this community-oriented space puts forth a compelling argument for the inextricability of these narratives from the reception of his work and for art as a natural platform for activism. It features a progression from dark palettes and hard materials toward the brightly painted fabrics of his 2012 “Rag and Bag Idiom” series. Yet the evocative presence of textiles throughout the show—for instance, I Mus Speak, 2008, incorporates a small American flag and knots of human hair—conveys a consistent through-line of deeply personal stakes.

Many of the sculptures on view evoke portability and transience. Case in Point literally takes the form of luggage while others incorporate small satchels that might be tied to sticks and carried by down-and-outs, as in Bags, 2011, or filled with herbs and used in folk rituals, as in Healing, 2011. This dual implication of being on the move or treating ills stimulates an intense awareness of art’s vernacular potential to gather, absorb, and—in the best of cases—transform.

— Andrew Kachel

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES (MOCA)
250 South Grand Avenue
August 29–February 29

In imitation of the grittier storefront spaces often rented by emerging gallerists—and as a parody of the trendy “micro-storefronts” dotting downtown Los Angeles—the Storefront at MoCA opens with a display of contemporary masterworks as re-created by artist Noah Davis. This exhibition, “Imitation of Wealth,” began in 2013 as a curatorial project for Davis’s own Underground Museum in Mid-City. Realizing no institution would lend him actual artworks, Davis zeroed in on the simplicity of famous works that he emphatically made his own: a Dan Flavin lighting piece, a Robert Smithson nonsite, a Marcel Duchamp bottle rack, an On Kawara date painting, and a Jeff Koons vitrine (complete with a Craigslist Hoover). Among the destabilizing, Sturtevant-like laterals provoked here are the emerging and established, the unknown and known, and African American versus (largely) white. Even the exhibition’s title cites Imitation of Life, a 1959 Douglas Sirk film about a light-skinned black woman who passes in white society. Davis’s pointed substitution of wealth for life questions what we value most.

These works first appeared in a neighborhood underserved by art. What is now at stake is their relocation downtown to MoCA, where art is expected and a distancing glass facade is the trade-off for twenty-four-hour access. Davis’s concept remains graceful. Yet rephrasing a gesture once so specifically sited “underground” and outside the standards of institutional lending, this present iteration anchors a curiously circular transposition from museum to artist-run space and back. Wealth aside, the canny imitations here have earned Davis pride of place among institutional values.

— Travis Diehl