Graduate Exhibition: In On And Around
October 2 to 20, 2021
2020 & 2021 Graduate Exhibition: In On And Around
Curated by Jan Tumlir
To be an artist requires imagination, which is defined in the dictionary as “that faculty of mind
that forms and manipulates images.” Artists are expected to generate original, never-seen-before
images, as if from out of the blue, but only as if, because images wholly untethered to the facts
on the ground of the real and existing world risk becoming something other than art—products
of “Imagineering,” in the language of the Disney corporation. The artistic imagination is granted
a great latitude to stray from things as they are, but outright fantasy marks its limit. The images it
gives us to see, even when they take on the guise of castles in the sky, must still be ones that we
could conceivably inhabit. Habitation is an underlying theme of this exhibition. It bears the title
In, On, and Around as a prompt to consider the works featured within it in terms of spatial
positioning. These words suggest differing degrees of proximity to or remove from a common
center, which might be designated in the broadest sense as “home.” All that falls within its
compass—familiar environments, intimate architectures, the furnishings of domestic life, items
of everyday use, etc.—is insistently recalled here. What these works share is a fascination with
the commonplace, so easily overlooked in the course of our daily routine, and therefore also
potentially extraordinary when subject to sustained observation.
Architects furnish their clients with imaginative renderings of their prospective homes, generally
in the form of floorplans and elevations. Elizabeth Weber’s paintings suggest that these two
views—overlooking and straight ahead—permeate our experience of domestic space and remain
put in mind even after this space has been left. These are paintings of memory as much as space.
“My work is not pre-visualized,” Weber informs; “the generative processes of drawing and
painting influence the outcome.” In other words, it is painterly space that she is concerned with
above all—a space that stops at the edges of the canvas. Yet those brushstrokes that subdivide
the interior into a perplexing maze of high walls may still be seen to follow familiar paths set by
habit and stored in muscle since our earliest days.
Three photographs by Matthew Chan offer a succession of views of the artist’s hometown of
Monterey Park that transitions from the street to a residential parking structure to the interior of a
home. These un-peopled pictures are suffused in a generic pall, yet here and there one can make
out certain culturally specific signs of occupation and, moreover, of a deeply experiential
investment in these various sites, which are known to the artist through and through. A banal
intersection assumes a haunting aspect when filtered through the memory of one who once raced
through it, timing the stoplights to negotiate a blind corner.
Jake Martinez’s landscape photographs of the Antelope Valley strike a vaguely disquieting
balance between factual reportage and the picturesque, their romantic aura offset by forensic
attention to the minutia. In their strict framing and expansive depth of field, these pictures hint at
the artist’s ingrained understanding of the terrain under observation. Originally experienced as a
child and then returned to in adulthood, these “old haunts,” scrutinized through a sharp lens,
disclose traces of growth and decay, of human occupation and natural reclamation, the rise and
fall of a region’s economic fortunes.
Stephen Sariñana-Lampson has long been concerned with documenting the changes occurring in
the East LA neighborhood where he grew up and still resides. Included here is a work from a
series of photographs that flirt with the freedoms of painterly abstraction without renouncing
their hold on the often-baleful social facts that underwrite the dynamics of urban blighting and
redevelopment. Taken across the river from Lincoln Heights in the industrial zone that borders
the so-called Arts District, his picture is entitled The Invisible Man after the figure stenciled,
black-on-black, on the warehouse wall depicted therein—a figure summoned by Sariñana-
Lampson to speak to the brutal logistics of ethnic displacement and erasure.
Two near-black paintings by Garen Novruzyan evince the reductionist zero-degree of modernist
formalism, but this impression of severity is only available at first glance. Peering deeper, the
eye is assailed with a superabundance of detail. The title of one of these works, Decayed Wall off
Kingsley Drive, VII (For Jack Whitten), inflects its ostensibly freeform gestural play with a
representational content that pertains to that sense of place only felt by a longtime resident. “My
upbringing in LA informs my fascination with surface textures,” claims Novruzyan, thereby
grounding his somber abstractions in passing views of buildings layered in grime and graffiti,
their sidewalk shadows punctured by the iridescent glow of petals falling from trees blooming
nearby.
Matthew Nespor’s film Autoluminescent is a montage of old and new media, Super-8 celluloid
footage intercut with cellphone capture, grain colliding with pixel. Grandparents and infants
chase each other’s tails through cozy interiors and sun-bleached gardens on fragile home movie
snippets. The depth and scope of family life is conjured up by its generational bookends and set
to a sensitive rendition of Misty on the living room piano. As the music fades out, it is replaced
by a more incidental order of sounds: the room-tone; field recordings of birds, passing cars and
rain; wind whipping against the mic; the click and whirr of electronic mediation. Onscreen, the
frayed imagery of analog recollection is joined to the clean-rinsed impression of a hand stirring
through water, as though tracing the ebb and flow of memory from a point that is always right
now.
A series of isolated figures, silhouetted against saturated sunsets, move in time to a music we
cannot hear in Tirsa Delate’s video collectively dancing alone in the landscape. Only the
faraway ambient sounds of the idyllic environs—Ascot Hills Park in El Sereno as night
approaches—reach our ears. And then, captured more closely, there is also the rustling of the
bodies before and behind the camera, joined in a ritual of disinhibiting communion. A circle of
friends is convened one at a time, lone individuals sutured together on a screen that glows
somewhat sadly as the only available alternative to social distancing.
What could be closer, more intimately within reach than one’s own body? And, at the same time,
what could be more foreign than this thing that we glimpse only in reflections, in pictures,
through the eyes of another? The body as locus of dysmorphic fantasy is the perennial subject of
Anja Honisett’s paintings. Kate is emblematic: the portrait of a young woman caught in the act
of self-portraiture, which increasingly implies the surrender of appearance to auto-correction.
Here, though, the mask of algorithmically determined perfection is deformed by the hand.
Features are set adrift in a face that opens neither inward nor out—the body banished to the
desolate topography of its “second life.”
To say that an artist is “in dialogue with painting” often leads to evasion, but in regard to the
work of Christopher Taylor, the expression might gain some sharper contours. What we find here
is not an approximation of the painterly by other means—whether sculpture, photography, video,
installation, etc. Rather, this artist turns to drawing, an essential component of painting, as a
means of addressing the painterly “from the inside.” What becomes of the delimiting line within
a field of de-differentiation, where depth vies with flatness and figures must dissolve into their
ground? Etched in charcoal, the vaunted “push and pull” of abstracting gesture unfolds as a
drama of adaptation, assimilation, passing. The curious organism at the center of The Tempest is
merging with its environment of pattern and decoration, and of course we know this only
because it has not succeeded.
Coby Cerna carves painting into pieces, odds and ends that reflect on the economy of a studio
where nothing is wasted. The singular masterpiece lies on the far side of these multiplying scraps
that can be endlessly reconfigured. They derive strength from their smallness, which is not
simply a matter of material size but of experiential scale. That the steam rising from coffee cup
chimes in with the pattern of a loud pair of socks might not amount to a philosophical epiphany,
but it is worth noting. Painting is here a means of note-taking, of sorting through “the run of the
mill,” selecting and collecting fragments that only become meaningful when we connect them.
The realism of Adrienne Kinsella’s painstakingly rendered color-pencil drawings is undermined
by their translucent ground of mylar, which lends to every one of her images a wraith-like
quality. The standardized modernist chair and collapsed figure of a woman in evening dress
depicted in the works Location Not Found and Communication Error show through to each other
and, when juxtaposed, enact a scene by turns tender and estranged. Like all chairs, this one is
shaped for our bottom, but here instead it cradles the head, as might the lap of a loving partner.
That furniture is readily anthropomorphized comes as no surprise; more unsettling is the reverse
perspective, where persons are objectified. In Kinsella’s work, the relation between the living
body and its inorganic supports and accessories is equalized at a point of dynamic polarity,
psychic currents running back and forth unimpeded.
Lauren Moradi’s chairs are scavenged from thrift stores and the side of the road. They have been
dismissed from their proper place and denied their privacy, and yet in this forlorn state acutely
recall the sense of having once belonged somewhere. Moradi seizes on this disjecta,
administering “fixes” that, in the end, only serve to exacerbate the problem. Do her two indigent
chairs lend support to each other or mutually confirm their precarity? And what of the quilted
textiles that swaddle the frame of another, protecting and simultaneously weakening it? Buckling
under its own weight, this chair has received a jerry-rigged form of emergency care that can also
be read as caustic parody of the trials of domestic upkeep.
The heterogeneous assortment of small items that Rory Nestor has reproduced in ceramics is
bound by narrative threads that remain suggestively loose. Quotidian, though by no means banal,
these are the sorts of things that stand out from a background of normalcy to sound a note of
alarm. A sheet of paper (folded, bloodied, desperately soliciting a reader), a pharmaceutical
container (tipped over, its contents spilling out), and a pair of handcuffs (locked with no key in
sight)—each is worrisome enough on its own and all the more so when taken together. In life,
they would open onto those zones of privacy from which we tend to recoil, though not here.
Remade in this material that faithfully conserves the imprint of the artist’s hand throughout, they
come insulated in artifice. Like pieces on a gameboard, they rouse the viewer to imagine the very
worst outcome in a spirit of play.
Matt Brugger makes ceramic objects with movable parts, suggestive of tools and machinery.
Obviously, the work Gearbox is dysfunctional; it nods to utility from an aesthetic arm’s length
that renders its title absurd. However, on second thought, this antithetical formulation of art and
technics will not hold. Although routinely confined to the realm of the homey crafts, ceramics,
we are here reminded, can also be linked to the very origins of industrial manufacture. This, then,
is a contemporary work of art that doubles as a fossilized artifact of technological life, as if
drawn up from the depths of an archeological dig. It projects the present into a distant future,
where it will be greeted as ancient history. Our hands still know what to do with the handle that
graces Brugger’s Gearbox, but already we can imagine a time when it will appeal to eyes only,
as nothing more or less than a gestural flourish.
The female and male figures foregrounded in Hanna Miller’s paintings Bouncy Little Girl and
Sleep with One Eye Open and a Bat Under Your Bed bear an evident stylistic affinity with those
of Max Beckman in their roughly hewn statue-like bearing. Yet they are engaged in that
quintessentially American sport that we tend to associate more with Norman Rockwell than any
German Expressionist. This is not to deny the pathos in baseball, nor its allegorical dimension,
which begins with the idea of the home plate as both a point of departure and destination. The
woman wears a glove and holds a ball, the man grips a bat with both hands. Even if we were not
told that they are siblings, we could still make out some trace of their kinship in these works. The
artist portrays herself and her brother as friendly rivals, perhaps playing on opposite sides of the
game, but still cheering each other on through every base to safety.
Home comes first and it is followed by a succession of homes-away-from-home, “halfway”
houses” that one can only try to make whole. Among the most resistant of these is the hospital,
which is programmatically designed to erase every last trace of our occupation. In Patricia
Lauletta’s photographs of her mother’s last days, however, these are saved for the record. Our
gaze follows that of the camera as it alights on a privacy curtain, a tray table, a glowing monitor,
a hat perched on the back of a chair. The rites of visitation are commemorated through a whole
host of details that, precisely because they are so unprepossessing and ephemeral, leave a lasting
impression.
In Michael Roman’s installation The Pipeline, a single bed, wrought from heavy steel without a
single accommodating curve, serves as a reminder that, for too many among us, home is
something routinely broken. Salvaged from a local youth detention center, this forbidding piece
of furniture conforms to a one-size-fits-all standard or mean that nevertheless tends to be
disproportionately reserved for a particular demographic. Above it is pasted a collection of news
reports, want ads and propaganda posters that throw such biases into sharp relief, warning of
crime-waves instigated by “super-predators” automatically identified by economic status and
color of skin. Included as well are a series of portraits, drawn from the archive of the
incarcerated and rendered in the artist’s own hand, that inject some measure of humaneness into
these brutal proceedings. The carceral enclosure here doubles as monastic cell, a place where
suffering and grace—“the ordinary grace of the contemporary black man,” as Roman puts it—
are inextricably intertwined.
A couple of bright-eyed Western missionaries is driven toward an African village in an excerpted
segment of Alicia Diane’s multipart graphic novel Jaydi’s Story. They are traveling far afield, on
an adventure, not yet aware that they might be invaders. Expressions of joyful anticipation turn
panicked as they are met with suspicion. Soon enough religious leaders will lock horns, but in
this moment of leadup, the rules of engagement remain open. The reader as well is met on the
threshold, a precarious place, but before anyone here can be defined as an other, there are only
hosts and guests.