Los Angeles’s rich gallery network spreads across the city’s endless urban landscape. Particular highlights this month include six shows by women artists and a group exhibition of work by Native American artists, all of which present work from multiple generations and historical perspectives. The exhibition spaces and formats are equally as varied, and include architectural white cubes, industrial complexes, historical buildings, and even a stately private home.
April Bey, ‘When You’re on Another Planet and They Just Fly’
Gavlak
Through March 5, 2022
Los Angeles–based, Bahamian American artist April Bey finds inspiration in the Afrofuturist movement, which began using speculative fictions and fantasies to envision a new, otherworldly future for Black life in the 1960s. For this show at at Gavlak,she further develops her decolonized realm of ‘Atlantica’, a place in which Black and queer cultures can blossom and thrive in ‘an ecosystem of mutual aid and acts of reparation’, as the exhibition text states. The show presents a constellation of painted and woven portraits of Black creatives that incorporate exultant textiles and materials, such as sequins and faux fur, which are hung on fabric-covered walls in the lush colors of Caribbean neighborhoods. As a self-proclaimed visitor from Atlantica herself, Bey continues the craft and artistic traditions of the world we already know while proposing creative freedoms for the next one – one she continues to expand.
Phyllida Barlow, ‘glimpse’
Hauser & Wirth
February 17 – May 8, 2022
Phyllida Barlow’s first solo show in Los Angeles is a site-specific presentation directly intertwined with a gallery complex that holds its own substantial local history. The now-refined brick complex anchors the downtown Arts District, but it was once the Globe Grain & Milling Company, established at the turn of the 20th century and in industrial use until the 1970s. For ‘glimpse’, titled after Barlow’s poem based on childhood memories, she draws on her decades-long practice of building installations with strips of fabric, cardboard, cement, and lumber stilts to create an immersive environment that reaches all the way to the twenty-feet-high ceilings, leading the visitor to the very limits of the space that houses the work.
Mika Tajima, ‘You Must Be Free’
Kayne Griffin
Through March 12, 2022
Though the gallery is filled with clusters of elegant glass pedestals – each one made to hold a unique, organic, bulbous, hollow glass form – the substance of this exhibition is the air that floats, not the shape that holds these transparent clouds. The freeform works on view – ranging from the delicate sculptures and their matching support structures to jagged two-foot-tall hunks of rose quartz – breathe in and out through Jacuzzi jets embedded within them. In doing so, they exchange what Epicurean philosopher Lucretius called anima, or the air of the spirit, that courses through an incomplete mortal body. They inhale and exhale, circulating the air in the exhibition, according to their own rhythms just as freely as we believe we do.
Samara Golden, ‘Guts’
Night Gallery
Through March 26, 2022
Samara Golden turns Night Gallery’s grand new space, deep in Downtown’s industrial zone, into a dizzying vertical hall of mirrors. The artist’s anxiety-producing installations multiply their own square footage many times over, appearing as simple white cubes or rooms on the outside with deceptively simple peepholes as entry points into a kaleidoscope of walls, floors, and corners. For ‘Guts’, the levels of a new illusionary hollowed skyscraper are filled with familiar objects turned uncanny – rustled sheets of blue viny become a plastic flooding; miniature heaps of disheveled and overturned furniture are perhaps the result of a tornado; fluorescent-hued toy soldiers are all down. The candy-colored entrails that give the installation its title house our deepest instincts and latent dreads. Climb the scaffolding to the temporary second floor for a deeper look with twice the vertigo.
‘Snake whisky still life and other stories’
Various Small Fires
Through February 20, 2022
This group exhibition at Various Small Fires has been curated by Todd Bockley and features artists from his own enterprise, Minneapolis’s Bockley Gallery, which has championed Native American, Indigenous, and folk artists since 1984. A mix of contemporary and historic media, the show is titled after Pao Houa Her’s poignant photograph starring the titular alcohol. Paintings by Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson, Jim Denomie, and Lauren Roche depict surrealist, mythical, and dream-inspired landscapes with Indigenous customs and symbols, while Brad Kahlhamer’s wall sculpture Ugh x 4 / 4 x Ugh (2021), part of his ongoing series ‘Super Catcher’(2014–), takes the shape of an oversized dreamcatcher. Additionally, works by Eric-Paul Riege use photography and weaving to pay homage to the weavers who came before him, recalling sentiments of the Diné, or Navajo, worldview.
Christina Forrer & Rebecca Morris
Parker Gallery
February 16 – April 9, 2022
Rebecca Morris, a painter and author of the manifesto ‘For Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-Objective’, continuously moves between the rigid (literal grids, black-and-white schematics), the temptingly sensual (triangles with hypotenuses of seemingly hand-torn paper), and the ornate (mark-making with materials like gold leaf). At Parker Gallery, housed in an elegant home hidden in the hills of Los Feliz, she presents new abstract works made over the last three years in advance of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles later this year. These are paired with Christina Forrer’s tapestries, which, although classically informed, often feature exaggerated, psychedelic-patterned characters caught up in violence, confrontation, and tense, heated arguments. Her new tapestries (woven from the floor up), sculptures, and drawings plunge even deeper into interpersonal drama. Seen together, the two friends’ methods begin to appear in parallel: They work their planes one small segment at a time until the patchworked image presents itself as an indisputable whole.
Rochelle Feinstein, ‘You Again’
Hannah Hoffman, in collaboration with Campoli Presti, Bridget Donahue, Nina Johnson, Candice Madey, and Galerie Francesca Pia
Through March 26, 2022
This collaborative exhibition, which has been unfolding across six venues in the U.S. and Europe, sets Rochelle Feinstein’s four-decade-long career in sharp focus as her styles and approaches to making – and displaying – paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and videos only continue to broaden. Feinstein shows older work next to newer work that responds to it; at Hannah Hoffman, the exhibition’s final venue, her deeply personal material history commands the space. With Travel Abroad (1999), a canvas of rough, cheerfully bright squares hangs next to a small cardboard box that has been through a ringer of a postal system; next to them is another canvas, color-blocked to menacingly summon the German flag and repeating the question, ‘Feinstein, is that a German name or a Jewish name?’
Jennifer Piejko is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her most recent editorial project is the exhibition catalog Technologies of the Self (published by Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Del Vaz Projects, 2021).