August 7 to September, 12 2015
7561 Sunset Blvd #103
Los Angeles, 323 378 6842

Pain’ing. In casual parlance that’s how we usually pronounce it, isn’t it? The “t” drops off the lazy American palate, moored on the tip of the tongue. How’s your pain’ing going? Are you still pain’ing?

Margaux Ogden makes pain’ings. It’s a convenient contraction for thinking about the young New York-based artist’s work. There’s pain there, definitely. But there’s also an ease about her work. I don’t mean to imply that she paints with blasé indifference. No, these are real pain’ings — full of struggle, anxiety, sadness, confusion, redemption, turmoil — but they’re not agitated, overworked, or even particularly expressive. Rather, they’re composed of fluid and confident freehand gestures, in evenly fragmented compositions, rendered in blocks of cool mint pastels, luxe lavenders, rich burgundies, and little pops of fluorescence. Sleek but not slick, there’s nothing jarring or discordant in these paintings. They’re easy on the eyes, is one way to put it.

But get a little closer, close enough to read the Basquiat-like texts embedded within the composition, and you find blips of neurosis, little obsessions, anxious mantras, mysterious notes and numbers. The phrase “high hopes for ya” floats in bright pink script at the top of a painting, ominously titled Cursed from the Start (all works 2015), almost sardonically out of reach, while the message “5/386 RELATIONSHIP SABOTEURS” screams slightly from the side. A kind of symbolic shorthand emerges throughout the suite of seven paintings, on view now at ltd los angeles: dollar signs, rectangular forms that resemble open laptops, a little desert cactus, a yin yang symbol, winking eyes — “emoji lyf,” she writes. Some forms are more inscrutably evocative: a four-legged shape is repeated among several of the canvases, like little Lascaux cave paintings, or maybe they’re representations of the “analytic sofa” whispered in pastel blue on a canvas called Being Human is Embarrassing.

One pseudonymous observer of Ogden’s first solo exhibition, at Freight + Volume in New York earlier this year, proclaimed that her work “speak[s] to our generation, the millennial.” It’s an apt characterization, in fact. These paintings pulse with pieces of the fragmented, distracted, abstract self, out there fixed in the digital ether or reverberating ad nauseam in your skull. Overheard phrases, something your ex said, awkward text messages, ephemeral Snapchats you just can’t forget. “THANK U FOR THE SEX.” Ogden’s paintings exhibit a cool and calm exterior, punctured with stabs of anxiety, humiliation, worry. A visual approximation of the gap between the real you and the you of your Instagram account. One composition, with its contrasting blocks of vivid turquoise and raw canvas, stands like a Guernica (1937) for a generation that’s never experienced war firsthand: equivocal, conflicted, chameleonic.

The title of Ogden’s Los Angeles show is “Chekhov’s Gun,” referring to the dramatic principle that you should only put a gun on the stage if at some point in the narrative it goes off. No element is superfluous, she suggests. But I don’t know if I take her word for it. Perhaps the invocation of this dramatic device serves more as a way to reassure us: all this is necessary. All the pain and drama and failure and elation and fucked up dreams. All the promissory notes and overdrawn bank accounts and paranoid thoughts. This whole collection of material objects, this paint on canvas: it’s all vital, needed, intentional. But in the end, it’s all theater.

Ogden paints on unprimed canvas. Mistakes and missteps can’t be gessoed over. There’s no “undo” button in her pain’ing. Like life, of course.

The post Emojis and Emotion: New Painting by Margaux Ogden appeared first on artcritical.

Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action at Pomona College Museum of Art
January 20 to May 17, 2015
333 N College Way
Claremont, CA, 909 621 8283

Alien She at the Orange County Museum of Art
February 15 to May 24, 2015
850 San Clemente Dr
Newport Beach, CA, 949 759 1122
traveling to the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland

SOGTFO at François Ghebaly
February 28 to April 4, 2015
2245 E Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA, 323 282 5187

What is the value of a woman’s work?

I find myself contemplating this question after spending a total of four unpaid hours learning to edit Wikipedia in the service of helping resolve its gender imbalance.

Only 13% of Wikipedia editors are women, according to a 2011 census, a statistic that prompted the Art+Feminism group to spearhead and sponsor worldwide “edit-a-thons” to encourage the creation and expansion of Wikipedia content related to women and feminism in the arts. I took part in a local chapter at Whittier College where I and a handful of students and faculty members learned best practices, notability guidelines, and how to create, edit, and cite on the world’s most-used reference website.

In four hours I managed to add one little paragraph of text to Hannah Höch’s Wikipedia page. Accounting for the learning curve and the chatter in the room, this isn’t really as inefficient as it sounds, but it did prompt me to question the value of my time and work — as a woman, and as a writer.

Not that I would have been doing anything different. Were it not for the edit-a-thon I would have devoted that time to writing this article for artcritical, an article that I’d promised my editor would survey a number of exhibitions featuring women artists in the greater Los Angeles area. There’s an exhibition of Guerrilla Girls ephemera at the Pomona College Museum of Art, a survey of the influence of the Riot Grrl movement on visual arts at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, as well as a recent exhibition of female sculptors at François Ghebaly Gallery in Downtown L.A. What unites these exhibitions is not only the gender of their participants, but the insistence on gender as a uniting principle.

A month ago, in Pomona, two black-clad, gorilla-masked activists greeted an auditorium with armfuls of bananas, tossing them out to the crowd before mounting the stage and presenting a lecture/performance/artist talk on the Guerrilla Girls’ objectives and activities. One of them, using the pseudonym Käthe Kollwitz, a founding member, has devoted a career to anonymously fighting for equal representation of art by women and people of color. The anonymity here serves to “keep the focus on the issues” rather than on the personalities of those who bring the issues to the table. But, I wonder, who is it behind the mask, who has toiled for 30 years with no credit, no personal recognition for such incremental concessions to the overall state of the arts? What is the value of this work, this lifetime of work? Certainly there are speaker’s fees, which are how the Guerrilla Girls fund their activism, but meager remuneration isn’t what gives value to this work, it is simply what enables it. The value of her work, rather, could be seen in the faces of the hundreds of young women in the audience — young artists and curators, ready to embark on their careers in an environment that is steadily getting better, more inclusive, but not perfect yet. The value is in the transmission of the message, in the hopes that more people will help carry the torch, keep the tallies, and expose disparity.

The message can be transmitted in other ways, in the case of Riot Grrl through music and mail order. The walls are lined with zines at the beginning of the fascinating and engrossing “Alien She” exhibition at OCMA: cheaply photocopied-and-stapled rants, poems, and comics, on topics from punk rock, to coming out, to resisting rape. Like pre-Internet proto-Tumblrs, zines were distributed through independent channels just like underground music, via independent record labels, in small bookstores, record stores, by direct mail, and at punk shows. Miranda July’s Big Miss Moviola project (1995-2003, later known as Joanie 4 Jackie) connected female filmmakers through a “video chainletter” distributing each work, each artist to one another. Born out of the frustration July experienced trying to get her work into male-dominated film festivals, Moviola cost only $5 to participate, was advertised in teen magazines like Sassy and Seventeen, and completely circumvented all the usual channels of distribution, production, and display, sidestepping “mainstream” audiences, and building instead a small community comprised only of likeminded female filmmakers. The value of this work is in the network, and in the recognition that you can create it yourself. Who cares what the boys think?

The exhibition “SOGTFO” (“Sculpture Or Get The Fuck Out”) at François Ghebaly, a grouping of five early- to mid-career female sculptors — Amanda Ross-Ho, Andrea Zittel, Kelly Akashi, Kathleen Ryan, and Nevine Mahmoud — paradoxically makes a bid to “undo the gendered vernacular” while using gender as a lens through which to observe sculpture and culture in practice. (The title is a play on the phrase, commonly found on male-dominated web forums, “TOGTFO”: [show photos of your] Tits Or Get The Fuck Out [of the discussion].) The young artists Akashi, Ryan, and Mahmoud are absolute revelations in this show: their forms, both light and heavy at the same time, slump, drip, curl, perch, and sway in the space. The show opens ideas and concerns beyond gender. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s essay in the accompanying single-sheet catalogue, “Sculpture…,” perfectly encapsulates the condition of constant questioning that comes with the desire to see beyond gender while recognizing the effects of the gender gap: “Being sick of crude binaries, false oppositions, extrinsic responsibilities and coerced competition,” she writes, “She wants a break from options phrased as this ‘or’ that.” Most pointedly she writes, “…or bypass phallogocentrism altogether! I’m so over it. SCUM says, ‘What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.’” Amen.

The sculptures, on their part, seem unbounded by such questions, despite the sad fact that, in all likelihood, given the art market’s enduring skew, these works will ultimately hold less value at auction than works by male sculptors (not to mention less attention in the press, in galleries, in museums, and in all the other parts of the arts apparatus). What is their value then? What is value, in monetary terms at least, if it’s so arbitrarily granted to some works and not to others? Certainly it’s not inherent in the work itself, so how do you measure it, and, more importantly, who gets to do so?

Like women’s work and artists’ work, art writing involves the transmission of a message, is likely to be viewed only by a small network of devotees, and is of questionable value. Composing tweets for a corporation or public figure pays better than writing art reviews, but writing for bigger audiences often pays nothing at all.

In the end, I suppose I should find a way to tell you that no matter the value, it’s somehow all worth it. I’m not sure exactly why or how, but I can confirm that by adding one paragraph to Wikipedia about Hannah Höch’s relationship with the insidiously abusive Raoul Hausmann, I was offered some slight feeling of catharsis (and a rather startling and grand experience writing for the mass audience of Wikipedia). Perhaps it’s a similar feeling to what Höch must have felt when she published, in 1920, shortly before leaving Hausmann, a biting short story parodying her lover and his hypocritical stance on “women’s emancipation.” Publishing it probably didn’t pay all that much, but no doubt she received tenfold dividends in satisfaction alone.

The post Women’s Work: Considering Feminist Art Through Three Recent Shows appeared first on artcritical.

Farrah Karapetian: Stagecraft at Von Lintel Gallery

2685 S La Cienega Blvd (between Alivar and Cullen streets)
January 17 to February 28, 2015
Los Angeles, 310 559 5700

When I was a child my father would delight me by playing Ken Nordine’s word jazz. We’d listen and laugh along with the absurdist poetry delivered in Nordine’s mellifluous baritone accompanied by bebop improvisations, breathy flute trills, the swish of a brush across a snare drum. I’d close my eyes and stare with my ears at the scenes Nordine sketched with words — short, jokey stories brimming with onomatopoeic ornamentation and witty little rhymes. His 1966 album, Colors, is a collection of 34 roughly one-and-a-half-minute vignettes, each characterizing a color with anthropomorphic anecdotes: ecru is a critic, for instance; burgundy is bulging and fat; lavender is an old, old, old, old, old lady.

I thought briefly of Ken Nordine after seeing Farrah Karapetian’s exhibition of new photograms and sculpture, “Stagecraft,” at Von Lintel Gallery. The comparison is perhaps a bit corny, I admit, but there is some correspondence to be found between Nordine’s evocation of colors through words and music, and Karapetian’s evocation of music through shape and color. There are shared elements of playfulness, improvisation and mood; with both, our mind fills in what the eyes do not see. While earlier works alluded to subjects with political weight (portraying riot police, protestors, guns and contraband), this series uses the accoutrements of music and performance as a vehicle to investigate the mutability of perception and the rhythmic possibilities of light, color, and space.

Karapetian began with bronzes and blues — the colors one feels listening to jazz, according to what Karapetian’s father revealed to her about his own sensations when listening to music. In Got to the Mystic (all works 2014), we see her father as a ghostly figure playing a skeleton of a drum kit, his face obscured by the hi-hat; the drum stands and rims and closures and cymbals register a stark white against the ruddy ground of the photogram.

Karapetian’s painstakingly crafted replica of her father’s drum kit — minus the skins and shells, leaving just the armature, the metal lugs, rods and stands — sits in an adjoining room. The cymbals are formed from glass, allowing light to pass through. A spotlight positioned on the floor of the gallery illuminates the sculpture from below, casting its shadow against the wall, and revealing the apparatus at play in Karapetian’s photograms. Many artists go to lengths to conceal their processes, but Karapetian, in the service of transparency, divulges her sources, shows us the “negative.”

The viewer, however, does not get the full experience, rather just a glimpse of how things work. In Three Muses one can clearly see the three bodies in space, but one can only imagine the haptic experience of three people trying to position themselves in a completely dark room, waiting for the flash of light that would inscribe their shadows on the paper. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Flash.

Karapetian spoke to me about the primacy of physical interaction in her work, from situating her subjects in the darkened space to the handling of the paper and processing. The viewer sees only the final result, limited to the perspective of the paper itself. We see only what the paper sees, as it mutely records the impression of shadow and light across its surface. It bears other marks, too, though. Around the edges, little fingerprints are indelibly smudged, and the pricks of the push pins that held the paper in place are visible. The prints hold a remarkable texture, impossible to capture in the jpegs you’d see online.

There are bronzes and blues — but also crimsons and yellows and indigos and deep, resonant greens. Yes, resonance: the colors here have it, just like sounds do. Light waves that linger. My memory of the electric greens and cyans of Kräftig — the color is so pure, so saturated and intense — challenges the colors I now see in the digital reproduction of the piece on my laptop and in the exhibition catalogue. Strange, how variable color is in real life and in reproduction. Stranger still, to think of these vibrant greens and blues produced by red and magenta lights. In the darkroom, the gap between perceived and resultant color becomes a playground of improvisation and experimentation, “a very present tense experience,” as Karapetian put it. Like a jazz musician mounting the stage, she may already know the riff, but where the song goes from there will always be a surprise.

The post In Colors: Farrah Karapetian at Von Lintel appeared first on artcritical.