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.

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March 31 –May 7, 2011
530 W. 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 691-7700

Matt Jones’ Multiverse was a generously dense exhibition with works covering the entire gallery space including two floor-to-ceiling wall installations.  Jones takes a fairly simple set of materials and through a process of contemplation and punk rock slapdash creates iconic wall pieces and propped figures.  There was a video work titled Every Expression Possible (2011) that featured a masked Jones acting out many different faces and expressions against the background of a Karma Charger.  As in his paintings, Jones uses repetition here to evoke a meditative calm.

But the work is also about contradictions, and these make for visual excitement.  While Jones cites Buddhist practices and meditation as a source of creative energy, we see Wolverine masks and Black Flag logos (originally designed by Raymond Pettibon in the late ‘70s) which conjure a kind of brash male ego enterprise (the rocker, the comic book character), archetypal symbols that Jones has rescued from adolescence.  He has dusted off these two icons, colored over them and reverently slathered them with Elmer’s glue.

The floor pieces were the most satisfying part of the show.  The groupings of propped figures invited interaction.  I arrived at the opening early and there were only a few visitors but I felt I had entered a crowded room.  The figures were frozen in dynamic poses and emanated excitement.  Propped paintings, frozen in animate gestural poses, act as stand-ins for viewers.  Jones plays with materiality in ways that feel at once DIY and mechanical in their clarity of execution.  The surfaces of these propped figures were treated exactly the same as the wall pieces hung nearly edge to edge along the perimeter of the gallery.  Inkjet prints are cut to the shapes of the figures and then adhered to the plywood surface with glue.  Jones works over the prints with alcohol-based marker and adds color and abstract patterns.  The final stage of the process is several coats of thinned Elmer’s Glue spread over the surface that acts as a lacquer, sealing and unifying the surfaces.  The result of Jones’ serial method is a borderline-obsessive repetition of themes and characters that is like a visual chant–we see black and white lines repeated in the Karma Chargers and the recurrent characters throughout the works.  A hum of patterns fills the room.

Jones succeeded at pulling off a sense of serenity in a room dense with punk-inspired plywood cutouts.  Karma Charger (2011), a large inverted wedge of plywood covered in Xerox sheets of black and white stripes, is a mandala that assists in bringing about a moment of Nirvana.  The idea with this construction, according to the artist himself,  is that the viewer basks in front of the device, imbuing it with his own psychic energy and that the subsequent viewers in turn exchange the other viewers’ meditative experience. When staring into the pattern for several minutes my peripheral vision dissolved, my eyes softened and my mind quieted.  I didn’t expect to be brought into a kind of guided meditation when entering the exhibition but was pleased to find a few moments of quiet contemplation and visual pleasure.

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At the memorial service given on June 21st for Eunah Kim, I found a powerful upwelling of emotion in the talks and readings given in honor of her memory. I myself was not prepared for the deep feeling her short but exemplary life occasioned, but almost without my knowing it, she had reached me as a gifted person and sculptor. At once a practicing Buddhist (from 1998-2000 she was a nun novitiate at the Hwa Gye Sa Buddhist Temple), a devoted friend, and a committed artist, Eunah transformed her many roles into a unity that was compelling from the start and unforgettable for those who knew her. People at the service noted that Eunah passed in and out of their lives; sometimes there would be no contact for months at a time. But the joy she occasioned when she was in our presence only made us feel just how remarkable she was.

Eunah’s gift as an innocent brave enough to face all manner of experience made it clear she had much to offer. Her musical voice and distinctive laughter conveyed a delight in both spirituality and creativity; moreover, she was capable in her art of making both attributes cohere. Capable of deep friendship, she leaves her mark in the memories of those who knew her closely, but she also inspired those who only knew her on the periphery of her acquaintance. Through the many changes and travels her life comprised, Eunah became a grand citizen of the world, who moved about globally but made her mark locally in the feelings of her acquaintances and friends. Memory is often about the occasion of loss; however, she bequeathed to us a decency and delight the likes of which are extremely rare, helping us to see her life in a positive light.

It is the combination of deep joy and inspired craft that honors Eunah in her work. We are hard put to recognize this when it happens, in part because we see it only occasionally. But Eunah’s flags and sculptures, in the tradition of Beuys, look to an esthetic in which a person’s substance and character cannot be divided from the work itself. As her admirers and audience, we can only hope that we will keep alive not only the image of her as a person, but also the ideas and the particulars of her art. To be remembered as well is her profound pleasure in daily life; more than any one I know, Eunah had a capacity for amusement in the largest sense of that word. Art, it has been famously declared, makes nothing happen, but perhaps that “nothing” points to the Buddhist notion of emptiness permeating our lives and relations. My deepest regret is that I did not know her better, although her memory will reside in me—and many others—forever.

Eunah Kim: Born Sooncheon, Cholladam-do, Korea 1973, died Seoul, Korea, 2010. BA in Philosophy at DukSung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea, 1997; BFA in Painting at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 2004; Graduate Studies in Art Therapy at School of Visual Arts, New York, 2007.  Solo exhibitions at Won Buddhist Center, Boston, Mass. Norfolk Gallery, Cambridge, Mass., 2009; Korean-American Association of Greater New York, 2011; and Illuminated Metropolis, New York (upcoming).  Group exhibitions include Migration, curated by Nick Lawrence, at Freight + Volume, 2011.  Recipient of fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundations, the Artists’ Fellowship, the Wheeler Foundation and the Capeli d’Angeli Foundation.

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