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Valerie Snobeck Makes Networks
New York-based artist Valerie Snobeck's solo show opened at Thomas Duncan Gallery in Los Angeles at the unconventional hour of 7:30 PM [through May 26]. The pitch darkness outside ensured that the objects in Snobeck's sparse exhibition, "They Seem Removed," would be entirely flattened under the uniform bright fluorescent lights, making the space over into a partially obscured, shadowy construction zone. During the day, the site-specific installation relaxes into a dance of material and California light.
Snobeck's work is all about the spatial limitations on vision. The eponymous works in the show (all 2012) are semi-transparent scrims set up vertically on the ground floor and the gallery's mezzanine. The ground floor structure, comprising a diptych of wood frames stretched with black netting with some orange stripes, has been fitted into the main gallery entryway to create an enclosure, blocking off entry or delineating the space as a work in progress. The structure on the mezzanine is less refined, with a looser, almost gauzy application of netting.
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The Perfect Arrangement: Q+A with Rachel Foullon
The title of Rachel Foullon's latest exhibition, "Ruminant Recombinant" [through May 26 at ltd los angeles], refers to the four-compartment stomachs of cows, goats and sheep. By chewing, swallowing, processing, regurgitating, re-swallowing and reprocessing, these animals digest their food in a way similar to that in which the artist deals with her materials. For this show, "Clusters," Foullon has constructed hanging assemblages (all works 2012) of found objects, sewn and dyed garments and ropes, and past works that evoke frontier esthetics.
Decidedly more elegant than the description above would suggest, Foullon's sculptures hang on a movable cleat system of pegs mounted on two levels of Western red cedar planks. The works are spread over two walls in increasing density toward the back of the gallery. Each work seems to be negotiating or conspiring with its neighbors as if its life depended on it. On the opposing wall hang four mirrored sculptures made of polished nickel and refurbished farm tools that perform the role of fetishized antiques. Each reveals distorted views of the space.
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Painting in Silver and Noir: Q+A With Jacqueline Humphries
Over the course of a more than two decade-long career, Jacqueline Humphries has approached every canvas with the intent to mess it up. She sees its blank white form as the perfect last painting, and she's nowhere near her last. Lately, the artist has been covering and uncovering her canvases with lurid veils of paint in signature metallic, washing them out, scraping at them, smudging them, and then re-painting all over them again. The traces of these gestures resurrect various historicized tropes of abstraction-fields of expressionist marks are frequently layered upon chilly monochromes, representing the painting's version of personality shopping in its search to find itself.
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B Wurtz's Legacy Is Unfinished
The group show "B. Wurtz and Co." at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, announces itself plainly [on view through April 21]. Engraved onto an office placard, the title, adapted from a 2001 MoMA exhibition, "Walker Evans and Co.," juts out on high from a copper mount in the corridor to the main gallery. Just as Evans's everyday subject matter influenced generations of artists, Wurtz's exploration of detritus served as a fulcrum for many of his peers and successors. Curated by White Columns director Matthew Higgs, the show charts the impact of the unsung artist, featuring 10 emerging, midcareer and outsider artists whose waggish visual poetry resounds with Wurtz's delicate works of found and recovered objects.
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Physical Pictorial: Q+A With Daniel Joseph Martinez
For over thirty years, Daniel Joseph Martinez has explored physical bodies as political instruments. In his current exhibition, "I want to go to Detroit: Cheerleaders CHEER," at LAXART [through March 3], Martinez shows two series of photographs from early in his career. Featuring men and women who have made themselves over as idols, the artist's pictures shuttle past the possibility of objective documentation. Martinez's photography concerns naturalism and beauty, with subjects who create futuristic avatars for themselves.
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2012, aluminum, wood, sublimation print on polyester and concrete, 71 3/4 by 122 1/2 by 135 inches overall. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New Yor
