Carnations and Pigeons and Satellite dishes.
2019
Oil, graphite and wax on paper in graphite rubbed frame
11 by 8 inches
 

This work was part of Christine Frerichs 2019 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Viewfinder." In naming the show, Frerichs references the physical act of framing a composition from life by using a classic viewfinder, a rectangular hole cut in a hand-held piece of paper. All works in the show were composed and painted using a viewfinder, which Frerichs describes as an object that “at once tells you what is important to look at, but inherently blocks out so much as well”. In that sense, the viewfinder becomes a metaphor for both the value of subjectivity as well as the problem of representation. Further, when we look through a cutout to choose a composition, we cannot share that view with anyone else directly. We can only translate that view through the use of words or a represented image. In the case of many of the works in Viewfinder, Frerichs uses both words and image. She begins each work by writing her immediate thoughts in a stream of consciousness manner onto the back of each blank surface. Only then does the image itself begin to be composed and painted on the front; the meeting of Frerichs’ interior words and the tangible space seen through the viewfinder becomes the painting.

Orange ranunculus, pink tulip, fertility test
2019
Oil, graphite and wax on paper in graphite rubbed frame
11 by 8 inches
 

This painting was exhibited at Klowden Mann in Christine Frerichs solo exhibition in the Fall of 2019, "Viewfinder." The series of interior portraits that make up this body of work feel both familiar to those with knowledge of Frerichs’ work, and remarkably distinct.
 
For the past ten years, her work has focused on observing inner states of self, and how they might manifest as tangible forms. Frerichs moves between languages of abstraction and representation, often using representational elements fluidly within abstract compositions. She allows each language to inform the other and subtly break down the fiction of purity in both.
 
The paintings in Viewfinder began in the margins of Frerichs’ practice; small observational paintings created over the past two years, that were intended as letters to herself. She recognized them as the central story only as time went on, and five paintings became fifteen, then twenty, and on.
 
As Suzanne Hudson beautifully said of the work in her February 2020 Artforum review of the show, "Frerichs begins these works with stream-of-consiousness writing; she then turns the page over and starts making other kinds of marks. Hidden, bracketed between public-facing apparition and institutional support, these jottings remain animating forces whose effects are felt even at a distance. (For a scheduled event during the show’s run, the artist pulled the paintings down and read the inscriptions on the back to those gathered.) An interview between Frerichs and one of her former teachers, the Los Angeles artist Charles Long, provides another lens onto Frerichs’s process. In their conversation, which was made available at the gallery, Long connects Frerichs’s makeshift viewfinder—which forces the eye to focus on one arbitrary thing—to the idea of the readymade, which makes it possible to understand whatever appears before you as an aesthetic: “It’s almost like a roulette wheel. Like, where does this thing stop? And when it stops, how do we know that this moment, this arrangement of things, is somehow significant over all others?” In response, Frerichs points out the handheld nature of the viewfinder and the “entirely personal” selection process it requires. Her paintings are always partial views of her authored space—iterations of selfhood."

Studio window, rain outside
2019
Oil, graphite and wax on paper in graphite rubbed frame
8 by 11 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
 
This painting from Christine Frerichs 2019 exhibition "Viewfinder" was a sneaky favorite for many of us. It's a quiet work on first view, and it's very small, and yet so many of us (gallery staff, our artists, or most loyal and frequent visitors) found ourselves standing in front of it again and again during the weeks of the exhibition.
 
There is something about the invitation into this relatively open space that is clearly meant for creation--it is a view of Christine's studio in her home, for me a site of so many studio visits and much laughter, sharing of tea and dark chocolate, and inspirational talks. The cool colors of the composition, yet the warmth emanating from the corner. It's a special piece, and I'm grateful to have gotten to visit and revisit it for those weeks.

Open studio door, western sun
2019
Oil, graphite and wax on paper in graphite rubbed frame
16.25 by 12.5 inches
 

This work was part of Christine Frerichs 2019 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Viewfinder." In naming the show, Frerichs references the physical act of framing a composition from life by using a classic viewfinder, a rectangular hole cut in a hand-held piece of paper. All works in the show were composed and painted using a viewfinder, which Frerichs describes as an object that “at once tells you what is important to look at, but inherently blocks out so much as well”. In that sense, the viewfinder becomes a metaphor for both the value of subjectivity as well as the problem of representation. Further, when we look through a cutout to choose a composition, we cannot share that view with anyone else directly. We can only translate that view through the use of words or a represented image. In the case of many of the works in Viewfinder, Frerichs uses both words and image. She begins each work by writing her immediate thoughts in a stream of consciousness manner onto the back of each blank surface. Only then does the image itself begin to be composed and painted on the front; the meeting of Frerichs’ interior words and the tangible space seen through the viewfinder becomes the painting.

Aubade (2)
2015
Oil and acrylic on two canvases
72 by 88 inches
 

CLOCKED
2016
Paper, colored pencil, hydrocal and paint
14 by 11.5 by 3 inches
 

This piece was made in 2016 during a time when Jamison Carter was working on a series of line drawings (eventually shown at UNTITLED Miami Beach later in 2016) and experimenting with embossing the drawings by using cutout shaped paper underneath the surface as he drew the colored lines across the page with a ruler. As he experimented, he began looking at the drawings less as 'drawings' and more as textured surfaces, he started asking himself "How do I buck the system on what a drawing is, how do I present them in a new way?"
 
He began dipping the drawings into wet plaster and hydrocal and holding them vertically as he did so in order to achieve a point of stability. The finished piece brings together many elements of Carter's practice over time: the conversation between two and three dimensions, as well as between clearly controlled elements and those that incorporate chance, and a sense of irreverence in marking time. While the drawing has been UV varnished and is protected, it is still caries the inherent vulnerabilities of paper; the visual power and dynamism of the piece argues with its physical vulnerability.

Navelgazer
2017
Wood, wood stain, hydrocal, polyurethane resin, crystal ball, concrete board and hardware
65.6 by 64 by 76 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
To me, this work is signature Jamison Carter not only formally, but also because of the way it plays with high impact celestial reference as well as absurdity and humor, without fear of either.
 
A lot of my favorite pieces of Jamison's are works that initially scared me a little when he told me about them. The idea of a waist-high portal using resin and raw wood ending in a crystal ball sounded so darn risky and weird to me, but as soon as I saw it in his studio it was one of my favorite pieces.
 
With concrete board, polyurethane, resin and wood, Carter creates a smaller-scaled celestial body; a portal diminishing into unseen space when one bends down to view it from the front of the sculpture, and a tenuous twisting plastic form ended in a crystal ball and held up by a thin piece of raw wood from the back. Here, the dialog that Jamison often engages between spontaneity and control expands into ideas of transcendence and materiality, and the fragile nature both of what we believe to be true, and the language we use to challenge it.

Sol
2015
Hydrocal, wood, paint, marker and glue
123 by 128 by 8 inches
 

In "Sol," Jamison Carter invokes the larger than life symbol of the sun, and grounds it in tangible, material form. The work is made from wood shards cut down individually which he then leaves partially painted, and partially raw. He creates a halo of wood around the black-painted plaster center. The final form references not only the sun, but also the halo as found in Baroque architecture, and the Baroque notion of light.
 
This piece was first exhibited as part of his 2015 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "A Cold War". Carter’s interest in material investigation is at the core of this body of work, as is his commitment to highlighting and extending points of tension between formal elements, and their conceptual/intellectual/visceral counterparts. Working with hand-cut wood, hand-moulded plaster, paint, paint pens, colored glue, and paper mache, Carter utilizes a system of purposefully imperfect repetition to present tangible, pared down representations of dichotomy, time-based perception, and the space where rigidity and fluidity find uneasy interdependence. Expanding upon his visual and thematic vocabulary from his prior body of work, which focused on the meeting point and reconciliation of dark visceral form and controlled light elements across space, this new body of work moves in the direction of their contentious integration.

Waning
2015
Hydrocal, wood, paint, marker and glue
47 by 58 by 5 inches
 

"Waning" is one of three wall works Jamison Carter created for his 2015 solo show at Klowden Mann, "A Cold War." This sculptural wall work was one of two pieces he created to represent the sunrise and moonrise, with drips of colored glue directing our gaze towards gravity (or defying it) even as we look up, and the plaster center out of which the shards form is split in two halves of black and white. In their radiating repeated lines and their response-inducing grit, these pieces nod to the Baroque—Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa has presence here—and that period’s distillation of human experience to the hyperbolic point at which identification becomes simultaneously impossible and inescapable, an uncontrollable recognition of self and other, and an invitation to exist in the awkward, potent, potentially transcendent space in which the two meet.
 
This work has been part of the artist's personal collection since its original exhibition, and we are excited to be able to offer it for acquisition after it has been in conversation with Carter's work in his home and studio for the last few years.

Proof
2013
Wood, plaster, latex rubber, paint, and glue
27.5 by 4.5 by 4.25 inches
 

This piece was part of the series Jamison Carter created for his first solo show at Klowden Mann, "White Light from Dark Matter," in 2013, the second show at the gallery when it re-opened in its Culver City location.
 
Both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional work from this first show frequently juxtaposes a darker, more gestured form against collections of brightly colored precise line. In the sculptural pieces, the amorphous dark shapes are constructed in some pieces from painted plaster, offering the potential feeling of flesh or earth—of densely packed and uncontrolled substance. In other works, the dark elements are made with paint applied directly on the wall or ceiling, alluding to a cut or opening in the surface.
 
The counterpoint to these dark spaces comes in the introduction of long tapered wooden forms, vertically clustered and painted in bright, unaltered paint colors, in an expansion that mimics the flow of light when emitted from a source. Carter’s columns of light effect a sensation of ascension, but in a way that is highly grounded in material, and repetitive action/form. Rather than the intangible diffusion of actual light in space, Carter offers light as part of a planned process, a tangible system of creation—one that is rigid and yet somehow transcends its own rigidity to become more than itself. The wood, with each length cut off at a 90-degree angle, is fixed and unyielding to the point that it begins to break away from its own inflexibility; the information on how to continue on its trajectory must be inferred by the movement its shape implies, rather than through additional systematic planned precision.

Yuh Nuh See It?
2008
Photo cut out
12 by 9 inches
 

This piece began when Andrea Chung was participating in the Kohler Residency in 2018, and access to the extensive Kohler fabrication materials and equipment allowed her to begin to actualize her idea for a brass chandelier in a style that would relate to British Colonial with a sugar element that would speak to the human cost of precious materials during Colonial rule in the Caribbean. Here, the glass vials hanging from the chandelier are filled with sugar of various colors from white to dark brown. Chung has also subverted the color hierarchy associated with skin tone by having the darkest color of sugar on top, with the whitest sugar vials at the bottom.

Brain Coral
2019
Cyanotype and sugar
66 by 51 inches
 

In these cyanotype works, coral bleaching becomes a metaphor for colonialism, and the expanding of the philosophy and impact of imperialism on colonial populations and cultures. These works are the first time that Andrea Chung added sugar crystals to her cyanotype works--both materials she has used for many years, but never before together. The addition of sugar crystals to the already highly sensitive cyanotypes underlines Chung’s interest in creating work that defies the notion of artworks as static objects that are meant to remain unchanging and unyielding in the face of shifting environments and time; in a way that also reflects the constant uncontrolled and irresponsible effects of human actions on the environment, and on vulnerable populations.
 
First exhibited unframed at Klowden Mann in the Fall of 2019, these works were intended to shift and change over the course of the exhibition, as the sugar embedded further in the cyanotype, fell, and expanded. As is often true in Chung's work, the pieces are linked to the environment in which they are placed in a way that she cannot predict or control.
 
Now, several months after their initial creation, the sugar has hardened into the surface and stabilized. The piece has been framed with the sugar crystals that initially cascaded from the piece when it was lifted vertically for the first time (pieces that were shown on the floor during the exhibition) lining the bottom of the frame--keeping evidence of the work's development as an important part of the finished piece.

Toadstool Leather Coral
2019
Cyanotype and sugar
4.75 by 5 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
These smaller sugar cyanotype works were made at the same time as the larger works that Andrea Chung created for her first solo exhibition at Klowden Mann, opening our season in the Fall of 2019. They are the first series in which Andrea combined her cyanotype practice with the sculptural sugar she had been working with for a decade.
 
When Andrea first unwrapped them while installing her show, I was instantly in love with their intimacy, and the way that--to me--they felt like family portraits. As with the larger works, these pieces use the vulnerability of their medium to speak to both the history of colonialism and the current tragedy of human environmental impact, as evidenced in part by coral bleaching.
 
This small work showing brain coral felt especially human to me, documenting these elements of our seascape that we are quickly losing in a way reminiscent of daguerrotypes of family members in the Civil War era.
 
On the wall in the exhibition, I found the small works especially moving, and was surprised and fascinated by the amount of impact they had in the space--holding entire walls on their own.

Yuh Nuh See It?
2008
Photo cut out
12 by 9 inches
 

This is an early piece by Andrea Chung that was made right out of graduate school, and shown in her first museum solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2017.
 
The image is a reproduction of an early 20th century photograph that was staged and meant to document colonial times in the Caribbean. Because photography was not widely used until after slavery ended in the region, many history books and scholars staged photographs in order to represent the time period in their work.
 
Chung has cut out the figure in the image for two reasons: First, removing the figure from this scene is her way of symbolically giving them 'the day off.' Second, removing the figure creates a void that forces us to look at the place where history lapses.
 
The plexiglass framing device also provides an important component to the piece that creates a shadow on the wall around the missing figure.

DE426689A Fig. 6
2014
Acrylic and thread on linen
20 by 17 inches
 

This is one of the few remaining available works from Megan Cotts 2013 and 2014 series of fabric sculptural paintings.
 
Inspired by inventions in ‘honeycomb’ technology that her second great-grandfather’s company patented in Germany in the early 1900s, Megan Cotts creates a new aesthetic framework to explore the uniquely manufactured hexagonal decor that once was the basis of her family’s daily existence prior to being ejected from Germany during the tide of National Socialist uprising. Cotts inscribes her family’s patents into her work as well as the former factories’ architecture, social sphere, and machinery, and connects the oral histories she’s absorbed and locations she’s visited during her research, including what were once her family’s factory buildings in Halle (Saale), Germany and Paris, France. In this way, her work invokes the spirit of the novels of W.G. Sebald, who weaves historical documentation into his quasi-fictional narratives and with whom Cotts finds a kindred inventive spirit. (text taken from Lisa Kunik's beautiful press release for Cotts' first solo show with Junior Projects, New York)

Untitled
2017
Tempera, ground glass on linen
24 by 24 inches
 

This piece was one of the first Megan Cotts created in a series of sculptural paintings made of linen stretched over wood, painted with pigment formed from tempera and ground glass. Featured at Untitled Miami Beach in 2017, and at her solo exhibition at Klowden Mann in 2018, the monochrome and dualchrome works are presented as individual tiles, and in groupings that form larger works.
 
Conceptually and formally, the work plays with ideas of transience and permanence, movement and stillness. Each piece is created to hang in any orientation, direction, or configuration, allowing the works to act independently, but also function in service to the space in which they are presented. The space becomes as significant as their internal coherence, with the inherent flexibility in how each is hung and displayed allowing them to be phonemes, becoming full phrases depending on the context and setting.

Untitled
2017
Tempera and ground glass on linen
28 by 26 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
I feel a particular kinship with this piece, one of the linen works Megan Cotts exhibited at her 2018 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Proprius". There is something about its size and shape that seem to ask for attention and omission at the same time. One of the works I paid least attention to at the beginning of the show and most attention to at the end, it so clearly evidences Cotts' intense attention to detail: a surface whose color is so evenly hand painted and yet constantly walks to the edge of manufactured precision, a color that feels like it's calling on personal memory from the viewer even more than from the artist. More than any other work in the show, I feel it embodies the idea I stated to close the show's press release:
"The work is optimistic, but not utopian—this is a form that embraces individuation in the face of near perfection, and evidences Cotts’ belief that weight and movement are not mutually exclusive."

Untitled
2018
Tempera and ground glass on linen
36 by 12 inches
 

This work was shown in Megan Cotts' 2018 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Proprius".
 
Situated between painting and sculpture, the works in "Proprius" traverse the formal language of architectural minimalism, but are overtly bodily in a way that defies strict association with that language. The shapes and textural weight of the work seem to reference the cast concrete forms that skim buildings. At the same time, Cotts’ process—building wooden structures in accordion or hexagonal forms, stretching wet linen taught over the wood, letting it dry, then applying pigment—leaves friction and imperfections that resists the imperviousness of concrete architecture, hinting at a very human physicality. Cotts allows the linen to rest somewhere between support and containment.

The Bridge
2015
Cardboard, oil paint, magic, plastic beads, wood and pins
36.5 by 24 by 8 inches
 

Deb Klowden Mann:
Sarah Cromarty made this painting at the same time as the smaller works we included in her first solo show at the gallery, "Studies for a Bigger Picture #HANDSINTHEDARK #WeDidntStartTheFire." We didn't include it in the 2016/2017 show because that show was very much about the smaller works as windows into other worlds, so instead it lived in my office (once my office was returned to me after the show, that is--during the show I emptied it completely so Sarah could install a huge stand-alone painting in an installation of sand... the only time I've ever given up my office for a show). I'll admit I never really tried to sell "The Bridge" because I was so attached to all the possible futures it felt like it was offering me, and especially after Sarah passed away, it felt like a special entryway into the world of magic that she always created when she painted. But some works I love in a very personal way don't belong to me, and this is definitely one such work. It is ready to go into the world, and anyone who gets to live with it will be truly lucky to have access to such a direct invitation into Sarah's magic.

Give Me A Miracle For Our Times
2017
Steel, ceramic, brass
121 by 6 by 3 inches
 

This piece was shown for the first time at Klowden Mann in 2019 during Sienna DeGovia's "America: Feast or Folly," but the creation of the work spanned over a decade. DeGovia first welded the ladder element of the piece in the early aughts and left the metal outside to age naturally from that time until its exhibition in 2019. The ceramic ornaments are cartoonish and consumable representations of American violence, making our greatest injuries harmless in a prayer for our times.

Lock Down Drill, Shelter in Place
2019
Ceramic and underglaze
4.5 by 2.5 by 1.5 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
These ceramic bunnies made me tear up every time I saw them. It may be difficult to read the scale from the image, but they are quite small, and fit into a tiny corner of the gallery but I felt were one of the strongest pieces in the room. For all our children, doing "Lock Down Drill, Shelter in Place" exercises. And for all of us, now at home, vulnerable together and apart.

Awakening/Sleeping II
2018
Oil on canvas
36 by 48 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
This is a favorite Rebecca Farr painting of mine, and just so beautiful in person--the way the surface is worked, the drawing immediacy of the painting execution, the warm light tones with just enough darkness. Rebecca's "Sleeping/Awakening" series is one I had a relationship with more through studio visits than through a show we were building for the gallery, as it was a strong body of work that built in between the two major series that became her most recent two exhibitions at the gallery. Sometimes those series stay with me even more than those that become a full exhibition, as they are still mobile in my mind and not yet fixed to a specific space or a catalog.
 
To me, and through wonderful conversations with Rebecca in the studio, I see this painting as a poetic engagement with embodiment and how we come to be in relation to our own physical and spiritual identity. I read the figures as lovers right at dawn, but also as each of us alone and recognizing the many different shifts in our own identities and relationships with ourselves, how distinct and indistinct our shapes become in turns under the light.

Promised Land II
2019
Oil on linen
39 by 49 inches

Alight
2016
Oil on board
24 by 24 inches
 

In 2016, Rebecca Farr created a series of paintings that were based off of Francisca Goya’s 1810 series entitled “Disasters of War.” Goya’s series were etchings, made later in his life as a protest against recent European wars. For Farr, Goya’s works were almost photojournalistic in their direct portrayal of the horrors of war and violence and suffering, as well as being a remarkable study of formalism and allowing a kind of awkward modernity to set the stage within a more classical subject and medium.
 
Within her series of paintings, she often chose to stay true to his original compositions, but the fact that his works were black and white allowed her complete freedom in the way she chose to engage with color. Her interest in studying a master from a couple of centuries ago provided a sense of hope and hopelessness in turn--on the one hand, as humans it feels as though nothing has changed, and we are continually enacting the cycle of violence and war. On the other, the generative act of painting reminds us of the power of storytelling to potentially enact change.

Reunion
2016
Oil on canvas
61 by 49 inches
 

This piece was first exhibited in Rebecca Farr's 2016 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Out of Nothing," which included a powerful series of paintings on canvas that are a study of Farr’s personal family mythology, as well as our Western cultural inheritance as it relates to embodiment.
 
Each five by four foot painting features two people moving through a dark body of water, with figures whose specific relationship to one another matters less than their unity in this space. "Reunion" references a cultural memory of baptism and the ritualized act of surrender and rebirth, as well as the exposure of physical beings that want to own and love their own messiness.
 
As Nazish Chunara ended her review of the exhibition in Venison Magazine, "Farr’s Out of Nothing may have transitioned from history’s telling’s to personal story telling, but I think the moment you set foot into that show, you’ll sense the familiarity and find that your story is hidden in there too."

Another Mother
2020
Oil on Canvas
60 by 46 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
This is a brand new work of Rebecca Farr's, and it absolutely tugged on me in all the ways as soon as I saw a rough image of it that Rebecca had sent me from her studio. I am always more hesitant to put language to new work--my many years of getting to do this job has taught me that humility in relation to work that provokes a reaction is my greatest tool.
 
And yet there is so much in this work even just on initial impact: the foregrounding of color and composition in front of the central nun-like figure. the soft Christ figure in the background. Movement that feels like it speaks to the reconciliation of body/mind split so often addressed in Farr's work, and healing the straight on philosophical wounding of the feminine energy. Sexuality, holiness, reorganization of the feminine principal, reawakening of what has been shamed or repressed. So much there, and I can't wait to see how it continues to unfold for me the more I look at it.

Self Reflection II
2019
Oil on board
24 by 18 inches

Tower
2019
Oil on canvas
84 by 60 inches

George W. Bush Shower Painting
2020
Oil on linen
20 by 16 inches
 

This painting was first exhibited at Katie Herzog's 2020 exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Yankee Candle". Though small in size, the painting has a significant impact, and it was reproduced as the feature image for Christopher Knight's review in the LA Times of Herzog's exhibition, in which he said, "The first image you’ll see in Katie Herzog’s exhibition of recent work is her copy of the infamous self-portrait of George W. Bush, the former president of the United States who is now a Sunday painter, taking a shower. Herzog made just one small alteration: Her portrait is painted entirely in a chilly range of blues.
 
The effect is subtle but inescapable. Bush may appear cheerfully ludicrous in his clumsy original version, naked back to the viewer and blank-eyed face framed in the reflection of a shaving mirror. In Herzog’s adaptation, “blue boy” is now set in cold storage — a man furtively using art in a fraught attempt to cleanse himself, sort of like Lady Macbeth and that damned spot."

Peace
2019
Watercolor on wood
20 by 20 by 1.5 inches
 

This piece was created as part of a body of work Katie Herzog created in 2019 and first exhibited as part of an exhibition at Sol Treasures in King City, CA, entitled "Mom's Historical Record."
 
The painting is specifically referencing the history of the peace sign, and the composition of the drawing that is most often sited as the first peace sign upon which the popular symbol was based. It is also a reflection of Herzog's interest in the historical and present ties between dissent and protest and political sentiment now and in the 1960’s--a time that set up paradigms surrounding protest and political action and the symbols associated with both. The work looks at the aesthetics of politics and the changing meaning of social symbols over time.

Arroyo Seco Regional Branch Library (Ketamine)
2014
Acrylic on canvas in painted wooden frame
12.5 by 15.5 by 2 inches
 

This piece is one of a series of eight paintings that Katie Herzog made in 2015, first exhibited at Los Angeles’s Monte Vista Projects, that began as a site specific conceptualization of the Arroyo Seco Regional Branch Library in Los Angeles, each small oil painting created through the lens of a different psychedelic drug.
 
Herzog intends the paintings to symbolize the embodied subject in contemporary information theory, with the understanding that as our information culture moves further and further into the digital realm, libraries and the buildings that house them are now becoming defined by a sensory perception of place—by the specific spacial, visual, auditory, and olfactory experiences of location—rather than by the information content of the physical books they contain.

PICTURE YOU’RE SAFE
2015
Colored pencil, ink, vellum, and collage on paper
8 by 3 3/4 inches

Jumping with Cats
2019
Lenticular photograph print
18 by 27 inches
Edition of 2 of 3 plus 1 AP

UM45
2016
Oil on palette paper
20.75 by 32.25 inches
 

This is one of the larger works from L.E. Kim's "First Paintings" exhibition at Klowden Mann in 2016. The way the surface of the palette paper refuses the pigment from the oil creates an effect that sits somewhere between digital and analog--especially given Kim's choice to present these works in ultramarine, which feels as if it is referencing the kind of blue lights we are constantly exposed to from our screens and devices.
 
As Leah Ollman wrote of the work in her LA Times review at the time, "Two dimensions flirt with a third; a curious oscillation occurs between different states, different textures. As with her earlier explorations in other media, here too Kim repeatedly interrupts continuous visual fields, gently shocking our perceptual apparatus into considering anew what we’re seeing."

Femme fatal
2014
collage on paper
17 1/3 by 10 1/4 inches framed
 

This work of Bettina Hubby's was from a series of collages she made in 2014 of powerful images of femme figures. Like so many of Hubby's collages, the dynamic pared down composition makes for a strong image of the presentation of power.
 
This body of work follows a similar aesthetic and feeling as her earlier collages as depicted in the wonderful 2013 book published by The Ice Plant, "an artist book of handmade paper collages as precise and elegant as they are chaotic and devious: clothed bodies collide, recombine and somersault across the page; machines mimic birds; jackets seem to genuflect in prayer… Constructed with the muted hues and contemplative negative space of a Noh play, Hubby’s mashups remix the familiar photographic imagery of fashion, commerce and reportage into a open-ended riff on personal identity and the human organism."

UM36
2016
Oil on palette paper
20.5 by 16.5 inches
 

Using shades of ultramarine blue, violet, and rose, L.E. Kim paints by placing and scraping oil pigments on palette paper with a palette knife, and then continuing to add and remove color repeatedly; some areas are scraped down to the surface of a worked and exhausted paper with just the remnants of color remaining, where others are built up to a high level of texture and dimension.
 
Despite the physical and gestural execution of these abstract works, the finished form presents in a way that confuses our expectations about medium. These are oil paintings that feel at first like photographs taken of textured surfaces, or manipulated digital images.
 
Kim’s past work has often walked a similar line between the expression of digital and physical experiences of seeing. Her early works in video used the medium to explore abstract sensations of time, form, and emotion: constellations being removed one by one in a progression of the night sky, a slideshow of 77 slides that she ran through a sewing machine and then projected, with light creating burned form through film that was no longer there. Likewise, past bodies of static work have also traced the physical hand across the digital realm, and vice versa; large digital prints in which she removed pixels one by one from scans of light; small, highly reduced geometric paper forms in dense digitally printed black ink sewn together by hand and floated without context.
 
Here again, Kim plays on the experience of sight and sensation as it exists across these now-intertwined ways of being. Ultramarine as a color has a history of preciousness, sacredness even. Before its synthetic version was introduced in the mid-1800’s, it was the most expensive of pigments—made from ground lapis lazuli and therefore often used to indicate significance, such as in the robes of queens or of the Virgin Mary. In the present day, one might argue that the color instead invokes the cool blue light spectrum emitted from the screens we now use to navigate and experience the world.
 
And yet, Kim’s paintings are resolutely tangible, somatic. Functioning consciously across this battle over embodiment, Kim does so without taking sides. She offers instead both the blue light we are now conditioned to seek, and evidence of the human hand as present and engaged in a process of visible making. Both are presented as valid, comforting even. The works bring us out of the embattled conscious space, and instead invite meditation on physical rhythmic movement and a sense of embodied sound in paint.

Today The Library Was Ripped A New Asshole
2009
Acrylic on canvas
48 by 60 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
I don't think I can adequately express how happy this painting makes me. First just because it is such a great, wonderful and weird painting visually. And then because content-wise, it contains so much in terms of instant affect, as well as layers that build as you look and look again: the details of the kids and their relationship to each other, all the micro-interactions, the physicality of the library, the use of color to code an idea of childhood but somehow speak to adulthood at the same time. And of course, the title.
 
I also love the relationship of this painting to Katie's personal history. In addition to getting her undergraduate degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and her graduate degree from the University of California San Diego, Katie also studied library science, and sometimes refers to herself as a "library school dropout." Personally, I love the narrative of this painting in relationship to interests that display themselves in her work again and again: the physicality and equity (or inequity) of access to information and hierarchies of knowledge economies, cultural memory, and the way personal memory functions alongside and within the historical record.
 
And as both Katie and I are parents, the recognition of constantly and often barely-controlled chaos with young children is definitely something that resonates for me as well.

LA/ATX Pocket Expo featuring Hal Fischer
2017
2 channel digital video
Edition 2 of 3
 

During "Jonesy's Pack"this two-channel video played in the gallery project space: The die Kränken LA/ATX Pocket Expo project, a piece Jonesy and Jaime C. Knight created in part for their exhibition at ONE Archives in 2017, but exhibited in LA for the first time at Klowden Mann in 2018. It features a loop with a short Hal Fischer documentary with a pairing of portraits on Austin, TX queer community. A significant California conceptual photographer in the queer community, Hal Fischer’s 1977 book Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men was inspired by ‘The Hanky Code’, created to streamline interaction and signal an individual’s sexual interest or particular fetish. The die Kränken LA/ATX Pocket Expo project presents a cheeky look at contemporary sexual proclivities produced in the spirit of the original Hanky Code.

Self Governing Body
2018
Oil on burlap
40 by 30.5 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
I remember when Katie Herzog first talked to my director Tyler Park and I about turning her intellectual fascination with the Seasteading Movement into a body of work. We were talking, all standing in the center of the room during a studio visit in LA in the Spring of 2018, right before she moved her main studio to Parkfield, CA. The direct impetus was our upcoming presentation of her work at Expo Chicago the coming Fall, but the interest in addressing this idea had been brewing for quite some time.
 
She talked about Milton Friedman's grandson Patri Friedman, about the non-profit he had started in San Francisco with Wayne Gramlich, and how seed money from billionaire Peter Thiel had gotten them started in pursuing a libertarian paradise on the ocean that would leave them free of any responsibility to governments, or to anyone not worthy of their imagined meritocracy. That they even had a working agreement with the government of French Polynesia to set up off of their shores. She talked about the way this connected in her mind to recent highly publicized museum exhibitions of Paul Gauguin, and the problematic colonialist and fetishizing impulses so very visible in his work, beloved though it and he is.
 
We were fascinated, and not long afterwards received an email from Katie letting us know with a "Ha!" that French Polynesia had backed out because they were concerned about the colonialist nature of the agreement. But the Seasteaders were planning to keep pushing forward and find another location.
 
I wasn't sure how the series born from these ideas would be actualized formally, but couldn't wait to see. That summer, Katie started painting in oil paint on burlap--a medium and surface often used by Gauguin, in a style that referenced his work but still felt entirely like Katie.
 
"Self Governing Body" is my favorite of the series. It pictures Patri Friedman with a uniformity of surface/skin that feels vulnerable and verging on nude but without sexuality. The fetishizing gaze of Gauguin and the Seasteaders is turned back on them. And of course, in an era in which women's rights to govern our own bodies are also under attack once again, it certainly brings those issues forward as well.
 
Tech’s current mythology, like that of art history, continues to idealize the archetype of the erratic white male genius who creates something from nothing, against all odds. Herzog asserts that this positioning of the individual personality who overcomes the collective through disruption erases both the historical reality of government subsidization (in tech) and the disparate and diverse minds and bodies working individually and collectively upon which the canons were built (in tech and in art history). And the formal appeal of the painting visually draws us in and allows us to be affected by the piece in layers.

Mishima
2018
Silkscreen print and chain link embroidery on black denim with attached chains
24 by 18 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
This piece was part of Jonesy's first exhibition at Klowden Mann, "Jonesy's Pack", in 2018, which was a really special exhibition that definitely did not take the form or feeling of the standard commercial gallery exhibition. Jonesy is an artist who has built a career working collaboratively, and he chose to reflect that in his solo show by inviting a group of peers/artists/performers to create and physically stage hand-embellished vests or ‘cuts’ in a manner that recalls the initiation ritual of biker clubs, and that ritual’s extension into other subcultures. The exhibition centered around a live collaborative performance that was modeled after a hybrid of a drag king show, a fashion show, and a beer bust, hosted by Lex Vaughn with music by Nathan Hauenstein. Jonesy and the 22 artists he invited to participate walked their ‘cuts' down a catwalk from back to front of the gallery, then hang their vests on rows of armature along the longest gallery wall.
 
Lex Vaughn was brilliant as the MC, and the energy in the crowd was insane and amazing. Vaughn payed homage to each artist with a short speech as they walked, and a DJ setup accompanied the artist’s creations. Inviting the artists to view their cuts not only as an expression of their individual identity but also as an exploration of the idea of icons and iconography, many of the individual artists chose to represent figures significant to them and to their community. This particular vest was Jonesy's cut, and he chose to represent Yukio Mishima.
 
By the time Jonesy, as "Dad" of the pack came through bearing the flag and wearing his cut, the crowd was on fire with an energy I have never before or since experienced at a gallery. The performance also inspired my favorite Artforum writing of all time by Andy Campbell. And personally for me, the whole experience felt wonderfully queer and absolutely like home. And this particular vest felt like a direct expression of that--collaboration, identity, icons we make our own, and the most fantastic combination of reverence and irreverence.

The Sexual Bronze Show (Los Angeles), With Animals
2017
Print on aluminum
16 by 20 inches
Edition 2 of 9 Plus 2 APs
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
This piece of Bettina Hubby's is absolutely a favorite of mine. I love this entire series, in which Bettina interferes with her own exhibition history of projects--her own "oevre"--and inserts adorable fuzzy animals into all of her gorgeous professional installation shots.
 
First off, fuzzy animals are always good to lighten the mood because seriously (and especially at this quarantine moment), what would we do without them? But I also love Hubby's consistent willingness to refuse to consent to the art world's dominant sense of hyper-self-conscious-serious-face-elitism. Hubby has often said that she takes her humor seriously, and the way that she manages to make me laugh while also so darn smartly talking about the meaning of an exhibition history and the importance of continuing to engage in dialog with oneself... It's just so darn good, and like everything Hubby, a giant breath of fresh air.
 
And this is my favorite of the series because I also love loved "The Sexual Bronze Show", a 2015 exhibition at the gallery that was another extraordinary example of Hubby's signature intelligence and humor.

STILL ILL
2010
77 Slides, unprocessed 35mm color negative film, plastic slide mounts and slide projector
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
This piece was created by L.E. Kim for one of Klowden Mann's very first exhibitions back in the Fall of 2010. Created by running a sewing machine directly through slide film, Kim’s projections manage to convey a kind of quiet dissolution and penetration of internal/external boundaries, with the observer positioned as if behind a dark object that is slowly being perforated by light.
 
In the exhibition, the gallery created a small blackout booth in which to view the slides projected onto the wall in succession on a loop. The effect was meditative, beautiful and even disturbing in moments, but one of my favorite works in the show, which was a two-part group show on the theme of embarrassment, with this first part titled "Embarrassment part 1: Vulnerability." I loved that the piece required you to isolate yourself in a space that felt highly physical, but also loved that the piece was more flexible than the installation we chose for the exhibition: that it could be projected outside, smaller, larger. The simplicity of Kim's act of running the sewing machine needle through the film and then placing them in perfectly partitioned slides has always just felt so darn beautiful to me--aggressive and meditative at once, reminding us that time is insane and impossible and intangible and also, somehow, everything.

Untitled
2018
Indian ink on Arches cold press
12 by 9 inches

Untitled
2018
Indian ink on Arches cold press
12 by 9 inches

Untitled
2018
Mixed media on paper
14 by 11 inches

God's Skin
2011
Mixed media on wood
27.75 by 18 inches

The Cosmic Pendulum
2007
Mixed media on wood
96 by 108 inches
 

This large-scale painting of David Lloyd's was first shown at Klowden Mann in his first solo show with the gallery in 2011, "Monas Hieroglyphica."
 
The exhibition featured several large and medium-scale mixed-media paintings on canvas and wood, in a series that fuses together abstract imagery, words, representational figures and animals, illustrated scientific principals, surfing symbols and dimensional collage.
 
The title of the show is taken from the book “Monas Hieroglyphica” (Hieroglyphic Nomad), published in 1564 by John Dee, who was among other things the court astrologer for Elizabeth the 1st of England, and who used the original publication to expound upon the significance of a symbol he had invented called Monas Hieroglyphica—one he perceived as a convincing tool for teaching his theory of the unity of the cosmos. This 16th century situation, in which a powerful empire is guided by an occult attempt to represent the universe as whole, is not without resonance in our contemporary political landscape, and evokes the confluence of contradiction and absurdity at play in Lloyd’s body of work from this time.
 
Formally, Lloyd’s paintings operate in their own intersection between abstraction and representation, with a fluid integration of formal abstract language topped by imagistic referent points that provide a kind of inverted narrative map for the viewer. The pieces incorporate a barrage of materials, ranging from collage, fiberglass and resin, monoprint, paint of a variety of kinds, xerox transfer, water based medium, spar varnish, dirt, and used synthetic boat sails, and they present us with a visual density that matches the intensity of physical material used in their creation--leading to pieces that are atmospherically affective while commenting on the overabundance of competing didactic languages in our current social and political landscape.

Time Machine
2011
Mixed media on wood
27.75 by 19.5 inches

Untitled
2019
Acrylic and encaustic on wood
57 by 20 by 1 inches

Trapped in Paradise
2018
Oil on canvas in artist frame
54.5 by 42.875 by 1.75 inches
 

This painting was originally showed in Klowden Mann's first solo exhibition with Morgan Mandalay in 2019, "Bad Sin Frutas."
 
In this series of works, Mandalay takes the mythology of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden as the starting point for a series of expressive narrative oil paintings that detail close-up moments in the story of exile. While Adam and Eve are an archetype of this story within Judeo-Christian religion, Mandalay layers his interpretation with art historical and personal archetypes as well—looking at the figure of exile as seen in Gustave Courbet as well as Mandalay’s own family story of exile from Cuba and the myth making that follows a generation later. Working through painting, Mandalay consciously attempts to figure out his “place”; a combination of real and imagined spaces, identities, stories, homes that are constantly being built and rebuilt; remembering past struggles and privileges.
 
For Mandalay, interweaving these distinct narrative perspectives is a way of unmasking the often-monolithic cultural understanding of ‘exile’ and ‘the exiled’. As he says, “I’m interested in what happens when the lens shifts. All of these paintings capture fractions of the story. They invent what is happening in the garden post-expulsion. They are imaginary ghosts of what might or might have been in a place that both is, and isn’t—a place defined more by a moment than a landscape.” These ghosts of memory and mythology appear in Mandalay’s still lifes and landscapes as trees whose branches are aflame while still carrying lush fruit or colored leaves, crows with wings spread on the verge of landing or alighting, lemons glowing to the point of combustion, disembodied hands reaching for tree trunks, and often gestures of teeth and lips or tongue around the edge of the painting—as if we are perceiving the scene through the open mouth of a beast.

S.O.S. (Meyer lemons, cresthaven peaches, sultana grapes and wild hen)
2017
Oil on canvas
82 by 36 inches

Howlers
2018
Oil paint on canvas
56 by 60 inches

Congregation
2020
Oil on canvas
46 by 28 inches
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
This new work by Morgan Mandalay inspired such a visceral response from me when I first saw it. It brings together so many different elements of his work: the physicality of myth, the desire for connection and equity and the many blocks to getting there, the formal choice to collapse space in ways that forces our eyes to move from detail to detail.
 
When Morgan and I spoke about the influences in this work, he talked about our current social and political reality, illness, the seemingly endless wait for progressives in the U.S., MLK Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and this section of lyrics from David Bowie's "Lady Stardust":
 
And he sang all night long
Femme fatales emerged from shadows
To watch this creature fair
Boys stood upon their chairs
To make their point of view
I smiled sadly for a love
I could not obey
Lady stardust sang his songs
Of darkness and dismay

Escape Plan C: Rebuild
2016
Oil paint and spray paint on canvas
60 by 40 inches
 

This painting was originally exhibited at City Limits in Oakland, CA for Morgan Mandalay's 2017 solo exhibition, "Norman Amygdala." Mandalay looks at that particular exhibition as an amalgam of his life, and the politics that were happening at the time. Paintings featured too many clowns stuck in a car together, clowns at a dinner table. The clown car escaping and exploding in this show ended up being the inspiration for Mandalay's next body of work for his MFA thesis, which used a similar visual language to explore the legacies of the 1818-19 painting by Théodore Géricault, "The Raft of Medusa."
 
"Escape Plan C: Rebuild" gives the feeling of rebuilding a car when you don't know much of anything about how to rebuild a car, and too many hands are trying to put the pieces together in all the wrong ways. It might work for awhile, but eventually the whole thing is going to fall apart.

Untitled (Street Performances), Broad Museum Concept Sketch #1
2014
archival pigment print mounted on plexiglass, mason line
12.5 by 20 inches
 

This work was part of Nancy Popp's 2014 solo exhibition at Klowden Mann, which included large-scale photographic prints of a selection of Popp’s performance sites in the main gallery space, one adhered as a mural to a wall built specifically for the exhibition, and others mounted on plexi-glass, perforated, and strung through with orange mason line that is then interwoven into the existing gallery architecture.
 
This particular work was a sketch for Popp's performance intervention at the construction site for LA's Broad Museum while it was being built. Popp uses the orange mason line during her performances, tying the line across much of where she moves her body on site, as a way of demarcating and discussing what spaces are allowable, and the way in which massive construction projects can drastically reshape vulnerable communities. Her performances, videos, drawings, and photographs draw upon the rich traditions of durational, corporeal performance and political intervention to explore relations between body and site, incorporating public and architectural spaces.

Untitled (Street Performances), 19th/Broadway, Los Angeles
2014
Digital C-Print Mounted on Plexiglass, Mason Line
36 by 53.5 inches

Untitled (Street Performances), San Francisco MOMA
2014
Digital C-Print Mounted on Plexiglass, Mason Line
48 by 64 inches
 

This work was part of Nancy Popp's 2014 solo exhibition at Klowden Mann, which included large-scale photographic prints of a selection of Popp’s performance sites in the main gallery space, one adhered as a mural to a wall built specifically for the exhibition, and others mounted on plexi-glass, perforated, and strung through with orange mason line that is then interwoven into the existing gallery architecture.
 
This particular work was a sketch for Popp's performance intervention at the construction site for San Francisco's SF MOMA while it was being built. Popp uses the orange mason line during her performances, tying the line across much of where she moves her body on site, as a way of demarcating and discussing what spaces are allowable, and the way in which massive construction projects can drastically reshape vulnerable communities.
 
This work is physically perforated by the mason line and Popp continues the engagement in the exhibition space, with the orange line traversing much of the gallery space.
 
Popp's performances, videos, drawings, and photographs draw upon the rich traditions of durational, corporeal performance and political intervention to explore relations between body and site, incorporating public and architectural spaces.

Fence
2016
Steel and oil paint
135 by 205 by 172 inches
 

Rebecca Ripple's "Fence" is a steel sculptural work with built in flexibility of presentation, and the intention to work with the specific environment in which it is installed. First exhibited at Klowden Mann in her 2016 solo exhibition "Surface Tension," the piece was later installed in a circular presentation in an outdoor group exhibition at LA's Descanso Gardens, and in a half free-standing and half wall-work form at UNTITLED art fair in Miami Beach in 2017.
 
In this body of work, Ripple addresses the contemporary personal and political landscape as a space in which power has become diffuse, and alongside it anxiety has become both omnipresent and difficult to name or source. As modes of viewing become faster and faster paced, we feel the sensation of constantly being questioned without adequate time to find the answer, the sensation that we cannot quite get a handle on something at the core of meaning in our daily experience. Surface Tension presents us with characters that reflect and act out this uncertainty; white steel gates stand in confrontational (yet permeable) formation as we enter the space, translucent plastics and aluminum are paired with human hair, mirrored surfaces undo and expand our reflections, and contemporary monsters made of plastic and metal rise up—simultaneously imposing and unraveled.
 
The ornate-seeming forms on the front of the gates are based in small graffiti tags that Ripple noticed in her Los Angeles neighborhood on her walks. She specifically chose words and names that she couldn't decipher, so that she was reproducing the shapes and curves without translating the meaning, and therefore leaving invitation to interpret and recognizing her own ignorance of many of the signs and symbols in her environment.

insertion
2011 – 2012
steel, tape
24 by 24 by 4 inches

Rubber Glove of Christ 1
2008
Mixed media on paper
16 by 12.5 inches

Sense of Place No. 46
2018
Acrylic, toner, chalk on canvas
28.75 by 36 inches

Mask #2
2018
Archival pigment print mounted on Sintra
43 by 33 inches
Edition 3 of 3 Plus 1 AP
 

This series of work was first exhibited simultaneously in Rodrigo Valenzuela's 2018 solo exhibition at Klowden Mann, "General Song," and his two person exhibition at Jenkins Johnson in Brooklyn with Lavar Monroe.
 
In General Song, Valenzuela abstracted and adapted images historically associated with protest. Drawing on his longtime interest in poetic resistance and his experience growing up under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in his native Chile—as well as research on resistance movements in countries such as the Ukraine and Venezuela—the artist focuses on simple physical structures that people build in times of oppression as a means to explore civil disobedience, as well as the masks worn to protect against the authoritarian response to dissidents. The title of the series refers to Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s volume of poetry which was first published in 1950, and narrates the history of the Americas from a Latin American perspective.
 
As Cooper Johnson said in his review of the exhibition in Artillery, "In both “Masks” and “Barricades,” Valenzuela employs art’s unique ability to connote multiple ideas and feelings without actually declaring what it is, or even being something at all. And he orchestrates those connotations in such a way that the interactions between them create the ineffable experiences that his audience, as art-makers and viewers alike, should seek out of art. With “Masks,” a series of tenebrous but electric portraits of mud-covered men wearing makeshift respirators, Valenzuela somehow achieves this with political and social issues, where voices are often so strident that they stifle the viewer’s ability and willingness to explore or experience different ideas—especially in today’s political climate. While others might equip politically-charged objects to incite, Valenzuela’s mastery of detail and ambiguity instead cultivates a sensitivity and awareness. In an air of riot and ritual, “Masks” enables the viewer to commune with the subjugated and the defiant, the hopeful, the indigenous, the dead."

Mask #12
2018
Archival pigment print mounted on Sintra
33.25 by 23 inches
Edition 1 of 3 plus 1 AP
 

From Deb Klowden Mann:
 
I have always especially loved this series of photographs from 2018, a moment when Rodrigo Valenzuela was commenting on the history of protest and civil disobedience (and acts of civil protection, such as the prevalence of homemade masks in cultures and countries where state and other violence can be daily). The masks mark another kind of time for me now, as sitting in the midst of a 2020 pandemic I find myself in the profoundly fortunate situation of being safe at home and learning how to tie different kinds of masks on the faces of my children.
 
I love Andy Campbell's description of this body of Rodrigo's work best, from his Artforum review at the time, "The artist’s large photographs scintillate. The seven works from his 2017 “Barricade” series present an achromatic playground of visual doubling and totemic sculptural assemblages, while the five works from the 2018 “Mask” series are somber portraits of men wearing ad hoc gas masks made of Coke cans and bleach bottles. This is an iconography of protest and authority under duress. We are ambiguously situated—is it before, or after, the Event? This ambiguity has formal implications as well, as the spaces shown in photographs such as Barricade No. 2, 2017, appear contiguous but are really scenes repeated in front of photographic backdrops of the same, just captured from different angles. The artist has titled his exhibition after Pablo Neruda’s sprawling Canto General, an epic poem from 1950 that tackles the longue durée of the Americas. Neruda is apropos in most contexts but especially here, where his words sometimes act like an ekphrasis delivered sixty-eight years too early: “I heard a voice rise up / from the mineshaft’s narrow bowels, / as from an infernal uterus, / and then a faceless creature / loomed forth, / a powdery mask / of sweat, blood and dust.”"

Free Fall 2
2019
Oil on canvas
78 by 65 inches

Snow
2014
Oil on canvas
60 by 72 inches
 

This work was first exhibited at Klowden Mann in 2014 as part of "Fictions," a group exhibition of work by then Los Angeles-based artists Josh Atlas, Srijon Chowdhury, Guan Rong, and Alexandra Wiesenfeld, exploring manifestations of non-linear narrative through paint, sculpture, books, and wall-imbeded works.
 
All of the works in the show acted as an invitation into storytelling, from the perspective of interaction, fantasy, personal history, and the invocation of myth. During the run of the exhibition, "Snow" seemed to call people into their own personal histories with an invitation to physically stop and look that felt both highly effective and deeply necessary in the midst of our increasing speed of interaction.

Sugar
2014
Oil and graphite on canvas
48 by 50 inches

This Pig Used to Sit on a Biedermeier Couch
2010
Oil on canvas
84 by 60 inches
 

This work by Alexandra Wiesenfeld was exhibited in her first exhibition at Klowden Mann in our original location, "Occasional Beast." In that body of work, Wiesenfeld invites us into an examination of form and psychology, in which figures populate an imagined world of impossible juxtapositions that is nonetheless very grounded in the daily language of relationships and physical space.
 
The larger paintings in this body of work are in many respects self-portraits, not only because they often include a central figure very reminiscent of Wiesenfeld herself, but also because Wiesenfeld’s extended process of creation means that each painting represents the psychological and temporal reality of the artist, as well as her physical form. The paintings were created over many years of layering, each finished canvas often containing as many as ten completed paintings layered beneath it. Organically formed, the resulting surface is simultaneously extremely finished and somehow new. The work is unplanned and yet remarkably rigorous and ambitious in scope.
 
The question of whether or not the pig in “This Pig Used To Sit on a Biedermeier Couch” is porcelain or flesh matters much less than its size, its placement in the central figure’s lap, its proximity to those strange slipper-type boots she is wearing (is that a hazmat suit? And of course that mask has a very specific and ubiquitous meaning for us today), and the intensity of the saturated landscape surrounding it—a landscape that is not so much background, as a fully characterized presence.

...
2019
Oil on canvas
68 by 77 inches