Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Samantha Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Ozzie Juarez: OXI-DIOS
Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
January 20 to March 2
Recently, a poet friend’s poet friends taught me an exercise they said was proliferated by James Merrill: you are asked to describe the image that comes to mind for a house, tree, bowl, water, animal, and wall—each, it turns out, is supposed to represent a major element of your life.
The tree you choose, for example, is a clue to how you see other people, and the key represents your relationship to spirituality. The wall is your current orientation towards death. By this “logic,” Ozzie Jaurez’s OXI-DIOS at Charlie James seems to play a little trick on death: these walls are gates, these gates walls—and they’re sexy, familiar, and a little threatening.
Topped with menacingly perfect loops of concertina wire, Juarez’s hypothetical structures take cues from the built environment of Los Angeles and its role as a perpetual surface: each wall/gate/canvas/sculpture is emblazoned with pop cultural imagery drawing from Mexican aesthetics, from the aguila with slain serpent in its beak and Aztec mythology to roving stallions and cherubs ringing bells. Such freshly painted dioses on rusted (oxidized) metal make space for the meeting of old and new, life and death—thresholds that are simultaneously a hard stop and a passageway.
Reflection: What first comes to mind when you think of a wall?
Joan Brown
Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Orange County, CA
January 26 to June 2
Joan Brown was, among other things, a Bay Area fixture, beloved teacher, dedicated open-water swimmer, cat-lover, shapeshifter, seeker, and woman who died too young in a tragic, if somewhat poetic, way.
Traveling from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, her posthumous retrospective at OCMA works to reestablish her as an artist worth “taking seriously,” following her career through evolutions thatwhich seem to have once marked her as “unserious,” at least in certain crowds. This means there are early works in the heavily impastoed style she learned at California School of Fine Arts (which later became the San Francisco Art Institute), like the 1964 Green Bowl that ceramicist Ron Nagle described as “elegant and crusty at the same time.”
Brown would jettison this approach to pursue a vibrantly graphic, often whimsical, mode, evidently underway in her 1970 painting The Bride, a wild and colorful painting of a cat in a wedding gown standing in a field of tulips against a sky of flying fish. Who’s to argue? Brown’s practice extended to sculpture and in the folk art-esque Smoker (1973), wire forms the plume of smoke emanating from the cigarette Brown smokes in profile; the Divers (1974) has the clean, utilitarian feel of commercial signage. “Numerous confusions arise when viewing these works,” Nancy Lim writes in the accompanying exhibition catalog, “and yet this is one of their key pleasures.” Indeed, it’s hard not to find some sort of pleasure here, whether it’s the complicated kind or not.
Reflection: Can whimsy be complicated, and serious, too?
Maxwell’s Demon
The Canary Test, Los Angeles, CA
February 3 to March 3
Sometimes when people use the word “energy” in conversation, they’ll give you a tentative look to see if it’s too woo for you. Depending on the context, “energy” can be a higher-key version of “vibes,” or it can be…literal energy, like, heat. Maxwell’s Demon at Canary Test arguably involves itself with both meanings, and then some. Curated by Zachary Korol Gold, the seven-artist group show focuses on the transmission of energy and information, and energy as information, using a curious item (“Maxwell’s demon”) from the history of Western science as its departure point.
Gold writes that each artist “conducts and organizes energies—electromagnetic, nuclear, temporal, social, psychic—through objects, through us.” Nuclear presumably refers to Brian Bowman’s Theia Ouisa (Kreskins Fleshlight) (2024), a two-part sculpture of “uranium granite” from Kern County’s Kergon Mine and its artist-fabricated doppelganger. Alice Wang examines and reinvents geology with a modified scan of a meteor slice (above) and gilded clam fossils (below). Clare Koury’s Towerbuster 9 (2024) looks and feels like a larger, more elegant version of the resin-casted Magical Objects one might find at hippie artisan market; it is a pleasingly symmetrical configuration of orgonite, a material said to counteract the negative effects of electromagnetic waves on the human body. Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik’s three-bladed Triple Weir (2023) interrupts the flow of bodies in the gallery by looking like it will slice you up, as a weir (sort of) does to redirect water. Marcus Zuñiga ventana a cosmovision (2024) is a captivating dual-sided lens-portal-sculpture conducting light, while Lara Joy Evans has “harnessed” AI to produce a semi-abstract depiction of fictional technology with Processor No.04 (2023). Colleen Hargaden’s Electroculture (Meditation) (2024) uses sculpture, audio, and video to re-present the practice of electroculture, in which electroculturists use configurations of copper to reroute atmospheric electricity to their plants.
Each and every work here comes with the whisper and weight of codification trailing behind it, be it tied to hard science or pseudo-science or religion or spirituality. Whether or not you choose to delve into the highly specific histories (and cosmologies) that swirl around each work, Maxwell’s Demon is layered, sharply smart, and quite fun: in other words, high-key vibes.
Reflection: What are constructive ways to talk about energy, and energies?
Scratching at the Moon
Institute of Contemporary Art LA (ICA LA), Los Angeles, CA
February 10 to May 12
The seed of Scratching at the Moon was first planted in the summer of 2020, a time, the introductory exhibition text notes, that was marked by intense social upheaval(s) crisscrossing the onset of the Covid-19, the George Floyd uprisings, and waves of violence against Asian Americans spurred by false rhetoric about the pandemic. After several years of gestation, the
“first focused survey of Asian American artists in a major Los Angeles contemporary art museum” opened on the Chinese New Year, with the work of thirteen artists brought together by guest curator Anna Sew Hoy.
Scratching at the Moon is, at least in part, important for what it is not: it is not a missive on Asian American experience, or the Asian American experience within contemporary art, or even the Asian American experience within contemporary art in Los Angeles. The works do not hammer home a singular thesis, but instead coalesce and diverge in sometimes-overlapping spheres of community, history, form, and content. From Michelle Lopez’s sculptures of precarious infrastructure to Simon Leung’s entrancing filmic opera Act 2 (2024) to the black and white portrait-based works of Yong Soon Min and Young Chung, the themes and approaches of Scratching at the Moon are many and not reducible to a single logline. What does emerge clearly is a sense of vitality and ongoingness—presence that won’t be dimmed.
Reflection: How are communities built and named without being contained?