Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Yuwei Tu: Wherever Your Mother’s Shadow Falls
May 4 to June 15, 2024
Rusha & Co, Los Angeles, CA
Taking its name from a poem by Ocean Vuong, Yuwei Tu’s first solo exhibition feels like an earnest ode to ephemeral, fragile, and—maybe?—sacred moments. Ten oil paintings, all made in 2024 and none longer than 20 inches, show glimpses of body parts weighted with reverie, an emotional effect created by warm light, the poetic shadows of body parts cast on other body parts, hands holding totemic things: flowers, origami, and a Joker card.
Vuong’s poem goes: “The most beautiful part / of your body is wherever / your mother’s shadow falls.” The kind of beauty that Tu gravitates towards seems intimately entwined with grief, which is, of course, all wrapped up in time passing and things that leave marks in its wake. The longer I looked at Tu’s paintings, the more I noticed engaging in an odd calculus about permanence; the flowers in Week-Old Lilies will be dead soon, but not sooner than the impression of a bra strap in Torso of Air will disappear. The tattoos in The Spine Won’t Remember Its Wings and Paper Lily will, most likely, exist as long as the paintings’ subject(s). Shadows don’t last very long at all, unless they are memorialized in pigment or celluloid or text—Tu deftly manages this delicate sort of preservation, avoiding schmaltz by way of technical skill and some kind of exciting miracle that will likely take her far.
P.S. Tu’s focus on the maternal and feminine pairs fascinatingly with Andrew Bujalski’s There There, a three-screen installation in the adjacent gallery space that is also on view through June 15th.
Reflection: Where does your mother’s shadow fall?
3B Collective: Highway Hypnosis
May 26 to September 8, 2024
Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA
With sculpture, ceramics, weaving, painting, assemblage, and more, 3B Collective: Highway Hypnosis decidedly reflects its artists’ embrace of a hybrid, multi-pronged, and fundamentally generous approach to art and cultural expression. The many and varied works on view are by Adrian Alfaro, Aaron Douglas Estrada, Alfredo D. Diaz, Alexa Ramírez Posada, Oscar Magallanes, and Rubén Ortiz-Torres, all members of 3B Collective, as well as their chosen collaborators. As exhibition text explains, the collective is comprised of Indigenous and immigrant Angeleno artist and “engages in collaborative works with skilled artisans from regions integral to their familial roots, such as Oaxaca, Jalisco, El Salvador, and Baja California…[for] a contemporary manifestation of ancestral cultural networks within an urban context and sensibility in present-day America.”
Among these collaborative works are the 2024 Freeway Weaving, made with Beto Ruiz of Tallerocho8, a textile studio in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. The distinctly modernist rendering of an elevated (and severed) freeway is stunning both for its blend of abstraction and representation as well as its colors, derived from plants native to the region surrounding Ruiz’s studio. This adaptation of modernist geometries through Indigenous Mexican craft is echoed in Oscar Magallanes’s series A Study of a Study of Mexico (2021), smartly bringing the work of Josef Albers into conversation with ancient Mexican architecture.
The collision of timelines and aesthetics is of central concern—this focus is both willfully enacted through artistic production, and reflected upon in terms of historic and ongoing colonial and capitalist acts of violence. Important themes emerge, namely that craft can be both ancient and contemporary and that maintaining the separation of art and craft may contain, like so many borders, a proposition of violence.
Reflection: Borrowing from the exhibition text, how do you see craftsmanship in relation to ancestral knowledge?