Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Fafnir Adamites: Displacing Structures
Angels Gate Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA
June 22 to August 17, 2024
Fafnir Adamites’ Displacing Structures brings together artists working in traditional fiber methods such as basketry, lacemaking, weaving, and netting, to move beyond established conventions into a deliciously disruptive exhibition. Material and technique converge to explore themes of human/nature, time, memory, belonging, sexuality, and the construction of the self. In Molly Haynes’ weavings, tension is manipulated via distinct openings akin to mouths or sinkholes. The horizontal monofilament weft loosens, gapes, and tightens again around each opening in deeply satisfying ways. Elsewhere, filet lace and soft sculpture pieces by Jade Yumang deviate from historical understandings of lace crafting techniques—utilizing images of gay Filipino pornstar Brandon Lee, mining the meaning of diasporic identity across generations.
Jose Santiago Perez’s Untitled (gold portal) (2022), composed of what resembles the inside of a helium balloon, shimmers under an impeccably placed spotlight—refracting a silvery-white glow onto the gallery’s walls. Staring into its center, demarcated by a few gold strands of plastic tightly woven into the portal’s surface—I wondered if I laid down, where or when would I be transported to?
Reflection: What are the ties that bind you? How can you become untethered?
Gretchen Bender:The Perversion of the Visual
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, CA
May 24 to August 10, 2024
I thought about Gretchen Bender’s The Perversion of the Visual for a long time after I left the exhibition I thought about the infectious soundtrack flooding the gallery from behind tall, black curtains. The gory, saturated imagery, the titles of works taken from some of my favorite movies,Gremlins (1984) and Hellraiser (1987). But mostly, I thought about how these prints, made in the 1980s, could have been shot on an iPhone from this year or last, taken straight from my Instagram feed.
At Sprüth Magers, The Perversion of the Visual features a handful of large scale prints, a video installation, and ephemera. In works like Gremlins (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), and Untitled (Hellraiser) (1988–1991), visceral images of civilian casualties from the US-backed Salvadoran Civil War are juxtaposed with stills from cult classic films and technicolor-computer generated graphics. Dumping Core (1984), a multi-channel video installation layers and splices corporate logo graphics with war imagery, alluding to media saturation and the pervasive influence of television and advertising on public consciousness.
I see and feel my own frazzled and somewhat desensitized psyche in these works— as I am now accustomed to the brutalities of state-sanctioned violence via the constant influx of images, videos, and information. Though the artist’s abstract and conceptual approaches to media criticism could be read as removed from the reality of this violence, Bender’s works effectively capture the dizzy slur of life in the Information Age. Bender would probably agree that not much has changed since the 80s.
Reflection: Have you re-adjusted your Meta settings?