Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Jaydra Johnson, Brittney Frantece, Blessing Greer Mathurin, and Quintessa Matranga pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl
Jeffery Dietch Los Angeles
February 15–April 26, 2025
Los Angeles, CA
As things warm up, blooms emerge at Jeffrey Deitch, where Tschabalala Self’s Dream Girl works dance between frames. Self’s presentation transcends confinements, never static, continuously unfolding and enveloping the space. The theatrical strata of fabric, acrylics, and canvas form bulbous shapes with lively colors ricocheting off one another. As my eyes darted between the movements, pausing between viewing work nurtured a sense of revelation.
Self invites viewers to think beyond the canon of static poses thereby asserting a new allowance of movement and in terms of expression of body, autonomy, and agency. The exhibition acts as a continuum of Self’s practice, staging the work incidentally between expectation and exploration. Observing the pirouettes, flowers, and iris-like shapes, this dynamism that prompted reflection of my own. The immediacy of Self’s Black female protagonist demands presence and in the cheeky ways Self plays with form, figure, and framing I felt prompted to ask myself: how do I take up space?
Reflection: In what ways do you allow yourself the freedom to take up space in the world?
culture:LAB; Womxn in Windows/ American Gurl: home—land
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
February 16 – May 4, 2025
Agency and provocation converge at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Los Angeles culture:LAB’s American Gurl: home—land, featuring several short films crafted by cultural visionaries. While the works articulate presences, each short equally encapsulates provocation through worldingbuilding, dialogue, and style. Identifiers of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism interlace, leaving a resonant impact in the reimagining of identity through each cinematic experience.
Diasporic identities are nurtured but never confined; the tension between belonging and yearning is conceived and elaborated, and crises in their perpetual states are not only felt but communicated without reconciliation. During the opening I typed a line from Siren’s Lament (2024), directed by Alima Lee, into my notes app: “Are we apart from this world, or its affliction?” The works provide inquiry for the unfamiliar and comfort for the represented. In all their questioning, subverting, and mediating, the works seem to communicate a knowing glance.
There is a pronounced relationship to land, music, and movement, illustrated through overlapping words, music, singing, and dance. In this space, ritual emerges but each director’s approach remains distinct. As the films round off with Shakersss.mov (2025), Solange Knowles crafts an accessible and sincere ode to life and personal history. The collective effort of each film’s team to question, return, and reconcile is palpable and infectious, causing the works to stay with me, evolving in my memory over time.
Reflection: How do you take agency over the things that define your life, have you taken the time to think about those definitions?