Math Bass: Full Body Parentheses

The lumber room presents Full Body Parentheses, a mid-career survey of Math Bass’s sculptural works, accompanied by the artist’s site-specific murals and a selection of small paintings. Best known for their paintings, which iterate on a lexicon of symbols to create a unique language, Bass’s sculptures in Full Body Parentheses animate and complicate those more familiar, flattened forms, creating a resonant, playful world of iconic objects.

Bass has explored the intersection between performance and sculpture since they began making sculptures to appear as characters in videos at the beginning of their career. Seriality, the repetition of forms, and sculpture as character remain crucial themes in their practice.

In this vein of performance, the exhibition begins in a double curtain room with a roving, pre-programmed spotlight. The light searching for the moment before the show begins is a classic performative moment. The stairway that leads up from that room to the main gallery has a tinted skylight that casts a light over the whole space, creating an ephemeral entryway to the show. From here, performance and sculpture find various points of connection among the forms, rendered in metal, wood, ceramic, canvas, and house paint.

The body of work in Full Body Parentheses started over a decade ago with a set of costumes in performances that referenced houses being tented for termites in Los Angeles, and has evolved into a set of objects that are deceptively simple in their poetic ambiguity. The works evoke common objects, human bodies both absent and present, witty riffs on American design, and forms all together stranger than all of these.

The titular work of the show, “Full Body Parentheses,” scales up a form from a lamp from a thrift store that appeared to be a handmade object from the 1960s or 70s. This work frames objects in the room, acts as a threshold, as tall as a standard doorway, at once in proportion with a home and unfamiliar.

Among these brackets and the charged objects in this show – alternately iconic and ambiguous – the body is activated, appears and disappears in space, conjuring a performance all of its own.

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Math Bass (b. 1981, New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, performance, sculpture, murals, and video. They received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2023) the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2021-2022); Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2022); Vielmetter Los Angeles (2020); Various Small Fires, Seoul (2019-2020); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2018); The Jewish Museum, New York (2017); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2017); and MoMA PS1, New York (2015). Bass has also participated in selected group exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, NY (2022); Martos Gallery, New York (2019); Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2019); Gordon Robichaux, New York (2018); and the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, (2012). A forthcoming solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC is schedule for September 2023. Their work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.