The Cup as a disruptor of artistic hierarchies; Fabric portraits preserve traces of lost loved ones; Women/femmes pushing binary structures
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Top 3 This Week
Let Lindsay Preston Zappas curate your art viewing experiences this week. Here are our Top 3 picks of what not to miss. Scroll down for Insider stories.
Previously Blumenfield Projects, ATLA is a newly launched Los Angeles and Tokyo-based studio co-founded by Jenny Hata Blumenfield and Ryu Takahashi. The Aesthetics of Everyday Objects: The Cup is a 39-artist group show, consisting of painters, sculptors, mixed-media artists, designers, and ceramicists, presenting contemporary interpretations of the cup. The formally diverse cups are stacked on top of one another on minimalistic white shelves, allowing them space to shine as individual objects. ATLA invites visitors to carefully pick up the cups, providing a tactile experience that is often forbidden in a gallery or museum setting. Blurring the lines between craft and fine art and between the utilitarian and purely decorative, The Aesthetics of Everyday Objects: The Cup is an attempt to push the boundaries of the everyday object, disrupt hierarchies, and reignite California’s long love affair with ceramics.
On the Other Side of the Wall at Praz-Delavallade is Franco-Iranian artist Golnaz Payani’s first exhibition in Los Angeles. Her latest body of work makes use of found antique frames that house intricately woven fabrics. In several works, the meticulously crafted weavings appear to spill out of the frame and towards the gallery floor. In others, the weavings project outwards. Payani describes her works as “portraits” and their arrangement as a “ritual” of sorts. These so-called portraits transform into relics that preserve the traces of lost loved ones. This is a reference to the artist’s childhood in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, where many were killed or remain missing. The portraits, made of fabric, also appear to be veiled figures - a reference to compulsory veiling. With this context, this push outside of the frame becomes a metaphor for liberation.
VAMPIRE::MOTHER at Anat Ebgi is curated by Jasmine Wahi and presented in conjunction with Vortic Curated. VAMPIRE::MOTHER presents work by 15 contemporary artists, each of whom was guided by Wahi to reflect on reductive, rigid, and binary words, terms, feelings, and quotes affiliated with women and femmes. The curator collaborated closely with each artist, urging them to create work inspired by their “instinctive responses” and “visceral sensations” to various phrases or prompts. The resulting works of various mediums, largely centered around the body, attempt to disrupt linear and binary structures and prove that multiple selves can exist simultaneously. The exhibition features a virtual extension, including bespoke virtual environments such as a haunted castle and a doll’s house, that will launch in conjunction with Frieze L.A. on February 28th.
In a recent Instagram post, the artist Nicki Green, one of the 39 participants in ATLA's The Aesthetics of Everyday Objects: The Cup, shared a video demonstrating the use of Negel Vasser, a terracotta cup measuring 3 inches high and 7 inches wide. The cup is adorned with purple floral and vegetal motifs and two hands with their palms facing upwards are placed within a circle on the exterior. A negel vasser, a Yiddish term literally meaning "nail washer," is used by observant Jews upon waking to wash their hands. In the video, Green can be seen grabbing onto the double-handed cup, tilting it over on each side to pour water onto her hands.
The exhibition includes an accompanying publication, designed by Ella Gold and published by Atelier Éditions, which now shares its gallery space with ATLA. In the publication, Green writes that she recreates ritual tools or “sculptures of ritual objects” from “the perspective of trans embodiment”; by doing this, she hopes to “explore the possibilities of considering the purity of the body as inherent,” as well as the “drive towards proliferation in the context of consistent decomposition.”
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