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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.
Jackie Amézquita’s Nuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur (Our North Has Always Been The South) is the artist’s first exhibition at Charlie James Gallery. For those who were unable to attend the last iteration of the Made in LA biennial, this exhibition provides an opportunity to view work in dialogue with what was exhibited at the Hammer Museum. Here, Amézquita is again using soil, fruit, masa, rainwater, copper, and other natural materials to create works that engage with a variety of socio-political issues. The fourteen-feet long work bajo el cielo sobre el mismo suelo (2024) serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition. The multi-panel “paintings” trace the U.S. and Mexico border and are made using soil from the contentious locale. Ultimately, the individual panels — which “break down the idea of a monolithic border” — serve as a “palimpsest of hope and adversity, natural beauty, and barber enforcement.”
The exhibition also features new works made of copper such as SUDOR de mi GENTE as well as soil paintings that incorporate color for the first time. The opening night also featured a performance, como el agua que fluye (2024) by Amézquita in collaboration with 19 friends and artists, who joined her on a walk from downtown Los Angeles to the gallery space.
What Will You Give? is a two-person exhibition of large-scale paintings by Veronica Fernandez and Tidawhitney Lek at Sidecar. Led by Night Gallery founder Davida Nemeroff, Sidecar is a new kunsthalle-inspired space next to Night Gallery’s north campus in Downtown Los Angeles. What Will You Give? is the space’s first exhibition organized in collaboration with Melanie Ouyang Lum. Both Fernandez and Lek use painting to explore stories of love and loss that are both personal and universal. Their bold canvases attempt to render the ecstasy and agony of the human condition.
Fernandez’s mixed-media paintings are both abstract and figurative, drawing on specific moments from her childhood and her familial history. Lek’s paintings play with perspective, time, and scale and speak to latent trauma and unspoken suffering. Together, the artists, who are also friends, explore identity and intimacy in their biographical and emotional work.
Rites of Spring is the latest group exhibition, conceptualized as a “gathering,” at Marta featuring the work of 22 artists across 18 different practices, including A History of Frogs, John Baldessari with Sébastien de Ganay, Sarah Burns, Klas Ernflo, Ross Hansen, Virva Hinnemo, Minjae Kim, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Dino Matt, Doug McCollough, Lindsey Muscato and Joshua Friedman, Magnus Pettersen and Lea Hein, Ben Sanders, Bennet Schlesinger, George Sherman, Jonah Takagi, and Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon. The title of the grouping, Rites of Spring, is a reference to an American hardcore punk band and an Igor Stravinsky symphonic ballet of the same name. Like the band and the ballet, the work of the artists “embrace and confound expectations of the vernal” and pay homage to the season of Spring, particularly its power, necessity, and rebirth.
The delightful works, blurring the lines between art objects and functional design pieces, range from bronze sculptures to textile paintings to pine light fixtures, some of which have been presented at other artistic venues such as Design Miami or Frieze London. Here at Marta, they now enjoy the possibility of “renewed activation,” fostering new meanings and relationships with the work of other participating artists.
Gallery talk is your insider look into the stories of gallerists, curators, and artists in the Los Angeles art community.
Regeneration and Borders
In an LA Weekly interview with Shana Nys Dambrot, Jackie Amézquita noted that her practice was about “regeneration” and a space where the artist could “unpack” her personal experiences as an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala in the United States. Through her soil paintings, she examines the “complexities of displacement, social adaptation, and identity formation.”
In a recent video made on Amézquita’s participation in the group show Tracing the Edge (August 23rd, 2023 – January 7th, 2024) at the Benton Museum of Art, the artist discussed the role of organic materials and line in her work. “I start thinking about still-life, but I am trying to stay away from more conventional ways of creating paintings […] and thinking about straight edges makes me think about boundaries and borders.”
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