As the West Coast gradually bids farewell to the rainy spring and enters early summer, the art ecology is also full of vegetation and ready to go. Local galleries Luis De Jesus and Steve Turner Gallery, which focus on multicultural regions and conceptual strategies, have recently expanded the broader media boundaries, narrative systems and multicultural contexts in the form of double solo exhibitions.
Carla Jay Harris: Flight
April 29–June 10, 2023
Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles
As a Los Angeles gallery that pays particular attention to critical historical identity and new media methodology in the framework of today’s society, Luis DeJesus recently presented one of the solo exhibitions from Indianapolis artist Carla Jay Harris, titled “Flight”. Harris’s photo-based paintings are a continuation of her “Celestial Bodies” series, which began in 2018 and mainly explored her multicultural background and her youth living in the United States and abroad. In her quest for a broader understanding and sense of belonging, Harris was drawn to mythological stories, which later became a core theme throughout her work. Harris seems to extend a psychological intimacy based on image expression. In “Flight,” she finds inspiration in African American folk tales and establishes a deeper connection with her own racial history and ancestral memory to make the work more personal. The new series is inspired by African myths about flight based on ancient African-American folklore: “Flying African” tells the story of enslaved Africans flying home through a magical ocean passage. Harris’s story text is full of truth and visual manifestations of freedom. Her powerful imagery of overcoming and transcending limitations and the unique overlap with mythological themes in her artistic practice maintain a strong resonance throughout.
Chris Engman: Prism
April 29–June 10, 2023
Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles
The combination of photography and graffiti is a very exciting experiment in the practice of Chris Engman (b.1978, Seattle). The stubborn indicative nature of photography also points to the complex and rigid relationship between this medium and inherent things, while also giving the imaginative world of graffiti the possibility of creative combination. It is reported that the traces of brushstrokes and color blocks left on the mixed media new photos in the artist Engman’s new solo exhibition “Prism” originated from his accidental realization of how innocent and full of infinite possibilities his children’s random drawings were, a truly primitive artistic creation – through careful measurement and arrangement, Engman is ready to remove the stubbornness and rigidity of adults – when creating graffiti, he only retains the childlike unhesitating, wanton imagination, and the pure joy of the action itself. It can be said that the marking of graffiti also adds whimsy, vivid colors and more attractive intrinsic materiality to photography, a medium that traditionally feels like a tomb and is fixed.
Vincent Cy Chen: Xenogenesis
April 29–May 27, 2023
Steve Turner, Los Angeles
One of Steve Turner’s new solo exhibitions is also the first solo exhibition by Vincent Cy Chen (b. 1993), a Taiwanese artist who lives and works in New York. Xenogenesis imagines the intersection of the primitive and the futuristic through a series of morphologically luminous sculptures. The exhibition title refers to the concept of offspring belonging to a different species from their parents, and alludes to the cultural derivative concepts of biology and technology such as metamorphosis, transformation, and hybridization. The sculptures are made from a variety of materials and processes, including fiberglass and resin casting, metalworking, woodworking, resin clay, and foam carving. Each work uses neon lights filled with inert gas to achieve its dreamlike fluorescent effect, and is carefully sprayed with paint and decorated with bird feathers, ultimately forming a symmetrical sculpture that resembles some kind of alien plant, deep-sea creature, womb ties, and electrical nodes. The artist recounts that these forms were inspired by Buddhist temples and portraits he encountered as a child in Taiwan. In fact, Chen also envisions the exhibition space as a central energy field that connects the ancient and the modern, the familiar and the unknown.
Jingze Du: Metropolis
May 4–Jun 3, 2023
Steve Turner, Los Angeles
Steve Turner’s solo exhibition, “Metropolis,” is also the second solo exhibition by the young Chinese artist Jingze Du (b.1995, Yantai, Shandong), who currently lives in Dublin, and the gallery. The new works in these exhibitions are related to what Jingze Du believes to be American popular culture, capitalism, and viewing perspectives. Artist Jingze Du spent the first 13 years of his life in China before moving to Dublin, Ireland. Du’s perspective is interesting. Although he did not visit the United States for the first time until 2023, he has already deeply analyzed American culture from afar and has used it as a theme in his creations over the past five years. The core of the exhibition is three pairs of paintings meticulously executed in black, grey and white oil on canvas. There are two larger-than-life portraits of famous American artists, Jeff Koons and Sterling Ruby; an American basketball legend, LeBron James; and Grand Wood’s American Gothic, the source of Du Jingze’s imagery, and a great white shark. Interestingly, Koons and Ruby are the “yin and yang” of contemporary American artists, one shining brightly, the other dark and obscure; James is the classic embodiment of the American dream; the great shark is the symbolic embodiment of American capitalism; and Wood’s paintings are also regarded as the “ultimate American paintings”—the “spectators” in the paintings are the audience of all this—us.
*Originally published on artnow by Noblesse, Summer Issue. 2023: 72–73.
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 