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Aporia at TOA Presents
Lindsey Scharold on the exhibition by Esteban Ramón Pérez
NEW REVIEW
TOA Presents is pleased to announce Aporia, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Los Angeles-based artist Esteban Ramón Pérez.
Working primarily with leather, Pérez creates objects that place painting in dialogue with textiles and sculpture, expanding how we consider the history and possibilities of painting as a medium. While drawing has always been central to Pérez’s practice, Aporia is the first exhibition to center his works on paper.
Esteban Ramón Pérez (b. 1989, Los Angeles; MFA, Yale University, 2019; BFA, CalArts, 2017). Pérez's practice involves a process of self-excavation, engaging with themes of hybridity, materiality and the interplay between visibility and obscurity. He examines his subjectivity in relation to familial histories of migration, labor and inherited cultures, while responding to his lived experience, fluidly shifting between past and present issues. His work operates within the borderlands where multiple systems of meaning converge, negotiating identities and histories through layered, at times abstract forms.
Esteban Ramón Pérez was awarded the NXTHVN Fellowship in 2020-2021 and the Artadia: Los Angeles Grant Award in 2022. His first solo institutional exhibition, Distorted Myths, opened at Staniar Gallery, Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA, in 2022. In 2023, he presented new works in the Hammer Museum's biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. In 2024, Pérez held his first international solo exhibition at Galleria Poggiali in Milan, Italy. His work has also been exhibited at galleries such as Lehmann Maupin (New York), Charles Moffett Gallery (New York), James Cohan (New York), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Various Small Fires (Los Angeles), Honor Fraser (Los Angeles) and Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco), among others.
—TOA Presents
On Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising
Brooks Turner responds to this recent exhibition
NEW REVIEW
On May 25, 2020 George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on the street outside the Cup Foods convenience store at the intersection of 38th Street E. and Chicago Ave. Days of protests and unrest followed. During the uprising, business owners across the Twin Cities began to cover their storefronts with sheets of plywood which were soon turned into powerful messages and murals by artists, protestors, and community. The Cities were in turmoil and the urban landscape was transformed into a living visual chronicle of the moment.
During this time, Leesa Kelly founded Memorialize the Movement and began collecting and preserving these murals as businesses took them down. Memorialize the Movement has collected over 1,000 panels of plywood over the last four years and continues to do so today, along with exhibiting these murals for the purpose of keeping George Floyd's memory and the story of the uprising alive and fresh in people's minds.
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery, in association with Memorialize the Movement, presents Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising, curated by Amira McLendon, a former Intern of Memorialize the Movement and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. The exhibition features a selection of the murals from Memorialize the Movement's collection. Art and Artifact is the largest gallery exhibition of the murals to be presented since they were created and is Amira McLendon’s curatorial debut. Her goal for the exhibition is to encourage people to reflect on where we are now, as we approach the fifth year since George Floyd's murder.
—Katherine E. Nash Gallery
Kelly Nipper at David Petersen Gallery
Sophia Chai reviews the recent solo exhibition
NEW REVIEW
Kelly Nipper’s art making manifests as sculpture, photography, film and video, performance, text, and various combinations of each, all dependent upon concept. Through rigorous research, her work is informed by alchemy, esoteric practices and theories of the occult. In many of our conversations, she has used the word “witchy.” Indeed, we have discussed modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman’s performance Witch Dance, as well as Alistair Crowley, hurricanes, MIT Self-Assembly Labs, and photographic darkrooms. We have also talked about Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, a method and language for describing, visualizing, and documenting human movement; Étienne Jules Marey’s study of locomotion through the construction of his Physiological Station, a building-sized camera; Oskar Schlemmer’s experimental Bauhaus performances with black screen technology; Eliot Kaplan’s documentary of the making of Merce Cunningham’s CRWDSPCR; and the influence of Allan Kaprow, for whom she once worked as an archivist and assistant. With her ongoing projects, many of which she has been working through and with for over a decade and often involve collaboration with designers, engineers, dancers, and scientists, Nipper maps movement, stretches and suspends images in time, and attempts to bridge the gap between performance and object/image.
—David Petersen Gallery
Pas de Deux at Dreamsong
Brooks Turner on the group exhibition in Minneapolis.
NEW REVIEW
"Every artist works relentlessly to shed the irresistible references of their idols, some more than others, but those influences never truly go away. They are ghosts that forever haunt the artist and without constant exorcisms they become too seductive to ignore, usually grabbing hold every once-in-a-while for a Faustian pas de deux - a bargain that is a simple one; material pleasures over spiritual ones, resulting in a derivative, didactic conduit instead of an original, abstract belief system. But maybe originality is overrated or a flat out myth..." (Jay Heikes)
With references to Giotto, Michelangelo, Morandi, and Paul Thek, among others, the artists in Dreamsong’s summer group show explore what it means to appropriate another artist’s work, either directly or slyly, wholesale or in part, and how distinctions between homage, facsimile, commentary, subversion, and criticism bend and shift, allowing the past to be ceaselessly reread in the present.
Xavier Tavera’s Borderlands at Somerset Public Library
Mike R. Curran writes about the exhibition touring libraries within the St. Croix Valley.
NEW REVIEW
Part of Valley Reads 2024, this touring exhibition depicts landscapes of the US-Mexico border. Mexican-born Minneapolis artist Xavier Tavera documents the aesthetics of the borderland landscape. He reminds the viewer that, historically, artist-rendered landscapes were not meant to be contemplative. Rather, they were a statement of ownership. “Arid and rugged, the landscape is divided by a man‑made scar that snakes through the topography in fragmented sections from west to east along the continent.”
What If Less Were More: “Deathpower” at Law Warshaw Gallery
Christina Schmid discusses a group exhibition at the Macalester College gallery.
NEW REVIEW
Deathpower is the new exhibition at the Law Warschaw Gallery. Guest-curated by Erin Robideaux Gleeson, the exhibition invites visitors to explore the ways that death multiplies life. Twenty-seven artists from different geographic and cultural backgrounds share personal and entangled vitalities across human and more-than-human registers. Five overlapping areas focus on rituals of care, including placemaking for ongoing communion between the living and the dead, language in acts of mourning, transformation and regeneration, survival, and the role of haunting for justice-to-come.
Alexa Horochowski’s Under the Sea-Wind
Ryan Fontaine on the new show at Dreamsong.
NEW REVIEW
Named after the eponymous book by Rachel Carson, Under The Sea-wind is Alexa Horochowski’s debut solo exhibition at Dreamsong. An immersive and poignant dive into ecology, geologically deep time and collective memory, Under The Sea-wind features a monumental installation, sculptures and video. Through unexpected collisions of organic materials, corporeal remnants and manufactured products, this exhibition presents a hallucinatory tableau of objects that one might imagine preserved in a natural history museum of the future.
Designs For Different Futures
Mike Curran writes about the new group show at the Walker Art Center.
Curatorial team: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly the Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago. Consulting curators: Andrew Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Curator-at-Large, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Colin Fanning, Independent Scholar, Bard Graduate Center, New York; and Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Emerging Design Practices), University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia.
Paolo Ventura at Weinstein Hammons Gallery
Mike Curran on ‘Quarantine Diary’ at Weinsein Hammons.
Paolo Ventura studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in the early 1990s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Forma International Center for Photography, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art of Roma (MACRO), Rome; The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome and during the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles. In 2012, he was selected to create a series of works for the Italian national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; he also received a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. And recently Ventura was invited for a commission by the MART, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy. Four monographs of Paolo Ventura's work have been published: War Souvenir (Contrasto, 2006), Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), The Automaton (Peliti Asociati, 2011) and Lo Zuavo Scomparso (Punctum Press, 2012). A retrospective show of Ventura’s work Carousel is scheduled to open at CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in September 2020.
When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Part 1 & 2
Some thoughts on the Poetics of Home
by Brooks Turner.
By choice or by force. With great success or great struggle. People move or are uprooted, for many reasons. The world is currently witness to the highest levels of movement on record; the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people is an international or internal migrant or refugee.
Borrowing its title from Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, “When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration” highlights the diverse artistic responses to migration, ranging from personal stories to poetic meditations in a range of mediums. See how the global movement of people today through migration, immigration, and displacement has mobilized artists from over a dozen countries to reimagine ideas of home and place. The exhibition includes more than 40 works by 21 artists, among them Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Mona Hatoum, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and Aliza Nisenbaum.