Press Archive

Gallery Revisited and Selected Artists Review; AWOL blog by Ezhra Jean Black for Artillery Magazine

May 12th excerpt:

From Chinatown, I headed north on Sunset back towards Silver Lake and Gallery Revisited which has regrouped its overall concept, so to speak, in the direction of – (voila) The Group – group shows exclusively for the next several months by its stable of artists – which is interesting in the sense it gives both of the impulses, ideas and aesthetics circulating among a certain segment (or segments) of the Los Angeles (or larger, or smaller) art community, as well as the tastes (whimsical, eclectic) and thinking (probing, enigmatic) of its director, Leora Lutz. Lutz is completely serious about the mission of her gallery and about getting the best out of her artists, at which she seems to have had some success with this show, without necessarily burdening them with too many constraints.

At the same time (and if her artists are any reflection of this), she’s all over the map (or at least one part of that ‘map’); and, for all her focus and seriousness, she’s sly, quick-witted (and changeable), and one of those people who can never fail to make me laugh. Without getting too much into the specifics (or the specific pieces), the direction the show elicits is about the enigmatic abstraction and the enigmatic object, which may be two sides of the same coin.

It’s a terrain Hammer curators have explored in some breadth (if not depth) – both with Thing and even Russell Ferguson’s The Undiscovered Country. The abstraction here is not on the same order as Ferguson’s ‘undiscovered country,’ which had a figurative/representational bias, but partakes of a similar sensibility: e.g., a cool abstraction like Elana Kundell’s oil “It’s A Wash” (which is really an incredible painting). (I’m happy to say that my publisher, Paige Wery’s, painting was no less creditable in this regard. The painting/object was heavily worked – but I think to a successful end. There were surfaces here that seemed not lunar, not Martian, but Jovian. We may all be in the gutter, but some of us are looking at – uh, apparently Jupiter.)

It was interesting that Paige’s piece somewhat straddled the turf between painting and object – and the terrestrial (specifically, a tree) and extra-terrestrial. More definitively ‘object’ and perhaps also extra-terrestrial was Ya-Ya Chou’s embryonic/placental object in blown glass and red plastic – call it ‘Star Fetus’ or Star Embryo (I don’t remember what the title was).

Then there was something that had at least the familiarity of one of those Steuben paperweights – containing a text – you might as well call that ‘Message in a bottle from another planet’ (again, I don’t know what the title was). Familiar at least conceptually was the vividly enlarged tongue segment with its clustered, nipple-like papillae, by Lana Shuttleworth (“Tongues Will Wag:”). Yes, they will. Another vivid, and utterly mysterious construction, something that looked vaguely like a pair of red peppers was actually a collaboration between Julie Hughes (who also showed work of her own) and another artist (Pete Goldlust?).

It sounds far out; and it only got farther out – almost to the verge of ‘outsider’ status. But then aren’t we all, until someone ‘sends the car’ for us? (L.A.-speak – that may be going out of fashion; what with the price of gas, they’ll soon be sending a bike and sidecar – or maybe a pedicab. I’ll settle for the invite.) I’m probably getting a lot of this completely wrong; what notes I have are completely illegible. (I hope the artists – or Leora, who apparently has her own blog now – will set the record straight.)