Hollywood, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Big Other
Château ShattoAlvin Baltrop, Angela Bidak, Cyprien Gaillard, Audrey Gair, Jason Hirata, Helen Johnson, Wolfgang Paalen, Paulina Peavy, Zeinab Saleh, Kaari Upson, Pam Virada, Tom Wesselmann Eighteen months ago, art historian Laura Whitcomb drew the gallery towards the work of Paulina Peavy. Her oil on board paintings (realized in the 1930s) and her so-called ‘smokies’ (realized in the 1970s) were immediate points of interest and catalyzed an exhibition that was scheduled to open on Saturday, January 11, at Château Shatto in Los Angeles. Holding a flame up to paper, Peavy would capture an impression of the wick-bound fire with residual curls of smoke. Peavy’s ‘smokies’ capture something essential to how art performs and suspends itself. They also capture something more essential to the fugitive nature of time and matter; what constitutes an impression, how and for how long does it stay impressed. Beguiled by the works themselves and this existential module of sorts, we started building a gallery exhibition around artworks that use smoke as subject or material. What began last Tuesday in Los Angeles city and county (and continues, as fires and fire weath- er persist) will be news to nobody reading this at this point and language feels unconscionably feeble when measured against what it is describing. So no descriptors of that nature here. The exhibition has sat silently installed in the gallery. We will open our doors again today, Wednesday, January 15, and audiences will be welcome to see the show. In Los Angeles at present, most people’s resources of time, attention, concern and plain money––including our own––are being directed towards the efforts to support the people, creatures, ecology and wonders of our beloved city. As such, we have set no expectations of how and if the exhibition will be received in person. As we configure an exhibition in the dark shadow of these ongoing catastrophes, we’re trying to understand what this horrific coincidence of subject matter means. We are so often afford- ed a kind of cool distance when we conceptualize exhibitions, but there is no distance here. Los Angeles has never been an arbitrary backdrop for our program at Château Shatto––it has always been a constituent part of it. Similarly, smoke and fires are never far from mind here. The vivid warnings of Mike Davis and Octavia Butler reside in our minds as evergreen guests. The beloved Gary Indiana, who passed away late last year and gave generously through his unrelenting and deliciously bitchy critique of the anodyne, titled his recent collected essays Fire Season. Indiana’s archives were destroyed by the Eaton fire, which still rages several miles to the north-east of the gallery. To live in Los Angeles is to be constantly aware of the ever- present possibility of the transformation of matter to vapour.