Weho, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
You Don't Control The Witness
Ltd Los AngelesLaura Aguilar Nora Aslan Ana Benaroya Gabriela Ruiz Zoe Walsh Who is declared too much? Too loud, too large, too gay. Excessive. Who bears the responsibility of toning down, or adjusting oneself to fit norms of comportment, appearance, and volume? This exhibition considers the ways in which artist practices may occupy a range of modes while standing in opposition to systems of control. The artists included question the visibility of bodies and lives that oppose hegemonies, holding in each hand the intensity of resistance and the right to opacity in its quiet. The political power of desire and the expression of love, beauty, and strength are here represented through an idiom of maximalism. Whether through visual, conceptual, or political means, that language is shared across these multi-generational practices. Through her portrayals of the quotidian existences of queer Latinx women, Laura Aguilar’s practice is defined by the intensity of presence. Like the boulders against which Aguilar placed her body in dialog, these lives of the marginal are at once spectacular and utterly ordinary. Her photographs evoke the wisdom accrued through time’s wear on bodies, the loosing and binding of the surviving self. In Nora Aslan’s practice, the visual style of rugs provides a means of probing the domestic sphere as a site of political consciousness. Within each canvas, information is hidden not under the rug but in the rug. Finding the coeval beauty and horror in repetition and scale, modernity’s steady stream is cast into patterns, the floor placed up on the wall. Ana Benaroya uses a lurid color palette to depict larger-than life, highly muscular women. Her style contains a graphic rigor and a visual intensity to push exaggeration beyond the limits of the possible. Big bulky figures burst out of their boundaries, out of paintings and into eyeballs. Lesbian desire is the thing, tender, tense, and rooted in tactility. Gabriela Ruiz redeploys the excesses of consumer accumulation, dollar store deals two steps from detritus. The decadence of materialism, indeed the very materiality of materialism, comes under her purview. There’s perfectly good stuff on the side of the road that maybe can't be taken or shouldn’t, but will be taken anyway. A road taken anyway. Often using insulation as a decorative element, Ruiz considers the invisible wrapping that ties objects to people and what those connections look like in broad daylight. In Zoe Walsh’s latest series of paintings, the sun-soaked flesh found in the classic gay porn Ramcharger and the poolside erotica of Odyssey magazine are abstracted into clashing planes and colors. The sex is explicit and semi-public in that source material occurs on desert roadsides and poolside landscapes. In their paintings the scenes are transformed, architecturally rigorous but pictorially nebulous planes flickering in a haze of overexposure.