GRUIN: CLEAN SLATE EXHIBITION
Exhibition opening Thursday, May 6th, 2021 from 5-9pm PST and Saturday, May 8th from noon-5pm PST
Location: Domicile (n) 4859 Fountain Avenue Los Angeles, CA, 90029
By appointment here
As we emerge from the pandemic, Clean Slate, curated by Margot Ross and Emerald Gruin, is an exhibition full of hope and celebration of new beginnings, wiping the slate clean for a rebirth.
Laura Jones’ work, Gaia, is the centerpiece of the exhibition. “Gaia”, the mother of all life, is the goddess of healing and cleansing removing all past darkness. The Australian Sturt desert pea flower featured in the painting, represents rebirth. After the rain, these flowers blossom and are symbolic of the rebirth of nature.
Belynda Henry’s works represent her fascination with the Australian landscape. Living and working in a lush valley in New South Wales, Henry experiences its ever-changing sights, sounds, light and textures. She is absorbed by nature’s compositions and colors, meditating on the medium and incorporating those impressions in her imaginative works, which are vibrantly modern and uniquely visceral.
Jonathan Rosen debuts a digital mirror piece from his Dream Machines series. After a year of confinement and sacrifice on the surface of the mirror the word BORN glows radiantly as a thousand phrases flash randomly underneath. When a viewer stands before the mirror and takes a photo a single message is frozen over the viewer’s reflection reminding us what we were all born to be.
Using the motif of a silhouette, Keelin Montzingo’s figures are taken directly from influencers’, models’ and brands’ Instagram accounts, observing how the female pose exists in an echo chamber where the real mirrors the constructed and the constructed seeks the real. While Montzingo does not criticize self-promotion, she questions whether the female is collectively perpetuating the male gaze or rather reclaiming the body, defining an empowering narrative where the female speaks directly to the female in celebration of the divine.
Dana James’ The Hero evokes a sense of nostalgia and history, where she works the textured wax achieving a distressed, “wear and tear” aspect, referencing antiquated, sentimental belongings.
Camie Lyons is an Australian-based artist working across a variety of mediums – including sculpture, painting and drawing. Her practice is largely inspired by her intuition and experiences as a contemporary dancer, as she explores the free-flowing possibility of lines, form and movement created by the human body.
Elliott Nimmo’s new series of work began on the cusp of Spring. Each painting explores the crisp light filtering through the trees, early morning mist and the possibilities that each new wave brings to the shore.
Jay Miriam paints magical moments of lingering time demonstrating that, when we are so caught up in a routine, we pass time without thought. In The Sunbathers, three women forget themselves in a forest as rain drizzles and one hides behind a bush.
Laura Kimmel (née Laura Weyl) is a New York-based filmmaker, photographer, and multimedia artist. Her NFT work Non Fungible Woman, uses analog image manipulations to create visceral, poetic visual worlds. Laura’s work explores the labyrinth of femininity through ritualistic, performative art making. She journeys with her muses, often trespassing, in pursuit of magical realms to conjure authentic expressions of self-outside the constraints of social constructs. Her photograph As Above evokes an alternate reality of light and color, a portal to the subliminal.
Leila Jeffreys’ work Revival evokes the feeling after the bushfires, where there is regrowth and new signs of life. The image appears like a tree of leaves, the birds appear to look like the tree is blooming with new leaves.
Although at first glance, Tom Smith’s work appears digital, it is carefully hand-made. Melt is constructed from 2 paintings on paper in opposing hot and cold colors, Smith slices the paintings into tiny strips using a razor. One slice at a time, he alternates the strips and adheres them into one picture. The painting then experiences 400 tons of pressure in a hydraulic press, permanently affixing the slices with vibrating effect revealing and distorting the image.
While attending a decidedly anti-queer Catholic school in Colombia, for Juan Arango Palacios the jungle became a place of refuge—a safe haven—it was the first place and time in Juan’s life where they felt completely content with who they are. This space, which over time has been transformed into an archetype, acts as a timeless setting for the people that Juan meets and experiences that they would have navigating the path ahead of them. Juan is committed to creating dynamic compositions that represent the blurred memories of an immigrant, the suppressed fantasy of a queer person, and an imagined heaven informed by an icon laden religion.
Rico Ayeni is a self-taught artist from Brooklyn, New York, who makes storytelling imagery that combines color and passion while documenting everyday life around the world. A Head In The Clouds Is A Clear Mind was captured when Ayeni was touring around Africa, looking for moments which highlighted certain characteristics and challenges he observed from his people.
Paris-based Cyrielle Gulacsy has created CS005 / (Spectral Component) for Clean Slate, the first of a series developed during lockdown. Struck by the beauty of the light during her first trip to California in 2017, Cyrielle studied the solar spectrum and the color temperature variations depending on the sunlight’s interaction with the atmosphere. The paintings are composed like windows opened to the sky that capture the magical and ephemeral instants of daylight. Breaking down the solar spectrum, each piece offers a moment of contemplation and invites the viewer to deeply meditate on the essence of light: its origin, its nature, its beauty. The artist uses pointillism and layers of dots to give form to the principle of “wave-particle duality” in quantum mechanics, a property of the photon, the particle of light.
VISITOR INFORMATION:
domicile (n.) is located in the Merrick Building in East Hollywood at 4859 Fountain Avenue. The gallery can be visited by appointment only.
