Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from October 19th through December 14th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 19th, from 4-6pm. Ahmadi masterfully uses her formal skills to invigorate challenging subject matter, blending free-flowing strokes with vibrant bursts of color to captivate viewers through unexpected contrasts—whether in sculpture, painting, or animation. Painting serves as her vehicle for truth-telling, where luminous colors and mystical figures intertwine with violent imagery to illuminate pressing global issues such as migration, war, and the brutal treatment of marginalized people. Tangle features her new works, which focus on female figures immersed in fantastical landscapes of land and water." Ahmadi's technical mastery of watercolor—a medium celebrated for its unpredictability—allows her to explore themes of covering and uncovering. By incorporating screenprints into her paintings, she adds temporal and physical layers, creating a dynamic dialogue between the real and the imagined. Through her inclusion of ruins or clues to a deeper story, Ahmadi encourages viewers to probe beneath the surface of the narratives we inherit, from ancient myths to childhood memories to the modern news cycle. Born in Tehran, Iran, Ahmadi grew up in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The roles imposed on women in Iranian society, including the mandate to wear the hijab, were formative influences on her development as both a woman and an artist. Drawing from mythological figures such as Medusa and Artemis—who symbolize the enduring strength of women despite societal oppression—Ahmadi portrays women in her paintings in positions of physical struggle, contending with vicious animals, walking through fire, and being weighed down by the weight of their own hair, bodies, and surroundings. Her paintings examine the history of patriarchy's surveillance and control over women's bodies, from the mandatory hijab in her homeland to the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights in her adopted country, the United States. In her Pressure Cooker series, Ahmadi explores the transformation of domestic objects into instruments of violence. Traditionally seen as a symbol of nourishment and care, the pressure cooker has been repurposed in terrorist attacks as a bomb, recontextualizing it as a tool of brutality. Her commentary on women's autonomy extends into this series, where intricate intaglio hand-etching celebrates the domestic role of this everyday object. By aesthetically enhancing the pressure cooker, she invites viewers to confront the unsettling juxtaposition of war and violence against the mundane comfort of its domestic function. Ahmadi's latest animation, Marooned, delves into the destabilizing effects of politics and war on ordinary people, with a particular focus on the struggles of immigrants and refugees. Composed of 5,172 hand-painted frames, the animation tells the story of people working tirelessly to build a pathway of large rocks leading to a stranded oil tanker in the ocean. As they near completion, ominous figures emerge and seize the tanker, leaving them with nothing. Ahmadi has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Manetti Shrem Museum in CA (2024), The Rubin Museum in New York City (2021), the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, CA (2017), the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2014), and the College of Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, OH (2012). In addition to holding regular solo exhibitions at galleries in NYC, LA, London and San Francisco, her works have been included in many curated museum group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Notable shows include the "Rising Sun" at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, (2023) "Being and Belonging" at the Ontario Museum of Arts in Toronto, Canada (2023) “Epic Iran” in Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2023); “A Boundless Drop in A Boundless Ocean” Orlando Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida (2021), Catastrophe and the Power of Art”, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019), “Revolution Generations”, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2019) among others. Ahmadi’s work is part of permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Arts; the Crocker Art Museum; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Asia Society Museum in New York; the Manetti Shrem Museum in California; the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; the Grey Art Museum in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University; The Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the Farjam Collection in Dubai; the TDIC Corporate Collection in Abu Dhabi; and the private collection of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Anna Lukashevsky: The New Immigrants. This is the Haifa-based artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view June 29th through August 17th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 29th from 4-6pm. Anna Lukashevsky is interested in the psychological and sociological aspects of the traumatic events, especially in portraits. Over the past two years, she has painted portraits of new immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. Lukashevsky’s subjects abandoned comfortable lives in Russia because their beliefs were no longer tolerated in the place they called home. The cast of artists, writers, journalists, and filmmakers seen in Lukashevsky’s paintings make up a fraction of the 70,000+ Russian and Ukrainian immigrants to Israel, and each portrait relays the subject’s story. As Lukashevsky speaks with her subjects during lengthy portraiture sessions, their experiences transform her images from an archetype to an individual. The New Immigrants project began in 2022 with paintings of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, but after October 7th Lukashevsky was instilled with a desire to capture the emotional impact of Israel’s war against Hamas. These new portraits depict the trauma, depression, and sadness that Israelis have felt since the war with Hamas began. Lukashevsky imbues her paintings with a sense of empathy and fear, portraying an uncertain future and viewing the work as warning signals to the cultural world. As an immigrant from the USSR herself, Lukashevsky has felt an intrinsic connection to her subjects, and viewed herself as an outsider in the Israeli cultural world. Lukashevsky is a part of the New Barbizon Group, a collective of five Israeli painters born in the USSR who offer a contemporary version of the tradition of painting en plein air. Following in the footsteps of the 19th century Barbizon School, the artists attempt to hold a mirror to contemporary life and highlight the lived experiences of those around them. In The New Immigrants, Lukashevsky utilizes this philosophy to represent the beauty and trauma of the present through those living in it. By deeply engaging with and sharing the stories of her subjects, the artist humanizes the refugee crisis and the effects of war. Anna Lukashevsky was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and studied at HaMidrasha Art School, Israel. She has had solo exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art, and Bat Yam Museum of Art. Lukashevsky’s work can be found in the collections of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum; Haifa Museum, Israel; and numerous private collections.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Brad Spence: FantasyBoatLoveIsland. This is the California-based artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm. This series takes the fantasy of tropical romantic getaways as the subject of inquiry and the backdrop for painterly gestures. The canvases are mostly improvisations, composed in solitude, yet picturing moments of social ceremony, celebration and excess. Figures are suggested through layers of finger-painting that upon close inspection dissolve into primitive marks. Airbrushed sprays of iridescent pigment bath these presences in colored lights. There is a prevailing lack of clarity mixing memory and its erasure with collaged rectangles hinting at photographic mementos that fail to come into focus. The compositions suggest tsunamis of conflicting emotions in works that are both fantasies and mediations on the nature of fantasy. The identities of the social events pictured are elusive and changing, shifting between celebrations, rites of passage and rituals of the carnal and carnivalesque. These moment of revelry and abandon are as well shadowed by crisis both personal and global. Entertained here are unmoored desires, like the decadent dreams of tourists. In the end the place fantasy shipwrecks upon empty shores is where transcendence can begin. Meanwhile an endless procession of mud baths, mediation retreats, nightclubs, destination weddings, coverbands, cruiseships, bachelorette parties, hottubs, beach fireworks and the threat of a morning light with no Advil at the bottom of the purse. Brad Spence holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Spence lives and works in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of painting at California State University, San Bernardino. Solo exhibitions include CSUSB Gallery, San Bernadino, CA; Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernadino, CA; and University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach, CA. Spence’s work has been included in group shows in venues such as the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Centre d’art Passerelle, Brest, France; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA, Los Angeles, CA.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Zadok Ben-David: From Here, There, and Everywhere. This is the London and Portugal-based artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm. From Here, There, and Everywhere contains over one hundred hand-cut aluminum sculptures from Ben-David’s ongoing series People I Saw But Never Met (2015-present), bringing together a heterogeneous cast of characters based on real people. Each work is inspired by a passerby the artist discreetly photographed while traveling, sketching their likeness before rendering the drawing in aluminum. The installation includes strangers from Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica in an attempt to chronicle the breadth of the human experience. A metaphor for the diversity of our world’s population, Ben-David’s sculptures materialize our shared humanity, allowing viewers to empathize with strangers from around the globe. People I Saw But Never Met has travelled the world and grown with each presentation, as the artist adds new figures for each exhibition. The work has been shown in Japan, Portugal, Siberia, Ecuador, Tel Aviv, Australia, and South Korea; and now includes over 8,000 sculptures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, People I Saw But Never Met took on a new meaning, becoming a powerful symbol for humanity’s isolation and communication and demonstrating that we are more alike than different. Work in From Here, There, and Everywhere encompasses the 9+ years of Ben-David’s series, placing early work in conversation with new sculptures. Against the backdrop of environmental disasters, wars, and global crises that threaten humanity’s continued survival, Zadok Ben-David presents a message of optimism and hope. A lack of hierarchy between the sculptures gives dignity and respect towards every stranger whose likeness is captured, regardless of origin. Ben-David believes communication and empathy are the solution to many of the problems humanity faces, and the installation visualizes human beings as a collective, emphasizing that our similarities are greater than our differences. Zadok Ben-David lives and works in London and Portugal. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia including: Itchimbia Cultural Center, Ecuador; Kew Gardens, London; Centro de Arte Contemporanae Graca Morais, Bragança, Portugal; Kenpoku Art Festival, Irabaki Prefecture, Japan; The Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent; Singapore Botanical Gardens; and The Tel Aviv Museum amongst many others. Ben-David has participated in group exhibitions, biennials, and museum shows worldwide including recently at The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; Arts Maebashi, Japan; and Breda Photo Biennial, Netherlands (2020). Additionally, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Cerveira Internatonal Art Biennale Cerveira, Cerveira, Portugal (2022, 2020); Busan Biennial, South Korea (2010); Wonder Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2008); and the Venice Biennale, Italy (1988). His art can be found in the collections of museums and public sites across Europe, East Asia, Australia and America including: Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; among others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Yveline Tropéa’s work in the United States: Between Two Worlds. The exhibition will be on view April 6th through May 11th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 6th from 4-6pm. Drawing inspiration from dreams and folklore, Yveline Tropéa creates paintings that defy explanation. A man and woman are wedded on a floating slug, an eyeball-shaped kite pulls miniature figures out of frame, and creatures melt into each other in Tropéa’s surreal scenes. The artist abandons notions of perspective and scale to produce dream-like compositions against backgrounds resembling cosmic ripples or oceans of sand. Working between Paris and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Tropéa’s paintings are influenced by the myriad of cultures and traditions that surround her. Tropéa transcribes events from everyday life and mythology into her canvases, attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible. Tropéa skillfully mixes hand-beading and embroidery, hiding motifs in plain sight and creating kaleidoscopic backgrounds. Her process begins with free drawing, autonomously transcribing dreams and fantasies onto paper. The artist digitally enlarges the image and maps out color choices and patterns for beading and embroidery. Selections of glass beads and threads draw from local beading techniques and source material from craftspeople in Ouagadougou. Tropéa charts out the direction of each strand, resulting in richly textured imagery that animates the mystical narratives. Combining traditional materials with a surrealist and spiritual approach to production allows Tropéa to create a world ruled by irrationality, which we are invited into. Much like contemporary life, Tropéa’s work exists in a space of ambiguity, but by venturing into these dream-like images viewers can find inspiration and meaning, widening their own worlds in the process. Yveline Tropéa (b. 1962) was born in France and lives and works between Paris and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Tropéa’s work has been included in exhibitions at Centre André Malraux, Agen, France; Ouagadougou Biennial, Burkina Faso; Il giardino di Daniel Spoerri, Seggiano, Italy; Château de Montbron, Montbron, France; Biso Biennial, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Institut Français de Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Musée de la toile de Jouy, Jouy en Josas, France, among others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Gravity of Color by Rachel Lachowicz. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view February 3rd through March 16th, 2024, with an opening reception Saturday, February 3rd from 4-6pm. Lachowicz’s newest body of work utilizes materiality as a lens to examine our reality through color and geometric abstraction. Materiality has been a through line in Lachowicz’s work, and through her use of cosmetics the artist attempts to break down strict and outdated binaries of gender. Where previous works have addressed these topics through direct representation and interpretations of the western art historical canon, Lachowicz has shifted her focus to geometric abstraction in an effort to make sense of the systems and laws which define our existence. Many of the works in The Gravity of Color were born from the artist’s interest in quantum physics and cosmology, and showcase a desire to illustrate the intangible. Works like Time (2024), Deep Weave (2024), and Radiofrequency (2024) are abstract representations of longitudinal waves, multiverse theory, and radiofrequency radiation. Depicting these monumental ideas through her signature medium of pressed-eyeshadow allows Lachowicz to examine them at a granular level, shifting the scale to something relatable. Etymology further strengthens a connection between cosmetics and cosmology, as both words share the Greek root of cosmos/kosmos. This shared root roughly translates to ‘order’ or ‘proper arrangement’ and by representing the forces which order our universe through makeup, Lachowicz illuminates and strengthens these connections. Lachowicz’s engagement in geometric abstraction and desire to experiment with materials situates her in a lineage of California artists stretching back to the 1950’s. Abstract eyeshadow pieces in the gallery’s main space are reminiscent of works by Southern California’s Abstract Classicists, while also drawing inspiration from Victor Vasarely and Joseph Albers. In the second gallery, Lachowicz has created two sculptures: Granularity of Space (2024) and Packets of Light (Yellow Field) (2024), which feature powder-coated eyeshadow tins. The two works evoke the Finish Fetish movement of the 1960’s, but the artist’s decision to combine cosmetic tins with industrial material puts a feminist spin on this male-dominated movement. While previous exhibitions sought to directly recreate iconic works of art, works in The Gravity of Color are wholly original outputs. Material relationships lie at the center of Lachowicz’s newest pieces, and by showing the links between paint and cosmetics the artist further blurs the line between the two. While materiality has always been central to her practice, recent work sees Lachowicz taking this interest a step further and creating ‘hybrid’ pieces that combine lipstick and oil paint. These are unlike the lipstick-coated canvases and sculptures present in past bodies of work, and appear closer to gestural works of abstract painting than anything Lachowicz has created before. Powder-coating sculptures of enlarged eyeshadow tins furthers the artist’s explorations of material relationships, as Lachowicz sees a link between the industrial practice and her use of eyeshadow powder as paint. A guiding principle of Lachowicz’s work is her use of ‘other’ materials, which she sees as a way to ‘other’ her oeuvre within the art world due to the materials she employs. In The Gravity of Color, Lachowicz continues to make a case for the inclusion of cosmetics as a form of painting, and demonstrates how structurally similar the two mediums are. As Lachowicz investigates the makeup of our universe in her signature medium of lipstick and eyeshadow, she represents larger-than-life ideas on a human scale. Varying relationships between scale lie at the heart of The Gravity of Color, and by shedding light on these relationships Lachowicz helps viewers ask philosophical and scientific questions about the nature of our existence. The eyeshadow dust that comprises the colors in Lachowicz’s work is not unlike the cosmic dust which forms our universe, and illustrating this allows us to see the gravity that color holds. Rachel Lachowicz (b. 1964) lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. She received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and is currently a professor of studio art at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Her work is currently included in ‘Inner Worlds: Sigmund Freud and Art’ at Kunsthalle Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany. Lachowicz has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; ICA, London; Benaki Museum, Athens; AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Tianjin, China; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; New Museum, New York City; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Venice Bienanale (1993). Her work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, among many others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce Storyteller Yellow, Jiha Moon’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Storyteller Yellow will be on view from December 2, 2023 through January 27, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, December 2, 2023 from 4-6 PM. Jiha Moon’s ceramics and painting draw from Korean folklore, Western contemporary art, and popular culture to create hybrid forms with a vibrant and personal visual language. Born in Daegu, South Korea and recently moving to Tallahassee, Florida after living in Atlanta for 18 years, Moon’s iconography speaks to the complexity of human experience in a globalized world where images are easily shared and recontextualized. She is a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker of cultural landscapes, including symbols from American and Korean culture to produce works that look both familiar and unconventional. In Storyteller Yellow, Moon’s visual vocabulary includes dumplings, fortune cookies, peach, Haetae, banana peels, Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, Milagro, and fireworks along with images of the artist’s son and pets to connect these motifs to her personal history. Embracing contrasting ideas and imagery is a way for Moon to subvert commonly held stereotypes of Asian and Asian-American communities, instead celebrating Asian culture by putting traditional symbols in conversation with emblems of contemporary pop-culture. The title Storyteller Yellow is drawn from Moon’s interest in the color yellow, which she investigates in both aesthetic and racialized contexts. Moon uses yellow for its “social, political, or cultural point of view,” acknowledging an association between the color and racial slurs towards Asian-Americans. Through abundant and prominent uses of yellow in her work, Moon subverts biases against the color and transforms yellow into a point of joy. The blossoms of chrysanthemums, broad strokes of yellow dancing between visual references to landscape painting, the inclusion of a banana peel stretching across a canvas, and the bold use of yellow as a vibrant base become points of exuberance in these works. By centering and celebrating yellow, the color becomes a piece of conversation through Moon’s work, forcing viewers to acknowledge its presence and conjure positive associations with yellow, such as sunshine. Moon’s work acknowledges the multicultural world taking shape around us, and her mixing of iconography asks the viewer to reflect on how art and society can benefit from this fusion. Posing the question of where someone or something “comes from” is not simple – and often times not important – in the 21st century. All of the works in Storyteller Yellow push the boundaries of categorization, inhabiting many identities at once and reflecting the diversity of experiences and cultures in our world. Jiha Moon (b. 1973) lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received a BFA from Korea University, Seoul, an MFA from Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Moon is a 2023 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Fine Arts. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the Asian Art Museum, San Fransico, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Fransico, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Asia Society and Museum, New York, NY; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, among many others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce tomorrow is just a thought, Terri Friedman’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. tomorrow is just a thought will be on view from September 23 through November 22, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 23 from 4-6 PM. Terri Friedman’s work responds to internal and external uncertainty through woven tapestries. Seeing the act of weaving as a unification of warp and weft – or left and right brain – Friedman attempts to weave new neural pathways on her loom and in her brain, combatting a climate of anxiety and instability with fiber. The human brain is wired for negativity and catastrophe, with our fight or flight responses being our first reaction to anxiety. Neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to repair neural pathways has informed Friedman’s work. If tomorrow is just a thought, then Friedman encourages viewers to ask themselves ‘what can go right?’ instead of considering what will go wrong. The work presented in tomorrow is just a thought explores the relationship between mind and body, considering the effects brain chemistry has on creating elevated emotional states and utilizing color, fiber, language, and abstract gestures to activate chemicals like Serotonin, Endorphins, Dopamine, and Oxytocin. Cultivating these elevated states and happy hormones is a political and personal weapon for Friedman that serves as barrier against indulging in despair. Though not representational or figurative, the work is imbued with an organic quality: orifices, uvulas, eyes, intestine-like cords, veins, and hair are primary in the work. Holes and cracks within the work allow light to penetrate each piece. Weaving has become an extension of Friedman’s practice of exploring methods of painting without using paint. In previous bodies of work the artist explored painting through the use of everyday material, and Friedman brings her experience in painting, kinetic sculpture, and installation to the loom. Her meticulous process begins by drawing a work on her iPad and selecting fibers before weaving. These “yarn paintings” undermine a traditional hierarchy of materials, incorporating objects like painted piping, hemp cords, and stained glass with naturally dyed wools and acrylic threads. The warp and weft of these threads carry equal importance, as the artist embeds stripes or plaid into each piece. By strategically placing fibers of varying thickness and texture, Friedman creates pieces that appear multi-layered and borrow from other artistic practices: black lines allude to the solder of stained glass while disparate patterns placed side by side recall quilting techniques. Language and color are employed in Friedman’s work to create somatic posters of urgency. Words like ‘heal’ ‘alive’ and ‘refresh’ can be found in these pieces, alongside a palate of acid yellows, dirty ochres, reds whites and blues, and hot pinks that envelop and camouflage their meaning, acting as a suggestion rather than a lecture. Friedman is drawn to abstraction because it “creates the most powerful picture of the unexplainable and unknowable.” It allows the artist to make sense of personal and world events, exploring places where the political and emotional bodies intersect. A response to anxiety, anger, and grief; each weaving is an agitated yet affirmative scream. Terri Friedman lives and works in El Cerrito, California. She is Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where she has taught both undergraduate and graduate students for the past two decades. Born in Colorado, Friedman received her BA with Honors from Brown University and MFA from Claremont Graduate School. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; CUE Art Foundation, New York City; CODA Museum, Netherlands; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the San Jose Museum of Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California. Friedman has received numerous awards including The San Francisco 2021 Artadia Award, Facebook Artist in Residence, CUE Art Foundation Grant, Santa Barbara Arts Fund Grant, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Grant, Albin Polesak Award. In 2022 the De Young Museum acquired her seminal work ‘ENOUGH’ (2021).

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce Frock-Conscious, Elaine Reichek’s 5th solo exhibition with the gallery. Frock-Conscious will be on view from June 10 through July 22, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 10 from 2:00–5:00 PM. Frock-Conscious explores the relationship between textiles and painting through nearly 50 works produced over the past 5 years. Although the exhibition is primarily grounded in Reichek’s signature medium of embroidery, it also expands spatially to restage the studio itself as a blended site of artistic production, domestic life, intergenerational conversation, and critical investigation. In the large gallery is a salon-style installation of 24 embroideries, featuring images of clothing or textiles that Reichek has appropriated from a wide assortment of paintings, drawings, and designs. Collectively these art-historical sources — ranging from Michelangelo to Kerry James Marshall — read like an associative mini-survey of the artistic pleasures and challenges in rendering costume, drapery, and pattern. Whether full-bodied or a tight crop, each image has been re-created entirely in thread, by either digital or hand-sewing techniques. Reichek thus engineers a cyclical translation of depicted fabric back into actual material, as well as a conceptual inversion of the distinctions between the fine arts and craft. Reichek’s investigation of the semiotic repertoire of fabric also examines its function as a second skin, whether through haptic textures or with an embroidered text that conjures the erotics of touch. Coding is another through-line, as she compares darning patterns to Sol LeWitt’s systems- work seriality. The largest works in the exhibition, JP Textile/Text 1 and 2, reimagine Jackson Pollock’s legacy as a collision of metaphors and materials. Each unfurls a considerable length (12 and 17 feet, respectively) of fabric commercially printed in 2 colorways with a pseudo-Pollock pattern — Spatter, by Kravet Inc. — over which Reichek has digitally sewn 25 citations selected from Pollock’s critical bibliography. Each citation is embroidered in a distinct typeface and appears randomly at least 3 times in each work, as Reichek cheekily literalizes the idioms “an embroidered reputation” and “art by the yard.” Rounding out this associative exploration of the repressed connections between Pollock and the decorative is a triptych of 3 silk charmeuse scarves that reproduce Cecil Beaton’s 1951 photoshoot, for Vogue, of models in couture gowns posing against Pollock’s drip paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery. The small gallery space stages a conversational installation devoted to Henri Matisse and the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. Although Matisse profoundly influenced the Bloomsbury artists, their entrepreneurial efforts actually anticipated his own forays into commercial decoration and textiles by nearly two decades. Along the right as one enters, 4 embroideries reflect on the Bloomsbury artists’ sustained engagement with fabrics and patterns, both in their paintings and through their short-lived but influential design business, Omega Workshops. Reichek also displays 2 dresses sewn from Omega fabrics (now marketed by The Charleston Trust) featuring painterly patterning by Bell and Grant. Both dresses are made in a modern high-waisted, corset-free style, for which Bell herself was widely known within her social milieu. To each is pinned an embroidered remembrance of Bell’s fashion sensibility from her daughter, Angelica, and her granddaughter Henrietta, respectively. In a similar spirit of cross-pollination, Un petit salon après Matisse is a staged mashup of current-day commercial product adapted from Matisse’s work, intermixed with vintage items that evoke his extensive and eclectic personal collection of textiles and furniture. A double-sided green-velvet folding screen, entitled Screen Time with Matisse, serves as a kind of Warburgian atlas of printed archival images, assorted fabric swatches, and miscellaneous merch. And in another related mode of deconstruction, Scattered “Sheaf” with Felt and Fabric reimagines Matisse’s 1953 ceramic tile mural The Sheaf as fabric cut-outs pinned around a tricolor, imitation-block-print floral pattern. As Reichek brings each new round of conceptual and material repartee back to her own artistic production, she reveals herself as both subject and object, maker and viewer, fan and critic, engaged in an ever-renewing reflective dialogue. Elaine Reichek (b. 1943) lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and a BFA from Yale University. She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, with solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; the Tel Aviv Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Jewish Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Dallas Museum of Art; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, among others. Reichek’s work was included in Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum in 2022; Venedigsche Sterne at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland, in 2022; Art_Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, in 2015; Art/Histories at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, in 2014; the 2012 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil; and the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “Black & White,” an exhibition of works by Beverly Semmes, Dinh Q. Lê, Jeanne Silverthorne, Nardeen Srouji, Rakuko Naito, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, Tadaaki Kuwayama, and Yoko Ono. On view from April 29th to June 1st, 2023. Works included in Black & White explore the possibilities created by strict aesthetic guidelines. Beverly Semmes’ seminal work ‘Buried Treasure’ (1994) will be presented in the first gallery space, while the second space contains a selection of ‘white’ works.

In the third of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the paintings of Chie Fueki and the paintings and drawings of Joshua Marsh. Chie Fueki If one of the ways in which we’ve exacerbated the environmental crisis has to do with assumed hierarchies in which animals, plants, and the objects of the earth are valued principally for how they serve human beings, the so-called apex species, then Chie Fueki’s art is tonic— and timely. The filmmaker Agnès Varda once noted that “If we opened people up, we would find landscapes.” Fueki’s paintings, in which the outlines of human figures can contain green leaves or midnight blues, is a case in point. Made during the pandemic in the especially lambent light of dawn or gloaming, Fueki’s new body of work radiates emotional tones that twine longing and pathos. Human figures, architectural graphics, symbols, and pattern fields coexist as a pluralistic, integrated painted organism. Pervading her figurations are radiant lines of energy, colorful swaths of abstract ornamentation, and variant but simultaneous perspectives. None is more central or more important than the others. There is even a democracy of material and method in Fueki’s approach to art making. What we call her painting is really a collaborative endeavor between wood panels, mulberry paper, glue, rubbings, drawing, collage, brushwork, pour, and acrylic paint. The realms we often assign to “inside”— our emotions, for instance, or our living room— and “outside”— the landscape, other people— have no clear boundaries in Chie’s work; they are one and the same. In most of the paintings in this show, inside— Fueki’s Hudson Valley apartment with its many curiosities— and outside— Mt. Beacon in the near distance—present themselves in an alliance with decorative motifs. The result is a radical, non-logocentric realism, where objects, figures, world, imagination, ornament, and lines of energy harmonize in a multi-perspectival mutuality we might recognize as actual experience. Joshua Marsh A body of Joshua Marsh’s small— 5” X 4”—graphite drawings share their image repertoire with two sets of paintings roughly five times the size of the drawings. In both, we see still life arrangements of apples, spools of thread, flasks, skulls, drawers, pipes, a bee, occasional scrawled words, and curious image rhymes that link, for instance, the springy wire doodle in one image with the curlicue hairs of a satyr’s soul-patch in another. There are also more ambiguous objects and shadows or ghosts of objects, and nascent faces— and we’re given (by their titles) to connect them to the Faust legend, that drama of lust for knowledge and pleasure, and its tragic repercussions. Often, it seems as though an object is appearing playfully next to the idea it generates. The congeries of images unsettle us; we don’t know how to categorize their roles in this context of conflicted relations. Rather than sating our desire for immediate satisfaction, Marsh’s work insistently introduces strategies of incongruity, perspectival and graphemic play, humor, and restraint that end up intensifying the fulfillment of our looking. The acrylic paintings generally hew to a color palette of brown, green, grey and blue, with the blues sometimes enacting contradictory perspectives, morphing between sky-like space and the clearer shape of an object. The ambiguities invite our extended attention as our eyes restlessly negotiate the intervallic leaps between conventional (skulls), personal (pipes), and inscrutable (cubes) object-symbols. What invests those symbols with significance is repetition and secrecy. In Marsh’s visual panoramas, our encounters with various symbols offer us the peculiar sense of wild disjunction tempered by meticulous detail. They are never a means for arriving at some predetermined, politically expedient, or instrumental supposition. Instead, we find that we keep coming across human absence and human trace: what we find in the paintings are hauntings. We see the trace of the human, for instance, in the assemblages of flasks, vapors, and scale levers that are missing their Faustian alchemist. If Faust used alchemy to arrive at answers, Marsh is drawn to alchemy because he’s fascinated by questions, by the processes of transformation. What do we witness in his still lifes but mutability, the apples rotting, the blocks melting into biomorphic shapes. Marsh’s still lifes aren’t still at all. While we watch, they are turning into landscapes. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Chie Fueki (b. 1973) lives and works in Beacon, NY. Fueki was born in Yokohama, Japan, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. She earned her MFA at Yale University and her BFA at The Ringling College of Art and Design. She is an inaugural recipient of the 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2022), and the Purchase Prize (2021, 2004), and Rosenthal Family Foundation Award (2004) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo exhibitions include the Orlando Museum of Art, FL (2014). She has public artwork at PS 92Q, Queens NY, and HHS Lerner Children Pavilion, New York, NY. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Orlando Museum of Art, FL; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; the Hirshhorn Museum, D.C.; and the Pizzuti Collection at Columbus Museum of Art, OH. Joshua Marsh was born in Pennsylvania in 1973, receiving an MFA from Yale University in 1997 and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995. His paintings and drawings have been included within exhibitions at Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, and the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT. In 2015 his paintings were included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. His paintings and drawings have been reviewed in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America among others. His work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA, Woodmere Art Museum, PA, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. As a Couple: Chie Fueki and Joshua Marsh met in graduate school while studying painting at Yale University in 1996. They have lived and worked together in Brooklyn, NY, next to a wooded preserve in West Chester, PA, and currently in the Hudson Valley town of Beacon, NY. Chie was Born in Yokohama, Japan, and moved at the age of three to Sao Paulo, Brazil where she lived until the age of 19. Fascinated by the appearance of the city from her family’s apartment, Chie would often stand by the window entranced by the patterns, structures, lights, fog and traffic movements of the city. Joshua grew up in Pennsylvania, where he often dwelt around streams, observing the flows, reflections, and intersecting processes that have remained inquiries within his work. Maintaining neighboring studios in all the places they have lived and worked, Chie and Joshua have continuously engaged in close artistic conversation, intertwining interests while exploring their distinct practices. Written by Forrest Gander

In the second of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the artwork of Ashwini Bhat and the poetry of Forrest Gander. Bhat and Gander’s work will be on view until February 25th, 2023, with an opening reception on January 14th from 2pm to 5pm. Ashwini Bhat grew up in rural, South India where she trained in a 2000-year-old dance form, Bharatanatyam, before coming to tour internationally with a contemporary Indian dance company. Her tumultuous, color-dappled ceramic sculptures relate the fire-and-earthquake-altered landscape of her adopted home, California, to female nature spirits of India. Bhat says she learned from dance how to keep her energy rippling and visible, even when her body is still, and only when her sculptures do the same does she think of them as finished. The large sculptures, which dominate the first room at Shoshana Wayne, appear to have been heaved upward from the earth, twisting, turbulent, merging sensual corporeality with tectonic drama. It’s as though the human body and the geologically active California landscape have become one thing. The smaller works in the second room bring into play thread— used in India to assign sacrality to objects— and Calla Lilies, symbols of regeneration whose orange-yellow spadices contain both male and female flowers in a spiral pattern. Bhat’s labor-intensive process involves the manipulation of soft clay slabs directly over her own body in an act of transformation and translation. She says the work in this show “responds to the phenomenon of the rift, the rupture, and the renewal of nature, body, clay, and self.” Her practice, and its attentive focus on the mutuality between human and non-human, comes to serve as a radical revision of our exploitative and transactional relation to a world of complex interrelationships. Forrest Gander’s poems appear in both rooms of the show, in the first as a kind of word-detritus strewn along the central rift of a fault zone created by the sculptural components of Bhat’s wall installation, and then— in the second room— as vinyl text on the walls and in an invocational lenticular print. Gander, who has a degree in geology and a long practice as an ecological writer, traveled with Ashwini Bhat exploring many sections of the 800-mile-long San Andreas Fault. Each short poem, with its left margins stepped to enact the horizontal movement of a strike-slip fault, hovers behind a sculpture “perhaps like,” he says, “the low rumbling vibration that accompanies an earthquake.” Both Bhat and Gander are interdisciplinary collaborators whose lives are intertwined by their mutual interest in ecology and place, emphasizing species interconnectedness. They live in the foothills of the Sonoma Mountains in northern California. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Ashwini Bhat grew up in Southern India, studied literature and classical Indian dance, and later traveled the world as part of the radical modernist Padmini Chettur dance company. After sustaining injuries, she began working with clay and apprenticed with the architect and ceramicist Ray Meeker in Pondicherry. Bhat works in sculpture, ceramics, installation, video, and performance to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. She’s the recipient of fellowships from the Howard, the Pond Farm Julia Terr, and the McKnight Foundations. Her work has been exhibited nationally & internationally and can be found in collections at the Newport Art Museum, USA; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan; FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum, China; the Watson Institute at Brown University, USA; New Bedford Historical Society, USA; Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre, Latvia; and in many private collections. Forrest Gander, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Twice Alive; Be With; and The Trace, a novel hailed as one of fifteen recent books that have “revived America’s Quintessential Genre, The Western.” Among Gander’s many translations are It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Best Translated Book Award), and Then Come Back: the Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda. Gander frequently collaborates with artists, including Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Ann Hamilton, Eiko & Koma, Kay Rosen, and Jack Shear. He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations. Written by Forrest Gander

In the first of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the paper constructions of Rakuko Naito and the paintings of Tadaaki Kuwayama. Naito and Kuwayama’s work will be on view until December 22nd, 2022, with an opening reception on October 29th from 2 to 5pm. The auras radiated by Tadaaki Kuwayama’s smooth-surfaced paintings transform rooms and routine experience. They meet the eye with peaceable intensity. They are, perhaps, as much objects as gestures— if there were gestures equivalent to someone extending their mind like a hand. If you look at Kuwayama’s evenly-hued paintings for thirty seconds and think you’ve seen them, let yourself look longer. Look for three minutes and the color begins to adjust— like a body shifting its weight. If you’re standing directly before the painting and you take a step to the left or right, the aluminum strips between panels wink at you. Then lighter swaths of color suggest themselves in what you took, at first glance, to be sustained monochrome; other panels seem to darken ever so slightly. Or is this a trick of the mind or the light as your eyes keep pulling toward the center of the four-panel square, toward the hub, the cynosure? The gravity is strongest there. You feel its pull, its invitation. The subtlety of the painting draws you as a chimney is said to draw, at once into its color field and into yourself. In another part of the gallery, we find Rakuko Naito’s boxed paper assemblages. One looks like the cross- cut of a hive or a bed of ooliths. Another like white cocktail umbrellas pressed flat. One like a constellation of baby octopus suckers. Another looks like a handmade Japanese go game board. Still another like the silence of a Phillip Glass composition playing in your head. Like and like and like. And yet, Naito’s art is gloriously independent of analogy. There is no nature, no narrative, no figure, no line, no colors, no titles. Her art doesn’t provoke likeness so much as it enacts its own distinct, insistent mode of intoxication. A signal blend of imagination and labor. Naito’s lushly exacting, iterative work is a paean to the hand and eye, and to the joy of repetition. Finger-torn and delicately arranged, her pieces of mulberry-bark paper take on the gorgeous rigor of the Fibonacci number sequence. Pressing outward, toward the edges of the white frames that contain them, Naito’s constructions give no quarter. Because there is no foreground or background, every element is equally essential. Her method, then, involves the highest degree of risk per unit of space. Every aspect is alert, on point. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Together, Rakuko Naito and Tadaaki Kuwayama immigrated from Japan to the United States in the late 1950’s and quickly found their place in New York City’s artistic avant-garde. Naito, the daughter of a doctor and amateur architect, has long worked abstractly using mulberry bark paper colored with plant pigmentation. Kuwayama’s large metallic color paintings, critically celebrated since his first New York shows in the 1960’s, rigorously upend conventional painting techniques and ambitions as they instigate an impervious aesthetic concentration. Naito and Kuwayama live and work in New York City. Naito received her BFA from Tokyo National University of Art in Tokyo, Japan in 1958. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Tokyo International Biennale; Karuizawa New Art Museum, Karuizawa, Japan; and Museo D’arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy. Naito’s work can be found in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and The Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Kuwayama received his BFA in painting from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo, Japan in 1956. He has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including The Museum Modern Art, Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and Rupertinum Museum, Salzburg, Austria.Kuwayama’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY, USA; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN. Written by Forrest Gander

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present ‘Inheritance’ by Anina Major. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. ‘Inheritance’ will be on view from September 17th through October 22nd, 2022, with an opening reception on September 17th from 2-5 pm. The decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which Major was born and raised (The Bahamas) motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place. In search of a place to articulate the essence of her practice, the artist returns to the inspirational source of her work—the straw market, an actual place that possesses metaphorical meanings, to further explore her own migration and the emotional complexities of transactional relationships between people and places. At its juncture a sense of belonging is generated from a combination of characteristics, core values and deep-rooted histories that are often undervalued in the context of tourism. In the desire to fabricate her own terms of cultural integrity and its defining influence, viewers experience sculptural works that act as present-day manifestations of the traditional weaving technique known as plait, taught to Major by her grandmother. Beach balls and straw bags collide into forms that through the material transformation of clay, exemplify the power of legacy building through making. And vintage postcards provide composition for the performative video work, Heavy is the Head as an alternate narrative to the utopian landscapes promoted. As a counteraction to culture erasure, the work is a continued celebration and reclamation of the ideas behind ‘women’s work’, specifically regarding expressions of identity and imagination. Layering references to post-colonial themes, cultural commodification, feminism and migrational experiences, the abstract nature of the work has the capacity to exist in both traditional and contemporary realms. Anina Major was born in Nassau, Bahamas. She lives and works in New York. Major received an MFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI, and a BS in graphic design from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; New Museum, New York, NY; National Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; and DeCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Major’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present the LIFE II by Jinyoung Yu. This is the Korean artist’s first solo show with the gallery. the LIFE II will be on view from August 6th through September 10th, 2022, with an opening reception on August 6th from 2-5 pm. Working with a cast of semi-transparent sculpted characters, Jinyoung Yu explores the disparity between the outer and inner self. Yu’s work acknowledges the anxiety of social situations and exposes implicit acts of cover-up one engages in when adhering to social conventions. This critique of social modes is developed using two opposing materials: vibrantly painted plaster and transparent PVC. The weight of the hardened façade of these figures is carried by their thin bodies, and some even appear to carry the weight of others. As the artist captures the many faces we have created for ourselves, she implores us to examine who we truly are. Behind the flamboyant exterior, outside of ever-present hierarchies and oppressive social structures, we may be left with a hollow shell conditioned to be invisible. Jinyoung has dealt with immense social anxiety and avoided being the center of attention from a young age. Though she as an artist utilizes extroverted expression to convey narratives, her introverted nature manifests in the transparent bodies of her sculptures. The subtle, nearly impassive expressions on the masks relate to the artist’s childhood, where she had to quickly notice subtle differences in the facial expressions of her parents to avoid being berated. The artist’s exploration of family dynamics and ego ultimately led her to delve into the insecurities and inequalities prevalent throughout society. She shifts her focus from the individual, to society, to the world, and reflects on our reality where no one can escape the weight of ‘life’. Jinyoung Yu exposes the dualities that exist within us all, urging viewers to look inward for a solution to break this cycle. Jinyoung Yu was born in Seoul, South Korea, where she lives and works. Yu received an MFA and BFA in sculpture from Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Vestfossen Museum, Norway; the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; the Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT; Gyeongnam art museum, Gyeongnam, South Korea; and Woljeon Museum, Icheon, South Korea. the LIFE II is in collaboration with CHOI&CHOI Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; and Cologne, Germany.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Inquiries in Abstraction featuring Philip Argent, James Richards, and Brad Spence. The exhibition brings together the work of three California-based painters who use abstraction to investigate materiality, the human condition, and the digital world. Each artist has presented two paintings created in the past year, which reflect the turbulence and uncertainty of the present moment. Inquiries in Abstraction will be on view from August 6th through September 10th, 2022, with an opening reception on August 6th from 2-5pm. Philip Argent’s paintings present an interpretation of the swift flow of experiential and technological influences. They also offer a counter to that rapidity; their meticulous surfaces and processes invite a slow read. Paint is applied using a variety of methods (masking, printing, atmospheric and linear) and allows for an intuitive selection of forms that often mutate, reappear, and transform as a series develops. The use of vivid color relationships stem from observations of natural phenomena, personal memory, and the influence of commercial or screen-based sources. Color plays an intrinsic role both as an indicator of depth and shape and as a referent for a non-objective internal logic. Brad Spence’s paintings are improvised abstract spaces for fantasy projection. Viewers’ bodies are mobilized in search of a distance where the scenes come into focus. However, clarity is just out-of-reach as what resembles human forms dissolves into fingered smudges at close inspection. The mingled clusters of marks suggest social events, the nature of which is elusive and changing. They shift between celebrations, rites of passage and rituals of the carnal and carnivalesque. The paintings are intended to provoke viewers’ subconscious yearnings as expressed in social ceremonies and unsober excess. They are meant to activate both memories and their erasure. James Richards’ two paintings initiate a new body of work inspired by the building technique of wattle and daub. Instead of mud on top of woven branches, paper-mache is applied to the expanded weave of the canvas. The paper-mache is then treated to look like unfired clay. An open structure of various materials including repurposed fabric, painted areas that mimic pen and ink drawings, and an ample amount of negative space contribute to an alchemy of surface and support. Philip Argent received an MFA from UNLV and a BA with honors from Cheltenham School of Art. Argent lives and works in Santa Barbara and teaches in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. James Richards holds an MFA from Art Center of College and Design, Pasadena, CA and a BFA from California State University, Fullerton, CA. Richards lives and works in Los Angeles. Brad Spence holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Spence lives and works in Los Angeles.

Continuing on the concept of “Stakeholders”- a solo exhibition representing Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019- Tse wants to bring to attention the biggest stake we all hold as stakeholders is anthropogenic climate change. Her current work contemplates all form of sustainability: our environment, our energy use, our mental health and our economic disparity. Tse has relocated to Lompoc – “stagnant waters, or lagoon” in Purisemeño language by the Chumash people - in search of a model for a sustainable art practice. Non-human stakeholders of Lompoc- animals, minerals, flower seeds, rocket- enter into her studio. Incorporating shed snake skin, diatomaceous earth, tar and charred wood from wild fire into her sculptures, Tse makes palpable the fragility of our life-world. Hong Kong–born, California– based artist Shirley Tse works in the media of sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She at once deconstructs the world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs models in which differences might come together. To visualize heterogeneity, Tse conflates different scales, fuses the organic with the industrial, moves between the literal and the metaphorical, merges narratives, and collapses the subject and object relationship. Tse received a Master of Fine Arts degree from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including: M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong (2020); the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004/2017); Osage, Hong Kong (2010/2011); K11, Hong Kong (2009); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2009); the Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk (2006); the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2005); Para Site, Hong Kong (2000/2005); the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2003); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002); the Bienal Ceará América, Fortaleza (2002); the Biennale of Sydney (2002); Capp Street Project, San Francisco (2002); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2002); MoMA PS1, New York (2002); the New Museum, New York (2002); Palazzo dell’Arengo, Rimini (2002); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001); TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam (2001); and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2000). Her work is held in the permanent collections of M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, among others. Tse represented Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Tse received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and has been on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Living in the End Times by Thordis Adalsteinsdottir. This is the Icelandic artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Living in the End Times will be on view from June 18th through July 30th, 2022, with an opening reception on June 18th from 2-5 pm. Taking inspiration from her personal surroundings and current events, Adalsteinsdottir’s surrealist paintings let go of any notion of sense or reason. Living in the End Times, whose title is inspired by its biblical theme and a Slavoj Žižek book of the same name, is comprised of paintings created between 2020 and 2022. Works included in Living in the End Times display scenes from everyday life: a man uses his phone in bed, a boy smokes a pipe, two figures play badminton; but Adalsteinsdottir makes sure these events are anything but ordinary. Animals often cohabitate with humans, vacuuming our floors and wearing our clothes, often appearing so large that seem like our equals. Figures are set against vivid colors and beautiful patterns, making these routine events into dreamlike compositions. A lack of separation between an inner world and our environment, and portraying the inappropriate desire to define reality, is at the heart of Adalsteinsdottir’s paintings, and much of the work deals with spectatorship. Humans and animals peak into the windows of these interior scenes, becoming part of the composition as they watch from the background. The inclusion of security cameras and cellphones reinforces this ill-defined boundary between public and private life, hinting that these moments are much less intimate than they appear. To summarize the experiences and feelings that inspired the works in Living in the End Times, the artist has prepared a statement for the show’s press release: I am with everyone at once and never with anyone. Kissy-wink-face, heart emoji, thumb up my butt. I live in someone’s diary, it’s written in 1898. The world will never be the same. A large window is open and someone plays an instrument on the cobblestoned street. I check my phone, longing for nighttime and longing for sleep. Luckily the days rush past at lightning speed. Someone goes out running, his woolen socks make a thump thumping sound on the cobblestones. He is building up strength and stamina, it is important so that he can run with other people who have built up strength and stamina. This seems to be a great year, a good diary; the smog is thick, the injustice is endless. I keep planting strawberries and the cats keep pooping on them. Thump- thump-thump- thump- This man is very good at running and knowing what is important. Finally, an angry pigeon closes the window from the outside, and I cannot hear the musical instrument anymore. I turn up the news and realize that the world will never be the same. Someone looked up and everyone was dead. In a square meant for young people drinking and old people kissing, I kiss a running man on the lips and realize that the world will never be the same. Thordis Adalsteinsdottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland and splits her time between Reykjavik and Rennes, France. She received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY after graduating from the Icelandic Academy of Arts and the Universidad de Barcelona, in Spain. Adalsteinsdottir has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally with exhibitions at The Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik Iceland, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, LA, Myokos Biennale, Greece, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Luis, MO, Chiang Mai Art Center, Thailand, and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Revival by Max Colby. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Revival will be on view from April 30th through June 11th, 2022, with an opening reception on April 30th from 2-5pm. Revival highlights two mature bodies of work by the artist. Colby’s most ambitious and prominent work to date, They Consume Each Other - an installation comprised of 42 meticulously crafted sculptures atop custom glass plinths - sits majestically in the main gallery. In the second gallery, new work from 2022 titled Shrouds connects Colby’s interest in material relation to the body in disquieting ways. The title, Revival, references Colby’s interest in mundane objects, aesthetics, and excessive consumption in contemporary culture’s relationship to normative, violent systems. They Consume Each Other explores the body and its relation to material through references to ceremony and ritual, evoking a monumental altar. Her subversive and campy usage of mundane material seduces the viewer into complex dialogues on the role of aesthetics in binary, cultural constructions of gender, class, and taste in this playful, yet unsettling installation. With a focus on material, Colby’s approach is research-oriented, utilizing Western and American textiles, crafts, and everyday objects. The application is tender and careful, lush and highly embellished, opening a lens to reframe oppressive structures embedded in these materials from a trans and non-binary perspective. Shrouds connects primary conceptual threads in Colby’s practice to the body through familiar objects - quilts. These works begin with reclaimed ‘Crazy’ quilts from 1900- 1950. The movements style uses a hodge-podge of fabrics lacking repetition and highly embellished embroidery, leading to an aesthetic of visually and culturally conflicting fabrics spliced together piecemeal. Colby’s quilts provide a remarkable overabundance of reclaimed materials sewn and embroidered on top. From party supplies to complex hand embroidery, connections drawn in Shrouds focus on reimagining relationships to popular culture and consumption through common associations with quilts of comfort, embrace, and home. Some ominous in scale, others small, the title Shrouds reflects the works anthropomorphic and haunting presence. Colby has been exhibited internationally including at Wave Hill, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling and Museum Rijswijk, among others. She has completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Wassaic Project, MASS MoCA and a Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellowship. In 2022, Colby exhibited a campus-wide public commission for Art in Focus at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Art Production Fund. Colby (born 1990, USA) lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2012.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Scarce Material by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the Los Angeles based artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from March 12 through April 16, 2022, with an opening reception on March 12 from 2-5pm. For this exhibition, the artist looks back to the earliest iterations of the cinematic form, during the Silent Film era. Using black and white 35 mm film, video, silver gelatin photography, and fabric, Gschwandtner offers an alternative to the male-dominated history of film, and a literal mending and repairing of film history. “Scarce Material” refers both to a quilting term for anything that can be stitched together into a quilt, and to the archived early cinema made by pioneering women filmmakers that is in short supply. The artist worked with local and international film archives over three years to source digital copies of some of the earliest films made by women cinema pioneers, whose work from the late 1800s - early 1900s is woefully under-recognized. She prints these movies onto black and white 35 mm film stock, and then cuts and sews the film into configurations based on quilt motifs. She intermingles footage to create a dialogue between the images inside the frames and the overall patterns of the quilt designs. The artist’s sewing of film is a three-dimensional form of cinematic editing and a reconfiguration of the notion of "filmic suture" (the use of editing to draw audiences into a story). It is also a way to center marginalized material histories of cinema, in which women with sewing skills translated their handcraft to film editing, and certain early film technology was based on the mechanical advancements of the sewing machine. Many movies made by pioneering female filmmakers were never archived, and have been lost to history. To honor these works, the artist hand-embroiders filmmaker’s names and hand-writes the titles of their films and the dates the films were made onto blank film. The time she invested in handwork gives permanence and gravity to lost narratives by directors like Fatma Begum, India’s first woman director, who pioneered the fantasy genre in 1926, and Mimí Derba, a pioneering actress, writer and director from Mexico. Gschwandtner’s silver gelatin photos and video evoke cinema’s earliest origins in stop motion photography through a translation of moving images into patterns of women’s self-portraiture. Gschwandtner has exhibited internationally at museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among many others. Her 3 channel video “Screen Credit,” commissioned by LACMA, is currently on view at the museum’s Stark Bar. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public and private collections worldwide. Her ‘zine KnitKnit is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University. She received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Bard College. The artist wishes to thank: EYE Filmmuseum, the Netherlands; Gaumont-Pathé Archives; British Film Archives; Kino Lorber; Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Film Archive; Women Film Pioneers Project; Gregory Yee Mark; Suzan Mischer; Aimee Mann, and Maia Julis.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at our new location on West Adams, Where Do We Go From Here an exhibition of new works by Tel Aviv-based artist Orly Maiberg. The exhibition opens January 29th, 2022 and runs through March 5th, 2022. Where Do We Go From Here is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in the United States. At first glance, Orly Maiberg’s works seem like abstract paint spaces, resembling satellite images. Raw matter touched by delicate gestures of paint. A closer look suggests a topographic map, patches that form landscapes, mountaintops, deserts and seas. Maiberg’s work begins in dipping the naked canvas in a tub of ink, allowing the appearance of initial contours of fluid, topographical marks. Then the artist collages pieces of canvas, covering parts of the painting and creating frayed geological layers of states and textures. From that point onwards, her treatment of the canvas resembles a musical arc: actions lead to actions or a pause – an empty space within the painting. Any suspension demands another action and thus, repetitively, the painting is being created, variation upon variation. The movement in the studio evolves intuitively, with moments of alertness that allow the mind to capture the story that emerges from the painting and illuminate it. Slowly, the arbitrary makes room for the rational, and the unconscious - for the conscious. Premeditation and randomness are being merged into a complex artistic progression, combining the pre-structured outline with that which appears out of the blue. This repetitive process is evident in all Maiberg’s works. Wandering among them enables the viewer to weave fragments into an incomplete body, hallmarked by tear, disruption, scars and fragmentation, implying the complexity of our life’s reality. An event, a narrative-led occurrence begins to emerge from the painted scene. The eye wanders upon the canvas and what seems to be an overview of the abstract, the elusive and infinite, focuses at once when a fragile figure appears and forces a scale, sharpens the perspective, permitting the gaze to hang on to it for a short while and linger. Emerging like that, the figures define the painted space, which is bound by somewhat vague rules. The human presence disciplines the painted reality. The works in the current exhibition were all created during the latest period of lockdowns, isolations and restrictions. As a way of challenging our restraining reality, the processes in the studio sought a release, spreading while the correlation between their fragmented forms and their inner chaos grew, gradually. In Sitting on a Branch the canvas’ boundaries are broken; the painting splits and branches out, as if it could go on growing. Maiberg draws her themes from within the world’s onwards movement and lets them mirror for us, make us confront their – our – loneliness. They require us to pour our own notions onto the canvas, in order to stitch it together, raise questions and reassess, where do we go from here? Orly Maiberg received her B.F.A. at the New York School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited her work extensively in Israel and internationally, and can be found in museum collections including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Maiberg lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present “Uncommon Ground,” an online-exclusive exhibition of works on paper available online from September 21 to November 30, 2021. The exhibition brings together the work of 17 artists, most if not all of whom are better known for their work in other art forms, such as painting or sculpture, but also actively made or make drawings or works on paper. Each of the artists approach the medium of drawing in different ways, experimenting in media, techniques and materials to explore concerns, themes and ideas which range from identity, race and the body to social, economic, gender, and political issues. For each of these artists drawing is a language in which to speak, to speak out, speak up. The works in the exhibition are drawn mostly from gallery artists, but also several others who have made outstanding contributions to the field of drawing over the years. The artists include: Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Jim Shaw, Yoko Ono, Russell Crotty, linn meyers, Shiva Ahmadi, Nicole Eisenman, Joshua Marsh, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Keinholz, Tom Burckhardt, Nancy Baker Cahill, Harry Roseman, Max Colby and Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Yuken Teruya. The works on view speak for themselves, as each was made in a different time and place with different motivations in mind. Some are figurative, some partly abstract employing marks, forms, colors and patterns, or even whimsical, but all share a love of the hand-made, of visual beauty and sensuality even if each of the 17 artists conceptualize these concepts in wildly different ways. Within this group, however, there is a collective interest in the unconscious mind and inner desires, a recognition that the power of an artwork is to be felt, deep onside, as well as seen.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce “Above & Below,” an exhibition of work by 12 artists working with fabric, cloth, beads and woven materials. The exhibition opens to visitors June 15th and runs through August 28th, 2021. The exhibition title refers to the process of weaving—threading above and below lines of thread to create a fabric. Though the use of weaving and woven materials is what unites each of these artists, they employ a diverse range of artistic processes and practices from weaving, quilting, sewing, needlepoint and felting to assemblage and threading. Image: Installtion view