June Editor’s Picks

As we break from Snap Reviews for the summer,
enjoy monthly curated picks from our editors across exhibitions,
books, TV shows, and albums.

Exhibitions

Em Kettner at François Ghebaly Gallery

Em Kettner, Slow Poke (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Many of the petite sculptures in Em Kettner’s Slow Poke (installed across a thigh-high pedestal) take up the form of a bed—a porcelain bed frame becomes an ad-hoc loom wherein a small tapestry is woven; a blanket that connects errant porcelain heads, limbs, and dicks that sprout from its patterned fibers. In some, the bedposts themselves morph into feet or hands, fusing with the small heads that lay within to become skeletally conjoined. Some figures lie alone in their beds, while in others couples engage in steamy trysts—hands groping, mouths interlocked. We spend at least a third of our lives in bed; it is where we retreat for the utmost privacy and comfort, whether in the throes of intimacy, pain, or illness.

In addition to the bedded people, cross the low pedestal, several snaking figures twist and crawl. The Blue Mother (2021), a worming form that pretzels itself into a loop, sprouts a singular set of legs and breasts, but inexplicably has two heads. It’s as if through the mother’s care and support for her child, the two have become inexorably linked into one ambling form.

For the artist, who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the private locale of the bed (and its attendant themes of intimacy, care, and illness), is pulled into the public square, and life’s banalities, ecstasies, and sufferings are aired out for viewing. In many ways, Slow Poke feels like an ode to loved ones—the partners, caretakers, and lovers that we become physically and emotionally intertwined with. Like two sets of limbs joining to become a singular unit, supporting one another through life’s ramblings.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Sarah Ann Weber at Anat Ebgi

Sarah Ann Weber, Strong Blossoming Thing Forever (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi. Photo: Matthew Kroening.

Sarah Ann Weber does not watch cartoons, a parallel I float during a walk-through of her handsome current exhibition at Anat Ebgi, Strong Blossoming Thing Forever. The exhibition title sounds like a Boredoms album, and Weber indulges in a similar vein of focused, maximal surreality throughout. If not cartoons, Weber’s varying, vibrant Prismacolor forms and tones seem at least to have their roots in the rich values of an analog television image, one playing nature docs and gardening shows on a loop.

The artist’s works teeter away from a direct reading of the landscapes into which they at first seem to organize. Various dimensions of the natural overlap: ragged, alien blooms of mold, thorny, or poisonous ensnaring vines, blooming cascades of florals. “Florals? For spring?” an unhurried Meryl Streep utters contemptuously in The Devil Wears Prada (2006)—but Weber goes so hard on florals that they begin to mutate into something else, and something wonderfully not quite right. The abundance and swarming repetition of her imagery toggles disquietingly between the hum and chirp of birds and insects and the sickening drone of approaching cicadas. The shifting forms in her works are never quite identifiable, and seem more like plants colorfully misremembered.

Return no More (all works 2021) features nude figures that flesh out the Edenic landscape. The bell-like flowers of There is no joy but calm loom rather than bloom, while pinky, starfish-like forms hover, slouch, and drape over a central figure who is either ensnared or becoming. Strong Blossoming Thing Forever is above all Romantic, positing nature—even nature wholly imagined—as a beguiling terror.

–Aaron Horst

Star Montana at Shulamit Nazarian

Star Montana, By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.

In Star Montana’s just-closed show, the artist contended with how to photograph that which cannot be seen—the past, the distant, the invisible and interior. A series of images (both those made by Montana and reprints, enlarged from her family archive) were arranged not by time but by place, beginning in the desert of El Paso and moving to the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights where she was born and raised. Throughout, Montana seems to make a case for archival images as necessary to a rigorous depiction of a place—in this case especially so, as she contends with violent familial loss and the larger impact of the Latinx diaspora. Taken by her late mother and grandmother, the pictures are relics of the people and places that cannot be returned to. Montana exclaims: they were here.

Still, Montana’s photographs are undoubtedly the most successful and poignant images in the show—particularly a portrait of her brother (Frankie, 2015) and an almost-magic-hour still life entitled Paula’s Desk (2014), which feels, somehow, like it reveals much more of Montana’s family than the appropriated private snapshots and photobooth strips. 

Though the exhibition was visually coherent, the archival images at times feel supplemental—like metadata or research—if only for the particular strength of vision of Montana’s own photographs. Two tiny, contextless family photos (the only original, non-reproduced archival images on view and the only works not for sale) that bookended the exhibition were an exception, however. Both offered to and withheld from the viewer, the completely unaltered, fragile originals were shared only temporarily in the gallery setting—belonging, ultimately, only to Montana and to no one, like all images, in the end.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Reading 

Currently engulfed in The Soul of an Octopus, which I’ve been listening to while I weave, and slowly making my way through Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a prompt that is proving difficult amidst an already-busy summer.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Chaos by James Gleick and On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, two beautifully written, often esoteric, and probably very outdated books about science I’ve had carefully displayed on my shelf since graduate school.

–Aaron Horst

I have a bad habit of picking up and putting down books, both reading and not-reading multiple at a time. I’ve finally finished Nathan Jurgenson’s The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, after toting it around for a year (it would otherwise be a quick read). An interesting look into the ever-changing ways that we communicate via images, it’s an inquisitive book that avoids the usual gloom and doom tropes about technology and photo-making as distractions from our real lives, instead considering our digital interactions as embodied and meaningful.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Watching 

My husband and I find televised middle ground in crafty reality shows, Marvel, and nature documentaries. At the moment, we’re immersed in Loki, The Great Pottery Throw Down, and James Cameron’s Secrets of the Whales, oscillating between the three.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Mystify, a documentary about Michael Hutchence, told entirely through archival footage and voiceover; The Handmaid’s Tale, about which I have yet to find another person in my life to commiserate; Feel Good; and, imminently, The Day After, a 1983 made-for-television movie about nuclear war. Help!

–Aaron Horst

Last week I discovered that if I set my VPN location to Canada, I can happily access the defunct Real Housewives of Miami franchise; this is less a recommendation than an admission.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Listening

I’m editing our next issue of Carla, which pulls me towards lyricless jazz or classical. I just discovered Utopia by Danish duo Bremer/McCoy, which one reviewer said could “be the score to an imaginary Peanuts special, in which Charlie Brown and his pals exchange occasional contemplative remarks, but don’t dance much.” Apparently, downtrodden cartoon soundtracks make for decent art criticism. Also Mia Doi Todd’s “Take Me to the Mountain” makes a dreamy soundtrack for local hikes.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

NTS Radio mixes, Unrest’s Imperial f.f.r.r., Charlotte Bumgarner’s “Haunted House,” fireworks and helicopters at night.

–Aaron Horst

See previous. Also, Outkast’s “Happy Valentine’s Day,” which goes to so many places, all of them danceable, and is an excellent addition to my home-yoga playlist.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Aaron Horst is a writer and architect based in Los Angeles. He has written for Carla, Art Review, and Flash Art.

More by Aaron Horst

Erin F. O’Leary is a writer, editor, and photographer from the Midwest and raised in Maine. A graduate of Bard College, she has lived in Los Angeles since 2018, where she writes about photography and image culture. Her work has appeared in Carla and Photograph, among other publications.

More by Erin F. O'Leary

Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder of Carla. She is an arts correspondent for KCRW. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), OCHI (Los Angeles), and City Limits (Oakland).

More by Lindsay Preston Zappas