July 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

Rosha Yaghmai at Kayne Griffin
July 10–August 28, 2021

Rosha Yaghmai, Afterimages (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles. Photo: Flying Studio.

Afterimages—those neon shapes that occur in our field of vision after staring at an image or object—are like a strange kind of haunting. A scene becomes warped, faint, and technicolor, like memories that fade over time even as the details of their retelling become exaggerated. Rosha Yaghmai’s new works at Kayne Griffin elicit this phenomenon in both form and title through dreamy, abstract fields of color that bleed and blur, disallowing any sharp image to emerge. The minimal aesthetic of the works—neatly framed paintings on tautly stretched organza—belies the optical thrill of walking around them. The clean compositions come alive as light hits the weave on the paper-thin fabric, op-art distortions emerging like apparitions.

Though Yaghmai’s source imagery is personal, sourced from the Persian miniatures in her childhood home, in these works she zooms in tightly on details of the painted landscapes, omitting distinguishable figures. Through this manipulation, Yaghmai untethers us from her reference point, inviting a more psychedelic and perceptual experience. Some of the works maintain a hazy reference to their scenic origins, like Afterimage, Night Vision (all works 2021), an oceanic horizon line that could be a Malibu sun sliding into the Pacific. Others, like Afterimage, Drifters, feel more microscopic, like rambunctious primordial cells swirling in a petri dish. Yaghmai calls her pictures distortions rather than abstractions, a definitive stance that pulls the work away from the burden of art history and plants them within a psychological and perceptual space in which memory is stretched to new and warped ends.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Lila de Magalhaes at Matthew Brown
July 17–August 21, 2021

Lila de Magalhaes, Describe Sweet (2021). Dyed bedsheets/fabric, thread, and chalk pastel, 45 x 54.75 x 1 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.

I chuckled in the presence of Lila de Magalhaes’ Sewing Accident (all works 2021), recalling an apocryphal tale I heard somewhere about lewd messages sewn into the lining of Prince Charles’ and Princess Diana’s clothing by the royal tailor. In Accident, a grinning grub-creature pokes a sewing needle into an enlarged fingertip, the words “Fuck You” carefully stitched out around its neck like a provoking novelty necklace. Eschewing the finer fabrics of royal garments, this and many of Magalhaes’ works feature fevery, figurative linework stitched over dyed bed sheets. The soft pools of color staining these sheets add another dreamy underlayer to the compositions, the stitching sewn onto them like dreams and notions that refuse to evaporate.

There’s a pronounced element of sensory derangement throughout, both of narrative and of scale, which toggles between references to cellular, insectoid, and human forms. In Describe Sweet, a reclining naked lady licks the stinger of an enlarged, curling bee, their eyes locked in delirious, mutual amusement if not flirtation. The woman’s eyes protrude out in blue and gold rings mimicking the bee’s similarly sketched body. Elsewhere, in Who’s Dinner, a line of eggy balls roll from the crotch of a reclining insect directly into the mouth of a face lurking behind the scene. The curious, absorptive expression of this face paired with the insect’s relaxed pose suggests a common appetite.

Several ceramic works in the forms of cocoons, seeds, or eggs augment the exhibition—though Untitled (Eggs 3) looks more like the cherry glazed donuts at Randy’s. The ceramics offset the horny delirium of works like Too Hot to Think with both sculptural weight and humor: tiny fingers poke through an opening in Untitled (Eggs 1) after apparently having their gels freshened at an inter-egg nail salon. De Magalhaes at once engages the gross, sticky, and erotic, layering insectoidal reproduction into a playful, naughty nature that keeps terror and humor simmering within each piece.

–Aaron Horst

I Am Not This Body at Tyler Park Presents
June 12–July 31, 2021

I Am Not This Body (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artists and Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles.

The current group exhibition at Tyler Park Presents, I Am Not This Body, borrows its title from the late photographer Barbara Ess’ seminal body of work from 2001. Though predominantly known for her affective pinhole photographs, Ess, who died of cancer in March, was a multidisciplinary artist who refused to understand the camera as a sharp and neat record-keeper. More interested in intuition, she approached the medium with a generosity that embraced the unknown, the accidental, and that which is too often regarded as error—her scenes blurry and out of focus, the edges of her images often stretching and pulling away.

Several of the works by the eleven artists on view are assemblage-style photographs that appear as if they could have been constructed digitally but result from distinct, intimate, and laborious physical interactions with the camera. In their respective works Blue Face II (2012) and The California Bather (The Smile) (2019), Daniel Gordon and Evan Whale use photography as a building block for collage: Gordon’s picture is made in-camera, using torn paper body parts and shadow form a face, while Whale draws and paints on his print, treating it with chemicals that eat away at and replace parts the image, revealing new internal textures. (Whale, who co-curated the exhibition, was, like me, once a student of Ess.)

Both graphic and poignant, Tommy Kha’s Stops (II), Marsha P. Johnson Park, Brooklyn (2020) features cutouts of the artists’ hands sprouting from the rocky shoreline in the New York park (renamed last August in honor of the prominent Black transgender activist). Reaching upward and into the sun, the severed hands suggest loss, recalling bodies in the ground, but their installation here points also to unity and the possibility of liberation.

The depiction of Kha’s partial, fragmented body extends to the lone sculptural work on view, Young Joon Kwak’s reclining nude Lying Hermaphroditus (2017) (which, incidentally, has no hands itself). Cast in fiberglass and resin and pressed against the wall, the figure’s shapely, arching back nearly conceals the hollow front half of the form, the work not incomplete but becoming. “I am not this body, but this is where I live,” Ess wrote in a text that accompanied her pinhole photographs. These artists continue her essential project, approaching the body not as a site, but as an open-ended container freed from neat boundaries or borders.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Reading 

Publishing as Practice, co-published by Inventory Press and Ulises, charts the work of three artist-publishers, documenting the course of their involvement in Ulises’ publishing residency. Essays and interviews examine their respective approaches to publishing as an expansive space for political and community interventions.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

I’m routinely intimidated by the idea of reading a play; Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992  is divided into perfectly absorbable chunks, culled from interviews with varied individuals in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings.

–Aaron Horst

Mark Greif’s “Octomom and the Market in Babies,” which is the best read in his 2016 collection of essays, Against Everything, and though I can’t yet totally explain it, reminds me of Didion’s classic “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

–Erin F. O’Leary

Watching 

My partner was recently recommended a show with such enthusiasm that it came with an HBO password. Part sci-fi, part crime drama, and part comedy, the Norwegian series, Beforiegners, is set in present-day Oslo, where flashes in the sea transport people from the Stone Age, Viking Age, and the 19th century into the present with no recollection of how they arrived. As the newcomers struggle to assimilate, murders, kidnappings, and comical shots of cavemen wearing AirPods ensue. Highly recommend!

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

Hacks on HBO featuring Jean Smart, whose character on Designing Women I thought I most related (as an 8-year-old). Also, Police, a 1985 French movie in which Gérard Depardieu falls in love with a glamorous criminal and everybody is smoking all the time.

–Aaron Horst

If life is about balance, I find it via the consumption of “trash” reality television. I’m currently making my way through Shahs of Sunset, but I’ll save you from my thoughts on its status as a cultural artifact.

–Erin F. O’Leary

Listening

Erykah Badu’s “Phone Down” is an appropriate anthem as I type this from the road, headed for a few days off the grid in the Sequoias. I’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries and creating more space for downtime, even as the summers’ reopening pace seems manically fast.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas

“Bachelor Kisses” by The Go-Betweens as I contemplate returning to dating (“dating”) apps, Brandi Carlile’s cover of “Black Hole Sun,” and whichever forgotten ’90s country songs my friend Anna DMs me about late at night.

–Aaron Horst

“The Tanning of America feat. Leandra Medine,” Recho Omondi’s compelling interview with the founder of the shuttered media company, Man Repeller, delves into the events that left Medine to join the ranks of other high-profile female-founders whose “disruptive” companies imploded over the last year as they failed to reckon with their own toxic, insular, and racist workplaces. Omondi’s reporting, however, is broader in its stroke and resonance—offering skillful moments of quiet restraint, and occasionally breaking from the interview to offer behind-the-scenes insight into her process and experience.

–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