Esther Pearl Watson at Vielmetter Los Angeles

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Esther Pearl Watson, The Goldi Lox Zone (2023). Acrylic and mixed media on panel, 60 × 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

When I open an email from my grandpa, I know for a fact that it will mention at least one of two things: aliens or Donald Trump. His emails arrive in my inbox from an alternate reality in which President Biden is the Antichrist and aliens built pyramids on the moon. Regardless of the conspiracy theory of the day—whether he cites Fox News or the book of Revelation—one thing I know for sure is that he and I experience the world very differently.

The possibility that two individuals can inhabit entirely separate realities is part of what first drew me to the work of Esther Pearl Watson. Dystopian, otherworldly, and yet strangely familiar, Watson’s recent exhibition of painting, sculpture, and installation at Vielmetter Los Angeles, titled A Very Luminous Vision, attempted to meet her loved ones in the middle ground between reality and surreality. Citing email correspondence with her family members—many of whom struggle with their mental health—Watson’s work expands excerpts from their communication into vast and uncanny landscapes, diving headfirst into her family’s precarious, often numinous worlds. Instead of dismissing her relatives’ states of mind, she wanders into them, getting lost in the realities they experience.

The philosophically-titled This radio frequency has already drifted into the past (2023) captures the meditative tone of Watson’s explorations into her family’s visions. The title, transcribed in the upper left corner of the canvas, is pulled directly from a family email. In the painting, a lonely figure reclines in a lawn chair, watching as a bright blue and yellow meteor shower rockets past. Two-dimensional and cartoonish, as if grafted straight from a child’s dreamworld, this piece introduces several motifs that Watson returns to throughout the exhibition. Chip bags, socks, and other familiar objects are strewn about the pastoral landscape as domestic animals linger near the edges of the canvas, watching as the figure witnesses a cosmic event. Above them, the yawning expanse of night sky appears split open, its contents spilling out onto the world.

Other scenes Watson paints are more plainly phantasmal—even a little cheeky—with aliens and angels often appearing interchangeably. The UFO that looms in the sky in The Goldi Lox Zone (2023), for instance, is replaced by two blobby green angels that loiter above a Taco Bell in The Comet’s Apparition (2023). Below the angels, who each hold an elongated trumpet in hand, an individual with long black hair appears to be on an evening stroll, unfazed by the apocalyptic scene above them. Watson has a way of making the particular, peculiar phenomena unfolding in her paintings feel uncannily mundane. Indeed, in her family’s minds, these extraterrestrial appearances are by no means fantastical; rather, the fact of their existence is foundational to the makeup of their realities. And Watson’s commitment to her family’s realities is total.

In a smaller room at the back of the gallery, Watson expands the iconography in her paintings into a 3-dimensional installation roughly the size of a drive-through coffee stand (A Very Luminous Vision, 2023). Faux fur, patterned fabrics, sequins, artificial flowers, CDs, and other glittery objects are tacked onto the wood and pegboard squares that compose the structure. Extravagantly bright and texturally cacophonous, the doorways, nooks, and crannies of the installation glimmer with the allure of a passageway into another world. Just above the doorway, Watson scribbled the phrase “There is nothing in life out of your reach!” capturing both the wistful optimism she associates with her family members’ dreamscapes, as well as the inherent complexity of diving into them.

And yet, even as her body of work toes the line between the real and the surreal, Watson remains a reliable narrator: Her work always feels grounded in the real. For example, though she renders her human figures in a playful, simple style—noseless and always a little wonky—they are always just lucid enough to relate to. Meanwhile, from my vantage point in Southern California, the raging wildfires in Did you get this message? (2023) hit unsettlingly close to home. Even the title of Artificial Intellegence Automatically Substitutes My Words (2022),¹ which depicts a golden, angelic form descending on a group of children playing with cats, bears witness to the parts of today’s technocratic reality that already teeter on the surreal. So what’s so different about Watson’s family’s version of reality and our own experience of the world?

In the end, Watson’s work seems to argue that reality itself is an unreliable material—one that tears at the seams far too easily. And it’s not as if we haven’t seen it tear before. When I packed up my workstation and drove home on a random Thursday in March 2020, I fully expected to be back in the office the following Monday. After nearly a year of Covid-related lockdowns, I had no idea how to process the incursion into the U.S. Capitol, as I watched the event unfold in real time. It simply didn’t feel real. Reality, I suppose, has a way of cooperating with our expectations until, one day, it doesn’t. Just below our hopeful assumption that our lives will look tomorrow the same way they look today lies the near-universal promise of chaos and change.

Climate change. Neofascism. Pandemic. War. Inflation. Earthquakes. Aliens. All of these words index differently for different people. Watson’s work reminds us that reality is malleable, multivalent, and subject to change in an instant. From this perspective, the fantastical visions of her loved ones, which she so carefully reproduces, may not be that far off after all. The difference between reality and surreality just depends on who you ask.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 32.

Esther Pearl Watson, The Comet’s Apparition (2023). Acrylic, graphite, and glitter on canvas, 6 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Esther Pearl Watson, A Very Luminous Vision (installation view) (2023) Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Esther Pearl Watson, “This radio frequency has already drifted into the past,” (2023). Acrylic, graphite, and glitter on canvas, 40 x 60 inches.  Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Esther Pearl Watson, A Very Luminous Vision (2023). Wood panel, fabric, fun fur, mirrors, pegboard, pegs, aluminum foil, lighting, steel plates, sunlight, and bubbles, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Justin Duyao (he/him) is a contributing editor at HereIn Journal. A San Diego-based art writer, he is the recipient of a Make|Learn|Build grant from Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council and a writing fellowship from the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA. His art writing has been published by Oregon ArtsWatch, Variable West, The San Diego Union-Tribune, HereIn Journal, Vanguard Culture, and Southwest Contemporary.

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