Janet Olivia Henry at STARS

Janet Olivia Henry, Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

In Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions at STARS, the artist uses dolls, drawings, and dioramas featuring miniature everyday objects to create deliciously sharp commentaries on the nexus of life and art. Her sculptural diorama, Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (2007–24), depicts a Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) meeting within a version of Phyllis Kind Gallery. The gallery’s central room is filled to the brim with dolls forming a massive drum circle, while the adjacent rooms are void of people, instead filled with miniature cultural ephemera and utilitarian objects like paint rollers, unfinished pedestals, ladders, milk crates, and pliers. The art historical references throughout the rooms—a set of shelves filled with marble busts of classical musicians, a replica of the Duchamp urinal, fliers reading “¿Dónde está Ana?”,  and a recreation of David Hammons’ recent installation Days End (2014–21)—suggests a collapse of time, rather than a recreation. Within this amalgamated space, Henry allows Wrought to depict a community unrestrained by the traditional modes of the art world. She embraces excess as an alternative to the desire to contain aesthetics and their possibilities within art movements and institutional spaces like galleries.

Historically, readymades like Duchamp’s aforementioned Fountain (1917) brought everyday objects into the gallery, imbuing them with new meaning and elevated status as art by changing the context of their display. In Wrought, Henry pushes against our idea that an artwork is an elevated object just because it is displayed within the contained space of galleries. Instead, art is thrown into flux and displayed nontraditionally, appearing on storage shelves and on the floor alongside abandoned tools and palettes. Most importantly, the artworks exist among the usually invisible people who participate in its production and activation. Henry depicts a gallery brimming with energy, where readymades accumulate meaning beyond becoming “art” to instead perform an aesthetic excessiveness that makes the line between art and everyday life hard to distinguish.

In a series of framed works from 2024 hung across from Wrought, images of dolls are isolated against multicolored brick backgrounds. In Lotte Gentileschi (Pink, magenta, maroon, beige, dark gray, peach, light blue, taupe), the doll is dressed decadently: A fluffy magenta fur coat obscures its face, leaving just a tuft of orange hair and a brown top hat visible. Henry again utilizes excess to create these compositions, injecting geometric grids with unexpected personalized details like giant bows, sunglasses, rollerblades, and drums. Lacking a spatial reference, the backgrounds evoke the canonized aesthetic of geometric modernism. They remind me of the De Stijl movement—closely associated with Piet Mondrian—which was emblematic of modernism in its desire to create a universal aesthetic language, but failed to realize that its desired lack of ornamentation was not unifying. It was an act of erasure. In opposition to this aesthetic, Henry’s dolls are maximalist in their styling, reanimating the otherwise uniform background patterning.

Another diorama and the titular work, Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions (1982) replicates a gallery space full of people socializing before a wall lined with abstract paintings. Compared to Wrought, it is more performative and tame, maybe a perfect depiction of how the white cube elevates value while limiting context. Henry’s works act as a critique against the contained logic of the white cube, which disregards context that falls beyond its constrained boundaries. Instead, she insists on excess as an antidote, a way to hold space for play, exchange, and reimagination.

Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions runs from March 28–May 11, 2024 at STARS (3116 N. El Centro Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90028).

Janet Olivia Henry, Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (installation view) (2007–24). Toys, dolls, and interlocking plastic bricks (IPBs), 45 x 45 x 16 inches. STARS, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (detail) (2007–24). Toys, dolls, and interlocking plastic bricks (IPBs), 45 x 45 x 16 inches. STARS, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (detail) (2007–24). Toys, dolls, and interlocking plastic bricks (IPBs), 45 x 45 x 16 inches. STARS, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (detail) (2007–24). Toys, dolls, and interlocking plastic bricks (IPBs), 45 x 45 x 16 inches. STARS, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Lotte Gentileschi (Pink, magenta, maroon, beige, dark gray, peach, light blue, taupe (2024). Digital print on vinyl decal and interlocking plastic bricks (IPBs), 15.25 x 15.25 x 1 inch. Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Michael Tallchief (Beige, light blue, maroon, yellow, lavender, pink, gray, taupe, light brown) (2024). Digital print on vinyl decal and interlocking plastic bricks (IPBs), 20.25 x 20.25 x 1 inch. Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Janet Olivia Henry, Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions (installation view) (1982). Toys, dolls, and oil and pastel on mulberry paper, 37.24 x 12 x 11.75 inches. STARS, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Shani Strand is a Los Angeles-based artist. They hold an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. They have been published in The Avery Review and Pin-Up Magazine.

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