July Editors’ Picks

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ As we break from Snap Reviews for the summer, enjoy monthly picks from Carla’s editors across art exhibitions, books, food, and more. ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Martine Syms, Loser Back Home (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Martine Syms at Sprüth Magers ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Martine Syms has described her video work as a place “where humor kisses pain.” This juxtaposition can be felt in a new video on view in Loser Back Home, her solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers. Titled i am wise enough to die things go (2023), the video is loosely based on an animation in which Daffy Duck is being edged out of the scene by the animator himself. The protagonist in Syms’ iteration is a Black actor who becomes increasingly frustrated by abrupt editing shifts and having to push away imposing backdrops that attempt to crowd her offstage. The palpable frustration on her face is matched by her T-shirt, which reads “TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING.”

Syms cultivates an urgent mix of personal and political, presenting a broad array of visual information underscored by her blunt and cheeky wit. Throughout the show, the artist’s archive of paper ephemera—ranging from ticket stubs and food receipts to fentanyl test strips and various handwritten notes—has been scanned and made into stickers pasted across shopping bags and boxes. In the upstairs gallery, wall-sized vinyl images create an ad hoc landscape from the mundane: Syms’ grocery shopping haul, her stickered laptop on a bed, a SpongeBob keychain, a parked car on fire.

Installed amongst this tangle of personal relics, Syms’ videos remain ciphers for deeper truths about day-to-day reality. In This Is A Studio (2023), security camera footage from outside the artist’s studio recounts an interaction with a police officer who rings the door in the middle of the night, asking questions about who and what is inside. The artist offers blunt replies—her voice sleepy, confused, and frustrated. Deposited within the vast ephemera of Syms life, the strained interaction reflects on the inequitable systems of power that proliferate our lives: the kiss of pain juxtaposed against the more quotidian realities of American life.

Loser Back Home runs through August 26, 2023.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Reading ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

While reading Brit Bennett’s The Mothers (2018), I often pondered the book’s matter-of-fact title—in the novel, mothers are not featured explicitly, but instead linger in the background as subtext. The mother of the main character, Nadia, has tragically taken her own life. Another mother, the pastor’s wife, is strict with her high school-aged son—who subsequently gets Nadia pregnant. As Nadia decides to terminate the pregnancy, her own prospect of motherhood wanes. Despite the book largely reading as a high-school coming-of-age story, motherhood looms as a specter throughout, and the book ultimately asks us to consider the familial ties that bind us, whether chosen or biological. 

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Eating ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

I recently moderated an artist talk with the fabulous Sarah Rosalena at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. After, she recommended that we grab food at Bibi Ji, an Indian restaurant that recently made it into The Michelin Guide. The food was sublime. The shareable plates were elevated but not overly fussy—the crispy cauliflower, which somehow retained a crunch after being slathered in chili garlic sauce, was a standout.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Around Town ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Now that the June gloom has faded, on most Sundays, you can find me at the beach. This summer, our big gear upgrade is a Neso shade structure, which lends itself nicely to a day spent shoreside. The other key to committing to a full day on the sand is a quick sandwich pick-up en route. Bay Cities is our go-to stop if we’re Santa Monica or Malibu-bound—Nick & Sons if we’re headed toward Manhattan Beach.

Jackie Castillo, Turning No°2 (installation view) (2023). Laser print, reclaimed brick, polyvinyl, and acetate adhesive, 5 x 7 inches (height variable). Edition 2/2 and 1 AP. Image courtesy of the artist and as-is.la.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Jackie Castillo at as-is.la  ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Jackie Castillo’s Turning is a testament to the notion that the proximity between where photographs are made and exhibited matters, particularly because photography is extractive at its core. Castillo compresses this distance, taking the Pico-Union neighborhood surrounding the gallery as her subject.

Three large floor-based sculptures made of photographs cut into grids and adhered to bricks, cinder blocks, and tiles depict nearby domestic dwellings in flux. Turning No°3 (2022) features a black-and-white photograph of a still-intact slab of foundation sitting atop a high pile of debris—the remnants of a home that has otherwise been leveled to the ground. In the background, a mess of draping telephone wires caresses a row of rickety scaffolding surrounding the shell of a new build, and at least three (!) kinds of fencing are hodgepodged together, demarcating the land. This photograph is pasted onto cinder blocks that are piled upon one another so that the image is lifted from the floor as if on low concrete stilts. As such, it recalls the precarity of not only L.A’s housing crisis but of much of the city’s infrastructure, which demands constant maintenance. Everything in the image feels haphazard, and with Southern California’s unceasing pace of development, it is. But Castillo reconstructs these chaotic scenes as careful sculptural compositions, assembling the heavy blocks one at a time. I think about the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who so loved J.M.W. Turner’s paintings that he once asserted that “every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition.”¹ But since Castillo’s sculptures are not finished with mortar or the like, the images that they form are malleable, impermanent.

The bricks that form Turning No°2 (2022) are stacked at varying heights like a kind of topography, and some are positioned a little off-kilter, so the image appears as if it is crumbling away. It feels exciting and subversive to get to see around and beneath these photographs, to watch them break down dimensionally. And the longer I look at Castillo’s sculptures, the less certain I am that the puzzle pieces of the photographs have indeed been reassembled in order. Looking at them provokes a visual sorting. We are all experienced, rapid consumers of images, but these slow me down. I have to dig.

Castillo’s works are not subtle in their politics, and for this I am glad. They press on their subject. They ask what it means to have fidelity to a place, to watch it turn over. Castillo turns her lens to things that are already almost gone, but these photographs do more than memorialize the places they depict. She is not bearing witness, she is building. In taking apart images and putting them together again (the same, but differently), Castillo makes photography into something that is in progress, rather than the static image of a moment to which we cannot return.

Turning runs through August 5, 2023.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Reading ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

On the recommendation of a fellow photo nerd, I recently read Angella d’Avignon’s essay “Free Dirt,” published last September in The Paris Review. D’Avignon moves with ease from Craigslist photos advertising “free dirt” to a particular black-and-white geological photograph taken in Riverside in 1939 in which the shadow of the photographer’s body and tripod-mounted camera are visible, outstretched before the Cajalco Reservoir. These kinds of photographs, largely created by U.S. Geological Survey teams tasked with cataloging “public land,” built a global understanding of the mythic American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, d’Avignon explains. In the Craigslist pictures, this classic vista and shadow combo is replaced by the more contemporary silhouette of a rectangular smartphone. As I finished reading, I got to thinking about the fleet of cars mounted with 360-degree cameras now responsible for imaging some 10 million miles of our planet. They sometimes capture their own shadows, too.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Eating ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Equal parts Campari and Dopo Teatro Vermouth Amaro, splash of soda water, ice. 

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Around Town ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

I can’t quite overlook the fact that Rancho Palos Verdes Beach is only accessible via the Trump Golf Club. But the short trail to the shore is gorgeous, and several hours can easily be spent combing the pebble beach and peering into the tide pools.

Yu Ji, A Guest, A Host, A Ghost (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Orange County Museum of Art. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Yu Ji at Orange County Museum of Art ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

At the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), the gallery where Shanghai-born artist Yu Ji’s show, A Guest, A Host, A Ghost is installed feels distinctly colder than the rest of the museum. Despite its location on the second floor, the darkened space and overall greyish tone of the room give the illusion that you’re somewhere else, like a dilapidated basement or the belly of a cosmic ship. This eerie displacement can be felt across the exhibition’s sculptures, lithographs, and video installations, which consider the ways that our bodies are tethered to the built environments that surround us.

Jutting out from the walls of the gallery, cement bodies—some with torsos and limbs, some without—are supported by iron armatures. Flesh in Stone #1 (2012), the first piece in Yu’s ongoing series Flesh in Stone (2012–present) features a headless, armless body with a single thigh. The rusted, multi-textured iron supports that cradle the body contrast with the cool smoothness of the cement, conjuring a sense of intimacy between our bodies and the human-made structures we engage with daily. Breaking from the figurative, Yu furthers her inquiry into the interrelatedness of bodies and environments through the installation Half Peel Half Pulp III (2022), which features a heavy lead carpet upon which pieces of wood, copper, and barnacles are arranged. The carpet’s rippled texture picks up the gallery’s minimal lighting, creating the illusion of glossy waves crashing beneath the moonlight. While the installation evokes the shoreline a few miles west of OCMA, it is not only in dialogue with Southern California’s environment. It also alludes to the curved architecture of OCMA’s mezzanine, a structure our bodies are in dialogue with every time we visit the museum.

Meandering through the space, my mind wandered to the ceramic figurines made by the Olmec. They too sculpted strange bodily forms that ooze an eerie and supernatural vibe. In the 1930s, when excavation of the Olmec zone began, many of the figurines were found in fragmented pieces. Later reassembled, conserved, and dispersed to museum, university, and private collections, they are now relics from another time. Through this lens, Yu’s cement bodies can perhaps also function as relics, but from a future with a distinctly Cronenbergian twist.

A Guest, A Host, A Ghost runs through October 22, 2023.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Reading ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

I was gutted when Cormac McCarthy passed away last month, and have since been combing used bookstores and libraries in an effort to read all of his published works. I recently finished Child of God (1973), a terrifying, nearly 200-page read about a disturbed 27-year-old who stalks the caves and hillsides of rural Tennessee. The story starts slow, but soon takes off at full speed, hurling the reader into the main character’s violent spiral. On my second read, I finished the book in just under four hours.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Eating ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Despite investing in a Nespresso last fall, I still spend way too much money and time at Steelhead Coffee in Long Beach.

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Around Town ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

At the base of the Verdugo Mountains, the Brand Library & Art Center is an ivory marvel.  The Moorish-inspired structure—complete with scalloped arches and minarets—is a lovely site for a slow morning at the park with a coffee and a good book.

Alitzah Oros is an art historian currently based in Los Angeles.

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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.

More by Erin F. O'Leary

Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and founder and editor-in-chief 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.

More by Lindsay Preston Zappas