September 7 - October 12, 2024

Katy Crowe identifies as an abstract painter. But her version of abstraction, while stubbornly uncompromising, is not allergic to outside references. Indeed, the title of this show, “Lunar Shift,” suggests planetary objects (far away) just as the title of her previous show at this gallery, “A Wrinkle in the Macula” suggested eyeballs (really big and close up).

Whether her titles offer genuine insight into the origin of the circular forms that often figure in her paintings or operate instead as playful misdirection could be beside the point. For whatever their relation to the outside world, Crowe’s powerfully affective artworks proceed according to an “inside” logic that is entirely indifferent to language, relying instead on modes of communication coded deeply in the process of painting itself.

September 7 - October 12, 2024

It is argued that “the dialectic of order and chaos” structures all poetic expression; sometimes tilted toward order, other times toward chaos, but always held together in a tense balance. If so, there can be few more reliable symbols of order (understood here as “domestic tranquility”) than the standard American upholstered couch, and few symbols of chaos more familiar (at least in the art context) than the rivulets and pools of splashed and poured paint associated with Abstract Expressionism.

Starting around 1990, the young Los Angeles artist Carter Potter brought together these two metaphor-loaded elements in a body of artworks hovering between sculpture and painting and perhaps something else. These artworks begin as couches which the artist strips down to partially expose their frames and then (sometimes) saturates with gallons of multi-colored house paint. All to powerful effect.

June 29 - August 24, 2024

The five women in this exhibition are linked by a number of shared commitments. These include but are not limited to their mutual interest in feminism, photography, storytelling and by a resourceful do-it-yourself approach to presenting their own ideas made necessary by the indifference if not active hostility that greeted the work of most young women artists in 1970’s Los Angeles. The exhibition at as-is.la coincides with a show by the same name and including the same five artists at Ortuzar Projects in New York. Taken together, the rich and diverse array of artworks presented in the two iterations of “Five Women Artists in 1970s Los Angeles” powerfully and effectively illustrate the political, social and aesthetic ethos of that time and that place.

May 18 – June 22, 2024

As the title suggests, Needle in the Hay is about looking – an act of searching deeply: for simple enjoyment or for ‘that accident which pricks me’. Same reasons that poets wrote: for the pleasure of arranging words on a page, when authentic and corporeal, “looking” and “making” operate in the same plane for artists. The exhibition features visual artists predominantly from Los Angeles areas in different generations with diverse backgrounds and disciplines. Here the notion of art as riddles, games or vessel-for-concept is in the rear view mirror and viewers are left to trust their own senses to “look” and to discover these “messy realities”. The collection of work is a humble survey of this reciprocal relationship in recent practices.

April 6 – May 11, 2024

“This body of work,” the artist explains, “is a study of location that has developed over the past ten years. The title of this exhibition is derived from the geographical name of this space, a looping trail set in Northern California overlooking the ocean.” What the resulting artwork offers, Karsen continues, is “a suggestion of landscape as body, as gold necklace, as abstract marker of dimension, as a palpable sense of a certain softness, as a relationship, as a questioning of where the line exists, as a trace that becomes faint, finding it and losing it again.”

April 6 – May 11, 2024

Once known for making small, lovable, abstract paintings—scaled thus to perhaps maximize their nearly irresistible charm—Brian Sharp, in and around 2016, produced a body of somewhat larger, nearly human-sized images. Impressive in a different way, these were more ambivalent than what had come before, less generous, more demanding of the viewer; offering a tantalizing reminder of the old pleasures with one hand while snatching it away with the other and leaving a different, unexpected reward in its place.

Ten of Sharp’s thoughtful, provocative abstract paintings were presented in a memorable 2017 exhibition in the basement gallery of the short-lived but highly influential exhibition space 356 Mission, and at least one of these, along with some contemporaneous artworks, make a welcome return appearance here in “Brian Sharp,” the artist’s second show at as-is.la

February 24 – March 30, 2024

To understand a work of art, three questions might be asked of the artist: Where does it come from? How does it work? What does it mean? So when presented with these questions about the works on view in her new show “Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks 2009 / 2021,” the artist has, happily, answers for all three:

Where does it come from?
In 2009 Yamaguchi began a series of photorealistic paintings executed in oil on canvas. The paintings derived from photographs commissioned from Matthew Brandt of a nude model posed to re-enact, however loosely, images figuring prominently in the history of modernist photography. Yamaguchi’s paintings were completed in 2010 and exhibited at the end of that year.

February 24 – March 30, 2024

Las Vegas in the early 1970’s provided the young artist Paul Tzanetopoulos—as it did a number of older and more prominent artists, writers and architects—that rare and almost magical combination of “right place and right time.” Indeed, when architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown were busy studying the Las Vegas strip for their groundbreaking book “Learning from Las Vegas” (1972) and when artists Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and James Turrell were flying in and out of Las Vegas in search of sites in the surrounding deserts for their own wildly ambitious art projects, Tzanetopoulos was at work on a series of equally inventive if still little known artworks sited both inside and outside of this uniquely important city he then called home. “Paul Tzanetopoulos: Las Vegas 1972-1975” presents a selection of these vintage Las Vegas artworks together here for the first time.

January 6-February 17, 2024

The words “dream” and “work,” roots of the Freudian term “dreamwork,” would appear to tug in opposite directions. Whereas “dream” promises the free play of imagination unencumbered by responsibilities, “work” suggests, well, the opposite. Nancy Youdelman cheerfully accepts the creative challenge of reconciling these opposed forces as she does here in an always charming if sometimes unsettling body of artworks that date back to the early 1970’s and forward to the present day.

January 6-February 17, 2024

The underlying source material here comes from vintage modern design publications, thus the title “Significant Properties.” Some photographic images—a Richard Neutra designed desert house, for instance—can be recognized as such. Most however are far more obscure and further disguised by a process of digital collage before emerging from the printer to be stretched and then overpainted with sometimes brightly colored accents applied by hand.

November 18-December 23, 2023

Tip of the iceberg.

This is the thought that pops to mind when considering the recent paintings of veteran Los Angeles artist Gerard Brane (b. 1947, Latrobe PA); paintings which, to follow the analogy, are as charmingly simple on their face as they are complex (and just a bit dangerous) beneath the surface. 

Each of the seventeen smallish (30 x 24”) oil on canvas paintings on view features the image of a single vase. Though easily identified as such, the vase-idea is transformed by the artist into an always beautiful and consistently inventive symbol rather than offering a plausible representation of an actual thing. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that these are works of the human imagination and that there are no crates filled with still life props gathering dust somewhere in the artist’s studio.

November 18-December 23, 2023

We are pleased to announce the exhibition “Susan Singer: ‘Bodies’ (1977) and Related Artworks,” a presentation of photo-related images and objects by this still highly pertinent if now little remembered Los Angeles artist.

Join us for an opening reception on Saturday, November 18 from 2pm to 5pm. “Susan Singer: ‘Bodies’ (1977) and Related Artworks,” is presented in conjunction with “Gerard Brane: New Work.” Both exhibitions continue through -December 23 at as-is.la

If the art of the 1970’s taught us anything it is that “scale is content,” that when an artwork is unusually large (or tiny, for that matter) size becomes an important part of its meaning. Susan Singer (then Susan Grieger) emerged as an artist and photographer at precisely this moment and she seized on this and other characteristically 1970’s insights with a vengeance.

September 30 - November 11, 2023

“Iconoclasm”—the violent if sometimes creative destruction of the icon—is a founding gesture in the history of art. The threat (or more often the overblown fear) of “cancellation” is a more recent development. These and a cluster of related concepts converge in a body of new work by the Dutch born, Los Angeles based artist Joost van Oss.

The artworks proceed according to a strategy that is as powerfully effective as it is modestly simple. They begin life as picture postcards. Often, but not always, the postcards feature an important work of modern or contemporary art. And often, but not always, the postcards are acquired from the art institution where the work is held. The artist then takes the cards and, with a custom-made cutting tool, punches one or more holes in each, an overtly negative act that is ultimately quite positive (and thoroughly aesthetic) in its effect.

September 30 - November 11, 2023

In choosing “Heat Island” as the title for his exhibition, the artist aptly characterizes the manifest content of the work on view. This term, according to Rogers, “refers to the phenomenon of urbanized areas experiencing higher temperatures than outlying areas.”  And, just as promised, the two small sculptures and ten elegantly executed oil on canvas paintings (in a variety of sizes ranging from 14 x 16 inches to 71 x 79 inches) on view in this show, though they are cool to the touch, suggest the sensation of heat the artist’s title invokes.

But heat here is presented not so much in the positive sense as a source of human sustenance and protection from the cold but rather as a nagging—if subtly and deeply coded—cause of concern. And the vague sense of unease that begins in the realm of this artist’s content—the gas flames of course, but also an open refrigerator and other suggestive subjects as well—is amplified in the realm of form (and perhaps even exhibition design), as objects and images of markedly different sizes and proportions jostle against one another on the gallery walls, competing in interesting ways for the viewer’s attention.

August 12 - September 23

In the “dialectic of order and chaos” that structures all poetic discourse, veteran Los Angeles artist Jesse Benson (b. 1978, Orange, CA) places himself squarely in the camp of order as his exhibition title, Organizer, so clearly suggests. But this presentation of new and recent paintings, sculptures and artifacts argues the position in favor of order so relentlessly that, as it approaches the point of absurdity, a viewer might suspect that the artist is, if secretly, on the side of a wild and liberating chaos, after all. The two positions being irreconcilable, it is left then to the viewers to examine the evidence and judge the artist’s real and true intentions for themselves.

June 17 - July 29, 2023

“Hildegarde Duane: Wild Honey Meets Togetherman.”
A Revisionist 50’s Superhero Love Story.
Eros! Politics! Chemistry!
Featuring a music video, photo pieces, costumes and artifacts.

Los Angeles based Conceptual artist Hildegarde Duane has since 1976 made narrative art in videos, photo stories, costume, calligraphy and written word. Amongst multi-media precursors to the Pictures movement and associated with the flowering of video art at the Long Beach Museum of Art, her work explores pop culture, the status of place and space, socio-political commentary and erotic feminism. In addition to her solo work, Duane has collaborated extensively with artist David Lamelas as well as with Ilene Segalove (who appears here in the role of Wild Honey).

June 17 - August 5, 2023

Turning consists of three works in which domestic tracts and remnants of infrastructure are unearthed and rebuilt; raised and collapsed. Turning is an excavation of the historical and material loss of the Southern California built environment. Three images—a hearth without a home, a tomb-like structure, and a mound of earth—are segmented and fused to the topmost layers of topographic stacks of reclaimed building units (reclaimed tiles, bricks, and cement pavers). The demolition sites erupt from the ground like a staircase, rapidly ascending into both mounds of debris and, alternately, the foundational layers of building. In moments of quaking tension, the edges of the photographic frame begin to fragment, breaking our habitual experience of photography and holding still the transience of the developing metropolis. Important to the work is the visual language of labor, called to mind by my physical act of solely assembling the modular sculptures when exhibited. The emphasis on the material evidence of construction reflects on the laboring class that built the structures around us.

April 22 - June 10, 2023

There is a widely held expectation that an artist working from a distinct, perhaps under-represented, subject position—a youngish Black man, for instance—will make art that reflects, even foregrounds, his own racial identity. Appreciating the power of expectation, as he does, Los Angeles artist Lenard Smith codes his work with great subtlety. Indeed, his artworks are sometimes so subtle on the subject of race that they effectively ask the question: Is the Black content we find in this art “implied,” that is to say, placed there intentionally, if quietly, by the artist? Or is it “inferred,” present largely as the result of our determination to find the thing we are seeking?

April 22 - June 10, 2023

“These still life works were started in 2008 and continue, on and off, to this day. I have been in a deep immersion with books from early on when my dad would regularly take me to the Gardena Public Library – he hated buying books and loved to read. From being an avid reader I went to work at The Strand Bookstore in New York City in 1980. I was also the Acquisitions Librarian at the Art Center College Library in Pasadena from 1989 to 2017.

March 4 - April 15, 2023

Tom Eatherton (1934–2023) was one of the most accomplished of the California Light and Space Artists,  that cohort of 1960’s and 1970’s era figures who’s gallery-filling, controlled-light room environments directed attention to the specifically “perceptual” qualities of the art viewing experience. Even more than the others, Eatherton doggedly pursued the alluring if ultimately quixotic dream of producing a direct and unmediated art experience detached from history and cultural context. “Not ‘symbolic’ but entirely ‘experiential,’” he would insist about his own work. If the results sometimes diverged from the artist’s sweeping ambitions, if “the ideal” struggled valiantly against the limitations of “the real,” then this, as they say, was “not a bug but a feature,” as now, particularly with the passage of time, the surviving material artifacts of this practice are practically aching with poignancy.