July 17, 2021 - August 28, 2021

Artist’s Reception July 17, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

as-is.la is pleased to announce a small, of highly focused exhibition of new, recent and older paintings by Los Angeles artist Ron Griffin. Griffin’s paintings can be characterized as “readymades in reverse”—delivering the cool, alienating indifference of Marcel Duchamp’s strategy while offering none of the readymade’s labor-saving advantages so prized within today’s neoliberal economies, Art and otherwise.

Quite the opposite. In one body of work, for example, the artist plucks small bits of paper and plastic detritus off the sidewalk. These are then exactingly “reproduced”—as opposed to, say, realistically “rendered”—in paint materials on hardboard surfaces at a precise 1:1 scale. A related body of work begins with the wax paper toilet seat covers (Duchamp again) found in public bathrooms. Griffin takes these, folds them over onto themselves and then poses the origami-like results against a black background, producing a gray-scale effect he then “re-creates,” so to speak, in overlapping layers of white lacquer sprayed onto a similarly black ground.

Both series set the demotic (street trash, stolen toilet seat covers) into tension with the elite (high-modernist referents, technical expertise) to a powerful if somewhat unsettling effect.