Lisa Adams in art ltd.

Paradise Notwithstanding 2011, oil on panel, 48 x 60 inches

Critic's Picks: Los Angeles

by shana nys dambrot

Nov 2011

Although shadowed by the onset of Pacific Standard Time this fall, contemporary artists in Los Angeles have

not sat meekly on the sidelines to observe the historical parade. Contributing Editor Shana Nys Dambrot picks

out six SoCal artists whose shows are worth detours this fall.

Lisa Adams is kind of the painter's-painter laureate of Los Angeles, though not in a bad way. Adams' work has undergone its share of stylistic nips and tucks, dissolutions and breakthroughs over the years, but through it all, she's never stopped attacking the paper or canvas, and has grown increasingly courageous in her persistent explorations of personal, private narrative and lyrical symbolism. From earlier, superlatively finished, often text-inclusive pictures, to a more recent, decisive loosening of technique and composition, Adams has been a moving target along the abstraction/figuration continuum. She favors tones over tints; even her bright colors are sweetly overcast. She's got a crush on trees and birds, which provide a rich source of narrative analogy for an artist with a love of fairy tales, psychoanalysis, and poems about freedom and gravity. Her scenic protagonists are allegorical armatures, while her gift for draftsmanship and her dreamy way with pigment washes and delicate surfaces are their own, naturalistic reward. Her just-released artist's book "Vicissitudes of Circumstance" (Zero+ Publishing) lavishes attention on passages of detail from her paintings, revealing the edgy expressivity and painterly gymnastics at the foundation of even her most serene pictures.

Her recent show "Lisa Adams: Born This Way" ran from September 11 -- October 9 at Offramp Gallery in Pasadena. "Paradise Notwithstanding" opens at CB1 Gallery downtown December 11, and continues through January 15, 2012.

Joelle Jensen- Nesting

For Immediate Release:

Joelle Jensen: Nesting

Exhibition runs from November 1- November 26, 2011

Artist Reception- Friday November 18, 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

801-322-1027

House Gallery is pleased to present Nesting, an exhibition of new photography by Brooklyn-based artist Joelle Jensen. The exhibition features a series of large-format photographs that hover on the edge of abstraction as they explore the transition into parenthood, featuring nest-like forms that intermittently look like they are coming together and coming apart. The exhibition opens on November 1st and continues through November 26. An artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on November 18, 2011.

Jensen’s recent work was spurred by a word she heard often when pregnant: Nesting. It describes a parents’ urge to “build a nest” in preparation for the birth of a child, to pull from available resources and create a haven. It also brings together two contradictory urges—one to break away and build your own family unit with a distinct identity, and one to strengthen ties with a bigger networks, to reaffirm your place in a clan of sorts. Jensen symbolically addresses both, cutting apart existing family photos then reassembling them into strange orbs, with strips of imagery clinging to each other. The resulting forms would seem wholly organic, like small, strange bodies, if not for the fragmented glimpses of limbs, eyes and mouths they gave.

After assembling her “nests,” Jensen photographs them using a large format, 4x5 camera. Concentric and smartly composed, with deep black backgrounds, the images have a sleek confidence worthy of Chuck Close or Doug Aitken. They impose calm over the complicated, harry process of bringing new life into the world.

Jensen received her B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri, in 1996 and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts and M.A. in Theory and Criticism from State University of New York in 2006. She has most recently exhibited at WallSpace Gallery in Seattle and Felicity R. (Bebe) Benoliel Gallery in Philadelphia. Nesting is the artist’s first exhibition at House Gallery.

Jeremy Willis- Attempt

For Immediate Release:

Jeremy Willis: Attempt

Exhibition runs from October 4-October 29, 2011

Artist Reception - Friday October 21, 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

801-322-1027

House Gallery is pleased to present Attempt, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Jeremy Willis. The exhibition features a series of large-scale, oil-on-canvas images with fleshy, frenetic abstract gestures interspersed with fragments of legible human figures. These never become whole. And that’s the point: Willis wants to know how one person can make herself legible to others in this strange, oversaturated world in which “personal identity” has become a marketable product. The artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on October 21, 2011.

Willis’ work puts the personal and public on a collision course, and what you see in the finished paintings is the mayhem the collision has caused. Colors, shapes and patterns are jammed together, caught in a hurricane of confusion. Every form and detail seems to be fighting to become dimensional and human but failing again and again. Willis has referred to his paintings as hybrid, human Rorschach blots, readable if you fall back on your subconscious, but always hovering between pure expressiveness and representation. The show title, Attempt, refers to each piece’s dramatic attempt to make the illegible legible.

There’s a cruelty evident in Willis’ paintings that is intentional and uncomfortably compelling. Because human beings have an innate desire to communicate, depriving them of decipherable identities, and thus the means of communication, is brutal. But abstraction has always toyed with such brutality. Look at Willem de Kooning’s work and you’ll see that it never fully submits to expressionistic gestures. Always, it hovers on the edge of figuration. The same can be said of neo-expressionists like Anselm Kiefer, and it’s these figures, not newer apocalyptic painters like Tomory Dodge and Dana Schutz, with whom Willis seems most resonant, though with one exception. When figures do appear, they’re cartoonish, over-dramatized pop culture ideas of human bodies. This suggests his push to make human beings legible as individuals will never pan out, no matter how many insistent, tumultuous attempts he makes.

Willis received his B.F.A. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1999 and his M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2008. He has had solo exhibitions at DuMois Gallery in New Orleans and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has also appeared in exhibitions at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art and Spattered Columns in New York, the Brooklyn Lyceum, among other venues across the U.S. and Canada. Attempt, the artist’s first solo exhibition at House Gallery, continues through October 29, 2011.