Hugo Crosthwaite
Installation View of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles / Booth B24 at UNTITLED Miami 2019
Featuring: Hugo Crosthwaite, Laura Krifka, Ken Gonzales-Day, Chris Engman
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce our participation in our seventh edition of UNTITLED, ART Miami Beach with a group presentation featuring Hugo Crosthwaite, the winner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Triennial, as well as new works by Caitlin Cherry, Ken Gonzales-Day, Chris Engman, Lia Halloran, Laura Krifka, Federico Solmi, and Britton Tolliver.
As part of UNTITLED, ART's new initiative, MONUMENTS, the gallery will present a new large-scale, site-specific installation by Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares in Lummus Park, adjacent to the fair at Ocean Avenue and 12th Street. It is not down on any map; true places never are (2019) is a kinetic sculpture consisting of two flagpoles connected by one chain that pulls 18 flags up and down each beam continuously.
Hugo Crosthwaite's drawings, paintings and videos seamlessly combine classical figurative representation with modern abstraction. This mixture creates feelings of chaos and spontaneity, reminiscent of the Mexican border community. Each work becomes an enfoldment of personal vision in which reality, history, and mythology collide as he explores the complexities of human expression.
Caitlin Cherry addresses history, identity, and present-day politics in pursuit of cultural reclamation and the dismantling of structural oppression. To create her obliquely narrative compositions and disorienting characters that re-examine notions of the self and the body, Cherry draws upon the traditions of art history, integrating contemporary cultural theories on race, gender, economics, and the impact of technology.
Chris Engman’s work takes the human condition as its central theme and calls attention to our misperceptions: the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think we see—the inconstant and constructed nature of memory. It is a meditation on impermanence and the fact that not only existence but even the features of the physical world are temporal and will come to an end. Engman’s photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations but they are also records of actions and elaborate processes.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded photographic projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems. Gonzales-Day’s exhaustive research and Pulitzer-nominated book Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 led to a re-evaluation of the history of lynching in this country. The Erased Lynchings series of photographs was a product of this research, which revealed that race was a contributing factor in California's own history of lynching and vigilantism, and through which he discovered that the majority of victims were Mexican or, like him, Mexican-American.
Lia Halloran’s practice has been in dialogue with science and nature, and discusses topics such as astrophysics, magnetism and gravity, perception and scale, giant crystal and ice caves, cabinets of curiosity, taxonomy and classification, the periodic table of elements, and interconnected relativity. Her most recent work brings attention to the work of female scientists including the Harvard Observatory's "Pickering's Harem", a group of 19th Century female astronomers who were hired because they could be paid less and nevertheless made significant contributions to the field of astronomy.
Through intimate and carefully constructed figurative paintings, artist Laura Krifka dissects the mechanisms of power, identity, and observation found in visual culture. With non-descript references to the history of painting, Krifka incorporates the contemporary frameworks of film and photography into her understanding of portraiture and psychology. By collapsing several views of the same pose, subject, space, and time into each painting Krifka creates scenes that appear deceptively simple, but are rife with distortions, puzzles, and physical impossibilities that make visual factuality tenuous and challenge the viewer’s perceptual abilities.
Federico Solmi is an internationally acclaimed multi-media artist who employs a satirical aesthetic in order to portray a dystopian vision of our present-day society. Combining traditional media, such as drawing and painting, with emerging technologies such as 3D animation, video-game software, and kinetic technology, Solmi's animations playfully and irreverently depict the most loathed and hypocritical aspects of contemporary life and western society through absurd narratives. Solmi stages a world where our leaders become puppets and the absurdity of exploitative action is accentuated, brilliantly animated by computer scripts and motion capture.
Britton Tolliver makes paintings that draw from the full range of abstraction's possibilities, fusing diverse positions and processes in hard-fought, deeply considered compositions. His paintings speak to a nuanced relationship with the natural world. Their textured surfaces, for instance, which are notable for their depth of relief and seductive tactility, can be read as topographic maps or psychedelic scans of alien landscapes; their high-contrast chromatic range, meanwhile, can recall the lurid immediacy of Los Angeles sunsets. And yet there is also something decidedly digital about the moods and spaces he conjures.
Antonia Wright explores empathy in contemporary life through a multidisciplinary practice that blurs the boundaries between live performance, video, photography, poetry, sound, and sculpture. Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares have been working collaborative for almost 10 years. This special project for MONUMENTS is a continuation of their interest in using the body to challenge social conventions and explore issues of identity. The artists’ recent work has moved away from using themselves in each project, but to replace their physical presence with performative installations to show how the machine can serve as a surrogate to the body.
