The Game of Patience features new figurative paintings by artist Laura Krifka that depict female and male subjects in intimate moments within carefully constructed interiors. Krifka deftly paints her bare-skinned protagonists reading, drawing, daydreaming, watching, and waiting. The peep of a phallus and the highlight of a thigh gap allude to the pleasure of stillness, supplemented by the visual tension meticulously sculpted throughout the domestic spaces. A notable development in Krifka’s content is the genesis of idiosyncratic wallpapers that appear to direct the viewer’s gaze rather than lay flat. These imagined patterns create parallel planes of space, shift color and shape inexplicably, and build psychological tension, functioning like maps for the dream logic of each painting.
At the heart of Krifka’s practice are post-modern and contemporary critiques of canonical Painting. Krifka treats the false dichotomies of subject and object, male and female, observer and observed as comedic jumping off points before bending or breaking the rules and moving on to more nuanced and poetic concerns. Sensually charged in the pinks, purples, pea-greens, and ochers of afternoon reveries, all the protagonists are depicted in vulnerable situations, and Krifka wanders through paintings with surprising detail and care, in search of consent and a deeper understanding of the nature of desire.
Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (4/24-4/27/19)-
Thursday
For MOCA’s 40th Anniversary they are hosting a series of exhibitions organized by LA based artists and MOCA curators with work drawn from their permanent collection. Tonight multimedia artist Elliott Hundley will lead a walkthrough of his exhibition Open House: Elliott Hundley at the Grand Avenue location (free tonight and every Thursday evening)
Slick Rick will be at Amoeba Records in Hollywood to celebrate and sign copies of The Great Adventures Of Slick Rick for its 30th Anniversary
Friday through Sunday
For the first time Photoville, the free annual photo festival with galleries built from repurposed shipping containers, is heading to Los Angeles. It will be taking place at the Annenberg Space for Photography this weekend and next with programming that includes nighttime projections, talks, workshops, family activities and a beer garden. At the same time the exhibition CONTACT HIGH: A Visual History of Hip-Hop, which showcases the work of hip hop photographers, will open at Annenberg Space for Photography with special hours to coincide with the festival.
Arcana Books is hosting a launch party from 4-6pm for issue 2 of Creative Director Alexander McWhirter’s thematic annual art and fashion journal, Public.
Compltr is playing at All Star Lanes with Sheer, Trends, and June Swoon
Saturday and Sunday
Grand Park is hosting the free two day festival, Grand Park’s Our L.A. Voices- a Pop-up Arts+Culture Fest, featuring short film, dance, music, spoken word and theatre performances, and visual art, created by L.A. artists. There will also be a marketplace with artwork for sale.
Jackalope are bringing their free local artisan Spring Fair to Old Pasadena’s Central Park
Sunday
Celebrate the Thai New Year all day at the Songkran Festival in Thai Town which includes a parade, beauty pageant, live music, dance performances, food, and more
Emily Wells is playing the Bootleg Theater with KERA opening
Zebulon has a free screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man
Telekinesis are playing at the Moroccan Lounge with SONTALK and The Pretty Flowers
Big Red Machine (Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Aaron Dessner of The National) are performing at the Hollywood Palladium
The title “Ground” resonates with the descriptive photography of western landscapes. In the painting context, the ground is the active place on which painting occurs. Hyde uses a home brewed paint for these works, consisting of pigment dispersed in acrylic mediums, and in most cases that pigment is a form of ground earth. In turn, Hyde’s photographs follow a “light-room” process developed in the computer, distorting and adjusting it and challenging the notion of any factual naturalism.
Resisting genres and traversing mediums, Hyde investigates the abstract gesture in relationship to photography. His opposition to the “realism” of digital photography, placed against the colors of abstracted shapes, snaps photography into place, making it a site, a location, and naturalizing it as a pictorial fact while reframing the question of the truthfulness of photography.
Luis de Jesus gallery is currently showing Chris Engman’s incredible photographs which play with the notion of what is real. Although the images sometimes appear three dimensional (like the cube and paper above) or altered in some way, they are more straight forward than they seem. These optical illusions should be seen in person to get the full effect.
Also take a moment to see Antonia Wright’s video work in the back of the gallery. Watching her fall through a sheet of glass naked repeatedly is mesmerizing and disturbing.
