Economies (Installation View), via LTD
Currently on view at LTD Los Angeles, the gallery’s summer exhibition, Economies, explores the notion of observation and exchange, suspending the images and objects of the world of art as transactional properties, bound up in a flow between the work’s circulation and its effects. The show, delving into the possibilities of simple materials suspended in flow, or twisted up into strange assemblages.Â
Describing the works on view as a “mirror” of sorts, the show explores just how one might explore the work and its “valuation” of sorts in terms of the viewer’s relationship with themselves, and with the work. The piece describes values and concepts in relation to the viewer, in relation to the viewer’s perception, more explicitly.
Economies (Installation View), via LTD
Artist Justin Serulneck, for instance examines the space left over during real estate development, following familiar threads to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, expanding the artist’s interest in leftover housing and other spaces to also investigate connections of interpersonal connections, environmental elements and concepts of just how life is suspended and elaborated in these spaces. Serulneck weaves these connections, investigates just how these kinds of spaces should be occupied and which should be abandoned. The spaces, as a result, seem to delve into the idea not of improvement, but rather, the action of late capitalism rendering these spaces as unavailable even as social need grows.
Economies (Installation View), via LTD
Economies (Installation View), via LTD
By contrast, artist Patrisse Cullors explores mass incarceration and its daily impact acts as a tool to plumb the depths of economic histories. Documenting her works with a series of objects and photos, which explore tenderness and touch, endurance and nourishment as strategies, embracing metamorphosis as restoration, using these gestures as a move towards community engagement and unification. Her work explored here centers around bathing, a repetitive gesture that emphasizes sustained care and maintenance.
Economies (Installation View), via LTD
Joining these works are those of Alexandre Dorriz, which view the economic through the biographic, and the biographic through the economic. His family history of migration from Iran to America is mapped along a parallel of embargoes and agriculture, framing items and materials, commercial goods and art objects in equal measure.
The show closes September 7th.
— C. Reinhardt
Read more:
LTD Los Angeles [Exhibition Site]
