The Portal to The Other Side” Spring Break LA 2023
Co Curator, Melissa Vogley Woods, Julie Curran
Artrist: Aaron Coleman, Benedict Scheuer, Julia Curran, Lisette Chavez, Melissa Vogley Woods, Ken Nurenberg
In this critical moment of human versus wilderness, feeling versus logic, and “us” versus “them,” our reliance on categories, hierarchies, and binaries leaves us torn between dichotomies of our own invention. Instead, what can we gain by exploring and embracing the seemingly contradictory and complex nature of everything? “Portal to the Other Side” invites viewers to step through the looking glass into a space where order turns upside down and more questions are posed than answered. Viewers enter the booth by stepping through a mirrored archway which serves as a metaphorical lens to contemplate complexities. Upon entering, one finds 8-10 mixed media works by six artists tenderly dissecting and laying bare the dark, soft underbelly of polite conversation, cultural taboos, our deepest discomforts, and the tenuous pillars of our society. Through unique and renaissance approaches to artmaking, each artist mirrors everyday life as they see it; neutralizing the chasms between seemingly apparent polarities to show that everything we assume is more complicated and ambiguous than we know.
Peering through to the other side first requires a closer look at institutions and systems of power. Through re-presenting and recontextualizing seemingly anodyne found objects, Aaron Coleman’s work probes cracks in our most esteemed institutions and myths to examine authoritarian systems stemming from the dark side of the Enlightenment. Coleman’s multimedia sculptural paintings combine and repurpose recognizable imagery and forms, yielding visceral, jarring, and powerful works that reflect on and interrogate the other sides of history. Contemplating similar themes, artist Ken Nurenberg works in the margins between painting, photography, and digital 3D technology to create seductive, recursive, monstrous mash-ups of classical and modernist tropes. Their work examines the fraught nature of the Western art-historical cannon, its relation to the present, and where and how we find ourselves in it.
Seen through the allegorical portal, the art of living and dying is both sacred and dirty. Through intricate works teetering on the edge of beauty and suffering, Lisette Chavez invites viewers to prod the unease between purity, seduction and evil, and explore the duality of life and death in American culture, which has few rituals around it. Chavez reconceives process as ceremony through combining drawings and prints precise as old Dutch masters with bejeweled religious iconography reminiscent of colonial-era Catholic ex-votos. Her work is a critical analysis of religious institution, as well as devotional object preaching the value of embracing one’s own narrative. Artists in this show find empowerment through dissecting and letting go of the stories we tell about ourselves. Through vibrant, highly-crafted mixed media paintings, Julia Curran casts off contemporary commodification of the body in favor of embracing our most fleshy, unruly, and abject selves. Curran’s work casts Mother Nature as mischievous, hungry monster-deities waiting beneath the surface to devour, digest, decompose, and regenerate. Historically rooted in Hans Holbein’s “Danse Macabre” prints, this work reminds us that one day even those of us who hold the most power will die, and the earth will eat them and spring forth new life.
Stepping through “The Portal to The Other Side” entails reconsidering our place in nature and reconstructing new meaning from old myth. Melissa Vogley Woods subverts the age-old story pitting humans against nature by fusing botanical motifs from the works of historical women still-life painters with outwardly-gazing, conflicted, entangled figures drawn from goddess imagery throughout time. Through her resurrection of the 17th-century faux-marble technique known as scagliola and the revival of works by historical women artists, Woods redefines what it means to be a Renaissance Woman. Lastly, artist Benedict Scheuer further blurs the space between artificial dichotomies of wilderness and culture. In contrast to ideas about logic, beauty, and truth born from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Scheuer’s billowing and breathing silk paintings champion sensation and the philosophy of interconnection while joyfully reminding us of our lungs and vitality. Rather than a call for humanity's return to the wilderness, Scheuer’s meditative work merges human figures and nature in unexpected swaths of color and shape, piecing together a new visual language of togetherness and interbeing.
In “Portal to The Other Side,” viewers enter a world with no clear up, down, right, or wrong; a world where binaries and polarities cannot exist. Crossing the mirrored threshold provides access to these six artists’ looking glasses, a veritable hall of mirrors where one can see that all we take for granted isn’t exactly what it seems. Here, questions beget questions: Who decides what is beautiful, good, and true? What insights can we gather from our own mortal and abject nature? What should be preserved from our old myths, and what should we lay to rest? What are the collateral damages in a culture that commodifies and categorizes? The artists in this exhibition show that perhaps, these very questions are the tools we need to survive the present.