Laura Whitcomb
26m
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Interviews by Brainard Carey
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In 1932, Paulina Peavy (1901 – 1999) attended a séance at the home of Ida L. Ewing in Santa Ana, California, where she claims to have met a UFO named Lacamo, a spirit from another world. From that moment forward Peavy, a university-trained artist, painted with a brush that “moved on its own.” In order to better channel Lacamo’s energies, Peavy also constructed and wore masks when she painted, occasionally signing her works with Lacamo’s name alongside her own. Peavy’s entire life was dedicated to promoting her worldview and various philosophies through drawing, painting, sculpture, text, and film. Her works on paper depict the artist’s individualized visual cosmos using shapes that resemble energy beams, solar systems, and procreative organic shapes signifying genitalia, ova, fallopian tubes, sperm, and fetuses. Peavy’s life and work were constantly evolving to reflect her belief in mankind’s evolution to an androgynous one-sex through contact with aliens. Laura Whitcomb is a surrealist scholar and the director of Label Curatorial, which focuses on lesser-known artists and movements of the West Coast. She has worked at the Gala - Salvador Dalí Foundation at the Dalí Theatre Museum in Figueres, Spain, while also contributing essays for exhibitions at the Dalí Museum in Florida. She is also a focused scholar of artists who engage hermetic traditions in their art practice. "Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler" in 2023 (D.A.P.) is edited by the adjunct LACMA curator Dr. Ilene Susan Fort and focuses on the channeler artist Paulina Peavy, whom Whitcomb curated at Beyond Baroque in 2021 and for the Andrew Edlin gallery in 2023. Label Curatorial focuses on sound art and light artists. Studying the inceptive roots of what became Los Angeles's most notable home-grown movement, she presented a Light and Space installation of Peter Alexander, Laddie John Dill, and Larry Bell at the official re-opening of the Brand Library and Art Center in 2014. In 2022, she curated "Luminaries of Light and Space" at LAX Airport, produced by Dublab, which included these artists along with Robert Irwin, De Wain Valentine, Fred Eversley, Helen Pashgian, Hap Tivey, and Gisela Colon. Whitcomb has two books forthcoming through Label Curatorial, highlighting artist and poet-run galleries from 1949-1965 and artists of the Beat era who continued surrealist lineages while exploring the occult. Paulina Peavy (1901 - 1999) 82 Modern Art, n.d. Mixed media 7.75 x 10 x 0.5 inches Paulina Peavy (1901 - 1999) Phantasma 59, c. 1980s Acrylic on canvas board 24 x 30 inches Paulina Peavy (1901 - 1999), Untitled, c. 1937 - 1939, Oil on panel, 72 x 48 inches
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Karla Knight
Karla Knight in her studio Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announceUniversal Remote, a solo exhibition of new work for artist Karla Knight, running from November 3 – December 22, 2023. A solo display of Knight’s work will be held concurrently at The Art Show (ADAA) at the Park Avenue Armory from November 1–5. Over the past four decades, Knight has executed her idiosyncratic visons of UFO related imagery with the stubborn persistence of an artist unbeholden to the dictates of art world trends, although contemporary interest in spiritualist art has certainly offered a favorable context. Knight’s relationship with what might be broadly termed “the occult” is rooted in her upbringing; her father authored publications on, among other subjects, UFOs and ghosts, and her grandfather, also a writer, penned a book about afterlife communication. Her solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum in 2021-22 expanded Knight’s recognition markedly and came at the same time she was beginning to experiment with weathered feedbags from the 1940s and ’50s, attracted to their creamy color and the traces they bore of past lives. She calls these works “tapestries,” as she embroiders the fabric and embellishes it with a combination of acrylic paint pens, vinyl paint, colored pencil, and graphite. Her newUniversal Remoteseries of drawings and tapestries riffs on the notion of channels with central motifs inspired by anachronistic television sets that hail from the early decades of the Cold War; a time when the frequency of UFO sightings was a source of great national anxiety. The tapestryUniversal Remote 1, 2022, is painted with a boxy television-like form—or “receiver,” a word the artist relishes—bearing her cryptic characters along with circles that suggest various dials and buttons: channel selectors, speakers, fine tuners, picture expanders. A large, rounded shape marked with blue crosshatching and abstract designs, some of which resemble yellow eyes with slivered pupils, overtakes the “screen.” At the mandala’s heart is Knight’s returning volumetric orb, here coronated with concentric circles. This celestial sphere’s significance denoted by its centrality to the composition, becomes a kind of universal picture, open to an endlessly expanding universe of possible readings. Karla Knight’s work is currently featured in the group exhibition,Sightings, at the Sun Valley Museum of Art (ID), and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), among others. A second edition of her Aldrich Museum exhibition catalogue,Navigator, with added images of recent works and a new essay by Cassie Packard will be available on November 1, 2023. Karla Knight (b. 1958) Big Night Vision, 2023 Flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton 46 x 73 inches Karla Knight (b. 1958) Delphi 3, 2023 Flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton 33.5 x 30 inches Karla Knight (b. 1958) Universal Remote 1, 2022 Flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton 68 x 49 inches.
Alva Mooses
Alva Mooses photographed by Mauricio Cortes Ortega at Shandaken Projects, Governor's Island 2023. Alva Mooses is an interdisciplinary artist. Her work explores the intersections of printed media, ceramics, and sculpture while engaging with earth-based materials to signal the memory of geological time. Her ceramic series titled ear to the earth/ culebra, truena, tormenta was exhibited at Jane Hartsook Gallery as part of her artist residency at Greenwich House Pottery. The slip-cast reconfigured globes move away from historical representations of the earth as a perfect sphere on a steady axis toward a transformative body—the pieces are glazed, distorted, mended, and kiln-fired multiple times. culebra, truena, tormenta translates to snake, thunder, storm, referring to the Mexica earth and mother goddess Coatlicue whose entire skirt, head, and belt represent snakes. The legendery 16th century Coatlicue statue was buried and unearthed multiple times since the Spanish conquest out of concern that the statue would inspire religious and political resistance; it now lives in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The writer Mirene Arsanios describes Alva’s ceramic globe series as: “Broken or no longer erect, the globe stands and their measuring systems are inoperative—the deconstructed globes undermine the project of western geography and the violence of its measuring tools, favoring instead a world, earth, and planet governed by the erotics of its own materials.” Alva holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited her work in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. She has completed fellowships and residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop, Shandaken Projects, Socrates Sculpture Park, Center for Book Arts, Greenwich House Pottery, The University of Chicago, Tou Trykk in Stavanger, Norway, and Casa Wabi, in Oaxaca, Mexico, among others. She serves on the faculty at Hunter College in the Department of Art and Art History and lives with her daughter and partner in Brooklyn. ear to the earth/ culebra, truena, tormenta, 2022 | ceramic | 20x15x8 inches | Photo by Alan Wiener courtesy of Greenwich House Pottery. ear to the earth/ culebra, truena, tormenta, 2022 | ceramic | 16x10x9 inches | Photo by Alan Wiener courtesy of Greenwich House Pottery. Undercurrents, 2023 | Drawing with CNC machine | 13x17 inches
Matthew Kirk
Matthew Kirk’s (Navajo Nation) practice combines the materiality of his long-held job as an art-handler with mark-making inspired by comics, abstraction, and Diné (Navajo) visuality. A 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow, his work was recently featured in The New York Times. His recent solo exhibition White Snake (2023) was presented at Halsey McKay Gallery in New York City. Kirk was born in Arizona, raised in Wisconsin, and is based in Queens, New York. Waste Is A Thief, 2023 Wood, acrylic, ink. graphite, leather, coroplast, insulation foam, hardware, wire, canvas 63 x 60.5 x 6 inches (160 x 153.7 x 15.2 cm) Save That Chitter Chatter, 2023 Wood, acrylic, ink, graphite, Nerf, hardware, cotton strap 35.25 x 46.75 inches (89.5 x 118.7 cm) I'll Sing Along, 2023 Canvas, acylic, graphite, hardware, basketball rim, rope, hardware, wood 58.5 x 35 x 7 inches (148.6 x 88.9 x 17.8 cm)
Cyle Warner
Cyle Warner is a Brooklyn-based artist of Afro-Caribbean descent. A recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Photography, he works across mediums, often using fabric and photographs inherited from family to explore his concept of Dis. In 2022 he attended the prestigious Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. Welancora Gallery is proud to present Weh Dem? De Sparrow Catcher?, a solo exhibition of new work by Cyle Warner (b. 2001), on view from July 27 to October 10, 2023. Warner’s first exhibition at the gallery brings together a reimagined archive of photographs and textiles to reveal a very personal exploration of his family’s life in the Caribbean. Sourced from the Warner family archive, the photographs are layered, recomposedand enlarged to conjure feelings of curiosity about Warner’s elders and their life in the Caribbean. The works on view raise a number of questions;namely, what would life be like if there had been no migration to the United States? The photos, ranging from the mid 1940s to the early to mid 1970s, depict family members when they were permanently residing in the Caribbean. The hazy quality and sepia tones, as well as what’s visible, what’s further highlighted, and what’s left to be desired all lend themselves to the artist’s fractured understanding of a time in the Caribbean that he never experienced first hand. Cyle Warner a vessel a jam slow, 2023 Various fabrics and inkjet on fabric on wooden frame. 76 x 64 inches 193 x 162.6 cms. Photo: Copyright The Artist Courtesy of Welancora Gallery. Cyle Warner Album Page II (Debating with Powell and the Queen), 2023 Various Fabrics and Inkjet on Fabric on Stained Wooden Frame 15 1/2 x 11 inches 39.4 x 27.9 cms. Photo: Copyright The Artist Courtesy of Welancora Gallery. Cyle Warner I don't want to go, 2023 Archival pigment print with collage on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 5 x 7 inches 12.7 x 17.8 cms Edition of 2.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Heather Dewey-Hargborg, American artist and bio-hacker most knowned for the project Stranger Visions. Her recent work has been cesored to be showned in China. Ana Brígida for The New York Times Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (such as hair, cigarette butts, or chewed up gum) collected in public places. Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, the Van Abbemuseum, Transmediale and PS1 MOMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Wellcome Collection, and the New York Historical Society, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired. Heather has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a visiting assistant professor of Interactive Media at NYU Abu Dhabi, an artist fellow atAI Now, an Artist-in-Residence at theExploratorium, and is an affiliate ofData & Society. She is also a co-founder and co-curator ofREFRESH, an inclusive and politically engaged collaborative platform at the intersection of Art, Science, and Technology. Hybrid (Trailer) from Heather Dewey-Hagborg on Vimeo. Installation view, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery. Still from Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery.