ARYO TOH DJOJO

This will be the first time the artist incorporates elements such as film andfound photography, further exploring the notion of how we perceive truth.The show debuts a new body of paintings alluding to the artist’s continuedinterest in UFO sightings and the socio-political discourses that havearisen throughout history as a result.

The following is an essay authored by Michael Slenske on the occasion ofthis exhibition.

On June 10, 2022 at 5:10 PM, three hours before sunset on this breezysummer Friday, Aryo Toh Djojo witnessed a brilliant flash of light above therooftop of his studio in downtown Los Angeles. The sun was high, theclouds marbling the cornflower sky, so this blip of metallic radiance wasodd. Too high to be a plane, moving too fast—and skirting across too manytoo many different vectors—to be a weather balloon, it disappeared sofast it left Toh Djojo with only one explanation: a UFO. As a dedicatedUfologist, Toh Djojo didn’t take this sighting lightly. The only other one hewitnessed occurred more than two decades ago in Glendale when hewas skateboarding around a friend’s driveway. At first, this group of high schoolers thought it was a helicopter, but when this similarly metallic orbhovering over this suburban house vanished into thin air, these teenageskate punks all turned to each other...and screamed.

Toh Djojo happened to catch this more recent flashpoint on video, and itserved as a wellspring for a new series of paintings that incorporate theseriality of rooflines as a vantage point for framing phenomenologicalevents. Unless you are perched along the California coast, up in the hills,or hovering at cruising altitude over LAX, horizon lines in Los Angeles aremost often interpreted (or interrupted, depending on your perspective) bythe various geometries of a roof. Majestic Mansards, flat mid-centuryplanes, Moorish revival domes and metallic modernist slopes populate thecity—and have historically graced the serialized works of Catherine Opie,Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and countless other L.A. artists over thedecades—but for Toh Djojo, the anonymous gable was the perfect pitchfor his projective paintings comprising Over My Head, his solo debut inTokyo.

For Toh Djojo, the gable is “like a pyramid, there’s a mystery behind it, andwithin it,” he says, “And then there’s a mystery in the sky around it.” Theartist began his investigation with a night-shadowed pyramidal roof withtwo illuminated windows glowing like bright eyes beneath a gradient skyinvoking the Northern Lights. As with most of Toh Djojo’s loosely airbrushedpaintings—whose freehanded application confers a veil that clouds anyparticular markers of time or place while giving off a general sense ofnostalgia—this work features a green orb floating in the distance. Like anOn Kawara in reverse, this painting is one of twelve 12 x 16 inch canvasescreated in a sequence and titled with dates in sequential months. Thedates refer to historically significant UFO sightings, freighting each piecewith meaning that doesn’t necessarily relate to the images. Or does it?

The first painting in the series is titled January 6, 1969, a nod to the datewhen Jimmy Carter and 10 members of the Leary Lions Club saw a ball oflight that appeared in the sky for 15 minutes over Leary, Georgia.According to a statement by Carter, the UFO “seemed to move toward usfrom a distance, stopped-moved partially away-returned, then departed.Bluish at first, then reddish, luminous, not solid.” The juxtaposition of sky

and blank slated house project themselves onto the historic sighting,much like Charles Gaines’s iconic Night/Crimes series create uncannyassociations between L.A. murder scenes and images of the night sky.They beg existential questions: Did that happen here? or more simplyWhere is here? In subsequent paintings Toh Djojo pairs a mountain lionpeeking over a cliff-like roofline at twilight (May 11, 1950), another depictsa house awash in flames against a midnight black sky (July 8, 1947), whileyet another (October 11, 1973) reimagines a photo taken by the late L.A.multimedia artist Mike Kelley of his childhood home, which he would laterreplicate as to-scale moveable sculptural environment as the epicinstallation, Mobile Homestead. The only painting Toh Djojo rendered inblack and white, the piece juxtaposes the Kelley family home, which stillstands in Westland, Michigan, with the date of the so-called PascagoulaAbduction. On the evening in question Charles Hickson, 42, and CalvinPark, 19, claimed they were fishing off a pier along Mississippi’sPascagoula River when a 10-by-40 foot ovoid UFO, making whirringsounds and emitting blue lights, paralyzed them. The two men wereallegedly brought aboard the craft where three robotic creatures withcrab-like claws examined them before letting them go. Though their claimwas discredited by various people, the UFO in question sounds verysimilar to the one described as the “sport model” by renowned UfologistBob Lazar.

“I think their technology has evolved along with our technology, so youdon’t see too many of those these days,” says Toh Djojo, who made aluminous painting of a sportster for this exhibition. Teasing out this evolutionof formal concerns, Toh Djojo is also installing two documentary items: anedited version of his video from the June 2022 sighting and a foundvintage Polaroid of a house that could stand in as a potential sourceimage. Like the haunting mise en scenes of his paintings, the lines of theroof in the Polaroid frame a (possibly fake) sport model craft floating eerilyin the distance. There is truthiness in these archival materials and paintings,which feel like a New Pictures Generation for a generation raised in asocial-mediated image culture. The only thing left to do with all theseimages Toh Djojo is sampling and editing is to contemplate the eventsthey capture.

Take Love Above, a portrait of a woman’s head from a vintage Pirellicalendar, manipulated through an AI program by the artist, then renderedas a celestial body rising up to an infinite cosmos. She appears enrapturedby a tiny green vessel in the distance, or maybe she’s enthralled withThoughts in Mind, a painting of a window in a dark room framing a gradientsunset. Maybe it’s a voyeur’s perspective from one of these gabledhouses? Or maybe it’s another vantage onto another tiny painting spellingout the words Up Dog (or “What’s up, Dog?”) in delicately airbrushedskywriting. While the ephemeral greeting in the painting is hopeful, thetitle, Not Much, suggests a more ambiguous reality. Unidentified vesselsfloating around the smoke-filled letters are framed by red circles, the typethat lock an enemy craft into the sights of a fighter jet. The hazy slipstreamof this mediated suburban/alien tableaux recalls a line Kelley wrote abouthis Mobile Homestead not long before his untimely death: “The project, inits initial conception, expressed my true feelings about the milieu in whichI was raised, and my belief that one always has to hide one’s true desiresand beliefs behind a facade of socially acceptable lies.”

Press release courtesy Perrotin. Text: Michael Slenske.