Frieze Los Angeles 2022: Exhibitions to See
Exhibition view: Kelly Lynn Jones, Love Letter, The Pit, Los Angeles (15 January–26 February 2022). Courtesy The Pit.
Ocula Magazine brings you a list of must-see exhibitions in Los Angeles for the 2022 edition of Frieze L.A., which will open in a new venue in Beverly Hills from 17 to 20 February, hosting over 100 participating galleries and institutions.
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures
Art + Practice, 1 Lock Road, 3401W 43rd Place
18 September 2021–19 February 2022
African-American dancer and video artist Blondell Cummings' moving pictures combine photographic imagery and the kinetic energy of movement to explore daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life.
The first institutional exhibition dedicated to Cummings features rarely seen works from the artist's private archive in addition to performance documentation, interviews, and photographs.
Performances like Chicken Soup (1981), which was awarded the American Masterpiece title in 2006, staged the familial kitchen, where the artist revisited childhood memories through repeated gestures of cooking, washing, and scrubbing.
Snake whisky still life and other stories
Various Small Fires, 812 North Highland Avenue
15 January–20 February 2022
Snake whisky still life and other stories borrows its title from Lao photographer Pao Houa Her's documentation of the Hmong community inside 'whisky villages' in rural Laos.
Bringing together surrealist dreamscapes, indigenous perspectives on land and monument, and allegorical narratives with animal protagonists, the group exhibition contends with different attitudes that emerge in reaction to social realities today.
Among works on show, the Postcommodity collective's five-channel video installation A Very Long Line (2016) sheds light on the treatment of Haitian refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Kelly Lynn Jones: Love Letter
The Pit, 918 Ruberta Avenue
15 January–26 February 2022
Painter and founder of creative platform Little Paper Planes, Kelly Lynn Jones' occupations often take her away from her artistic practice.
Jones' first solo exhibition with the gallery, Love Letter, marks the artist's return to painting after 12 years, across ten oils on canvas that convey the painter's awe for life, including mesmerising landscapes and semi-autobiographical figurations.
Among them, Ordinary instant (2021) renders a sleeping figure in a purple room dotted with pink petals. A ray of moonlight casts beyond the potted plants to illuminate her face.
Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye
California African American Museum, 600 State Drive
16 February–4 September 2022
Troy Montes-Mitchie's solo museum exhibition draws parallels between the tailor's intuitive awareness of the body and the artist's encounters with boundaries that mark the Black body's place in American history.
Echoing Michie's previous assemblage and collage works, the act of draping—be it over person or nation—is visited across collage, drawing, and sculpture for Rock of Eye.
Works on show include the graphite and pencil drawing America Is Woven of Many Threads #1 (2019): outlines of two bodies stitched in yellow thread layered on cutout images of Black men set against cityscapes.
Rochelle Feinstein: You Again
Hannah Hoffman, 2504 West 7th Street 2F
12 February–26 March 2022
American visual artist Rochelle Feinstein's six-venue exhibition replicates the artist's diverse formal explorations spanning painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture.
Arranged thematically, each venue will show recent bodies of work alongside older works from Feinstein's three decade long practice, amongst which Travel Abroad (1999), a mix-media collage documentation of the artist's travels across two canvases.
Lucy Dodd: Heart Overture
Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Blvd
2 February–12 March 2022
American painter and installation artist Lucy Dodd renders mystical biomorphic topographies across energetic compositions that evoke spiritual and cosmological landscapes.
Often made from pigments gathered from nature and the artist's environment, installations like Holy Basil(ica) (2019), a blend of holy basil, yew berry, and squid ink assembled on seven chair frames, result in creature-like masses reincarnated.
Nicole Eisenman: Man at the Center of Man
Vielmetter Los Angeles, 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue
16 November 2021–20 February 2022
MacArthur Fellowship recipient Nicole Eisenman is known for figurative paintings and sculptures that undertake stark but levelled observations of human experience.
Eisenmann's Man at the Center of Men (2019) sculpture, made from plaster, foam, fibreglass, and epoxy resin, shows two metallatic figures fused together; one is seated on the other's back holding a mirror in each hand, hinting at codependency, or perhaps exploitation.
Danie Cansino
Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung King Road
19 February–
Working in a range of mediums including oil paint, cardboard, and lined paper, Danie Cansino's practice investigates Chicanx and tattoo culture, drawing from her experience with inking and its relationship to colonisation in the United States.
Collapsing high and low art, works like Make Your Mark (2020) show a ballpoint drawn map reading 'FUCK ICE' in one corner, inscribed using Flamin' Hot Cheetos dust.
Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation
LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.
4 July 2021–13 March 2022
Legacies of Exchange brings together works by Chinese contemporary artists including Ai Weiwei, Wang Guan Yi, and Xu Bing, produced in response to political conflict and international exchange.
Borrowed from the Yuz Foundation Collection in Shanghai, the collaborative effort features iconic works like Ai's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2011), 12 bronze animal heads mounted on columns, arranged in a row, inspired by architecture from China's imperial period.
Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes
LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.
12 December 2021–12 June 2022
Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes is an ode to Indigenous creative resilience, bringing the past into the present, Mexico beside the United States, across contemporary artworks and cartographies that challenge narratives of belonging and place.
The oldest map of Mexico City is etched in wooden pavement in Maria Castillo Deball's Vista de Ojos (2014), while a series of maps by Sandy Rodriguez explore social memory and contemporary politics.
Olafur Eliasson: Your light spectrum and presence
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 1010 N Highland Avenue
5 February–2 April 2022
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson creates immersive environments blending light, colour, and movement across painting and large-scale installations that generate hyper sensory experiences that challenge visual perception.
Following Eliasson's treatment of ocular devices in the LED colour projection You ocular relief (2021), Your light spectrum and presence continues the artist's inquiry into mirage and visual encounter, with oils on canvas like Colour experiment no. 92 (2020), a flower-shaped colour wheel in which neighbouring shades on the spectrum blend into one another.
Jonas Wood: Plants and Animals
David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W Edgewood Pl.
22 January–5 March 2022
Centred around the motif of wood, Boston-born painter Jonas Wood will show new drawings and paintings of fauna and flora alongside family scenes made into fictional narratives.
Rendered in bold forms in Wood's signature saturated hues, oil and acrylics on canvas like Patterned Interior with Mar Vista View (2020) depict a bedroom scene with loudly patterned curtains and bed linen, with a window opening onto a lush junglescape.
Yuri Yuan: The Great Swimmer
Make Room, 5119 Melrose Avenue
15 January–12 February 2022
Longing and loss permeate Yuri Yuan's oils on canvas, which show solitary, faceless figures caught in the stillness of daily life, as their surroundings quiet down for a moment and they are left in contemplation.
The Great Swimmer borrows from an unpublished fragment by Czech writer Franz Kafka, which evokes an awakening from dreams, or for the artist, a submerging into recollection.
Paintings on show are inspired from the swimming lessons Yuan took at the age of 13 following her move to Singapore from China—among them, the lone body in Towel (2021) wrapped in a dark blue towel, looks towards the turquoise pool, recalling the painter's alienation.
Phyllida Barlow: glimpse
Hauser & Wirth, 901 East 3rd Street
17 February–8 May 2022
British sculptor Phyllida Barlow's imposing sculptures, made from assemblages of cardboard, fabric, and wood, are often arranged in crowded configurations, brimming with colour and life.
For glimpse, Barlow will be showing new large-scale works made in response to Hauser & Wirth's Neoclassical South Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles. Framing the sculptures will be a staircase suspended on stilts, made by the artist to serve as a proscenium for surrounding works. —[O]
