January 6-February 17, 2024

The words “dream” and “work,” roots of the Freudian term “dreamwork,” would appear to tug in opposite directions. Whereas “dream” promises the free play of imagination unencumbered by responsibilities, “work” suggests, well, the opposite. Nancy Youdelman cheerfully accepts the creative challenge of reconciling these opposed forces as she does here in an always charming if sometimes unsettling body of artworks that date back to the early 1970’s and forward to the present day.

January 6-February 17, 2024

The underlying source material here comes from vintage modern design publications, thus the title “Significant Properties.” Some photographic images—a Richard Neutra designed desert house, for instance—can be recognized as such. Most however are far more obscure and further disguised by a process of digital collage before emerging from the printer to be stretched and then overpainted with sometimes brightly colored accents applied by hand.

November 18-December 23, 2023

Tip of the iceberg.

This is the thought that pops to mind when considering the recent paintings of veteran Los Angeles artist Gerard Brane (b. 1947, Latrobe PA); paintings which, to follow the analogy, are as charmingly simple on their face as they are complex (and just a bit dangerous) beneath the surface. 

Each of the seventeen smallish (30 x 24”) oil on canvas paintings on view features the image of a single vase. Though easily identified as such, the vase-idea is transformed by the artist into an always beautiful and consistently inventive symbol rather than offering a plausible representation of an actual thing. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that these are works of the human imagination and that there are no crates filled with still life props gathering dust somewhere in the artist’s studio.

November 18-December 23, 2023

We are pleased to announce the exhibition “Susan Singer: ‘Bodies’ (1977) and Related Artworks,” a presentation of photo-related images and objects by this still highly pertinent if now little remembered Los Angeles artist.

Join us for an opening reception on Saturday, November 18 from 2pm to 5pm. “Susan Singer: ‘Bodies’ (1977) and Related Artworks,” is presented in conjunction with “Gerard Brane: New Work.” Both exhibitions continue through -December 23 at as-is.la

If the art of the 1970’s taught us anything it is that “scale is content,” that when an artwork is unusually large (or tiny, for that matter) size becomes an important part of its meaning. Susan Singer (then Susan Grieger) emerged as an artist and photographer at precisely this moment and she seized on this and other characteristically 1970’s insights with a vengeance.

September 30 - November 11, 2023

“Iconoclasm”—the violent if sometimes creative destruction of the icon—is a founding gesture in the history of art. The threat (or more often the overblown fear) of “cancellation” is a more recent development. These and a cluster of related concepts converge in a body of new work by the Dutch born, Los Angeles based artist Joost van Oss.

The artworks proceed according to a strategy that is as powerfully effective as it is modestly simple. They begin life as picture postcards. Often, but not always, the postcards feature an important work of modern or contemporary art. And often, but not always, the postcards are acquired from the art institution where the work is held. The artist then takes the cards and, with a custom-made cutting tool, punches one or more holes in each, an overtly negative act that is ultimately quite positive (and thoroughly aesthetic) in its effect.

September 30 - November 11, 2023

In choosing “Heat Island” as the title for his exhibition, the artist aptly characterizes the manifest content of the work on view. This term, according to Rogers, “refers to the phenomenon of urbanized areas experiencing higher temperatures than outlying areas.”  And, just as promised, the two small sculptures and ten elegantly executed oil on canvas paintings (in a variety of sizes ranging from 14 x 16 inches to 71 x 79 inches) on view in this show, though they are cool to the touch, suggest the sensation of heat the artist’s title invokes.

But heat here is presented not so much in the positive sense as a source of human sustenance and protection from the cold but rather as a nagging—if subtly and deeply coded—cause of concern. And the vague sense of unease that begins in the realm of this artist’s content—the gas flames of course, but also an open refrigerator and other suggestive subjects as well—is amplified in the realm of form (and perhaps even exhibition design), as objects and images of markedly different sizes and proportions jostle against one another on the gallery walls, competing in interesting ways for the viewer’s attention.

August 12 - September 23

In the “dialectic of order and chaos” that structures all poetic discourse, veteran Los Angeles artist Jesse Benson (b. 1978, Orange, CA) places himself squarely in the camp of order as his exhibition title, Organizer, so clearly suggests. But this presentation of new and recent paintings, sculptures and artifacts argues the position in favor of order so relentlessly that, as it approaches the point of absurdity, a viewer might suspect that the artist is, if secretly, on the side of a wild and liberating chaos, after all. The two positions being irreconcilable, it is left then to the viewers to examine the evidence and judge the artist’s real and true intentions for themselves.

June 17 - July 29, 2023

“Hildegarde Duane: Wild Honey Meets Togetherman.”
A Revisionist 50’s Superhero Love Story.
Eros! Politics! Chemistry!
Featuring a music video, photo pieces, costumes and artifacts.

Los Angeles based Conceptual artist Hildegarde Duane has since 1976 made narrative art in videos, photo stories, costume, calligraphy and written word. Amongst multi-media precursors to the Pictures movement and associated with the flowering of video art at the Long Beach Museum of Art, her work explores pop culture, the status of place and space, socio-political commentary and erotic feminism. In addition to her solo work, Duane has collaborated extensively with artist David Lamelas as well as with Ilene Segalove (who appears here in the role of Wild Honey).

June 17 - August 5, 2023

Turning consists of three works in which domestic tracts and remnants of infrastructure are unearthed and rebuilt; raised and collapsed. Turning is an excavation of the historical and material loss of the Southern California built environment. Three images—a hearth without a home, a tomb-like structure, and a mound of earth—are segmented and fused to the topmost layers of topographic stacks of reclaimed building units (reclaimed tiles, bricks, and cement pavers). The demolition sites erupt from the ground like a staircase, rapidly ascending into both mounds of debris and, alternately, the foundational layers of building. In moments of quaking tension, the edges of the photographic frame begin to fragment, breaking our habitual experience of photography and holding still the transience of the developing metropolis. Important to the work is the visual language of labor, called to mind by my physical act of solely assembling the modular sculptures when exhibited. The emphasis on the material evidence of construction reflects on the laboring class that built the structures around us.

April 22 - June 10, 2023

There is a widely held expectation that an artist working from a distinct, perhaps under-represented, subject position—a youngish Black man, for instance—will make art that reflects, even foregrounds, his own racial identity. Appreciating the power of expectation, as he does, Los Angeles artist Lenard Smith codes his work with great subtlety. Indeed, his artworks are sometimes so subtle on the subject of race that they effectively ask the question: Is the Black content we find in this art “implied,” that is to say, placed there intentionally, if quietly, by the artist? Or is it “inferred,” present largely as the result of our determination to find the thing we are seeking?

April 22 - June 10, 2023

“These still life works were started in 2008 and continue, on and off, to this day. I have been in a deep immersion with books from early on when my dad would regularly take me to the Gardena Public Library – he hated buying books and loved to read. From being an avid reader I went to work at The Strand Bookstore in New York City in 1980. I was also the Acquisitions Librarian at the Art Center College Library in Pasadena from 1989 to 2017.

March 4 - April 15, 2023

Tom Eatherton (1934–2023) was one of the most accomplished of the California Light and Space Artists,  that cohort of 1960’s and 1970’s era figures who’s gallery-filling, controlled-light room environments directed attention to the specifically “perceptual” qualities of the art viewing experience. Even more than the others, Eatherton doggedly pursued the alluring if ultimately quixotic dream of producing a direct and unmediated art experience detached from history and cultural context. “Not ‘symbolic’ but entirely ‘experiential,’” he would insist about his own work. If the results sometimes diverged from the artist’s sweeping ambitions, if “the ideal” struggled valiantly against the limitations of “the real,” then this, as they say, was “not a bug but a feature,” as now, particularly with the passage of time, the surviving material artifacts of this practice are practically aching with poignancy.

January 14 - February 25, 2023

“Poetics,” according to one old Structuralist, is largely a matter of reconciling “the pole of selection” with “the pole of combination.” Some hundred years later, and operating in a far more crowded media environment, Los Angeles painter Brian Sharp has come to a similarly stark conclusion: That making art might be a matter of finding things “hidden,” so to speak, in plain sight (selection) and then interpreting and presenting them in new and meaningful ways (combination).

November 5 - December 23, 2022

Throughout the history of theatre, theatrical props and sets have been used to support and complement the actors performing on stage. The 1970’s era plays of artists Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) and Robert Wilhite (b 1946) challenged this hierarchy, provocatively suggesting that stage actors may sometimes be serving the interests of their sets and props even more than the other way around. Acting on this insight, as-is.la presents “Robert Wilhite and Guy de Cointet,” an exhibition featuring sets, props and artifacts from “Iglu” (first performed, Los Angeles, 1977) and “Ethiopia” (first performed, Los Angeles, 1976 and again, most recently in October of this year), the two plays co-authored by this pair of historically important if sometimes insufficiently recognized artists.

September 17 - October 29, 2022

Ron Griffin’s paintings have been aptly described as “readymades in reverse.” They deliver the cool alienation of Marcel Duchamp’s famous strategy while accepting none of the accompanying labor-saving advantages so prized within today’s neoliberal economies, art and otherwise. Quite the contrary. For while Griffin’s artworks are similarly under-committed along the axis of content—often featuring small bits of paper and plastic detritus casually plucked off the sidewalk—they are wildly over-committed along the axis of form, as Griffin exactingly “reproduces” his found objects in paint materials at a precise 1:1 scale. A related body of work begins with wax paper toilet seat covers (Duchamp again) of the sort found in public bathrooms.

July 30 - September 10, 2022

“Katy Crowe: A Wrinkle in the Macula” is presented in conjunction with “Paul Tzanetopolous: Silk Series.” Artists’ reception on Saturday, July 30, 2-5 pm.

This tightly focused exhibition consists of four medium-sized (52 x 40”) oil on linen paintings and a single smaller (16 x 22”) painting, all executed between 2019 and 2022. Here, irregular geometric shapes—often full or partial circles—jostle against passages of vivid if loosely applied paint color, resolving in a tense if finally stable equilibrium.