Opening reception: Thursday, Semptember 3, from 6 to 9 pm
NOMA GALLERY is pleased to present “Play With Your Own Marbles: Walead Beshty, Karl Haendel, Patrick Hill" an exhibition curated by Betty Nguyen, Founder and Editor of First Person Magazine.
“Play With Your Own Marbles” is a bold attempt to challenge the viewer's usual access points into an artwork. Nguyen brings together three contemporary Los Angeles-based artists who examine the finite moment when a work becomes defined as "finished". The narratives of artistic and curatorial process are not only foregrounded in the content of the works – crafted with raw materials, portraying utilitarian tools, and addressing studio apparatus – but additionally, the temporality, disposability, and pervasiveness of “art” is addressed. Decoding the artist’s surfaces and content, the participant begins to process the sublimation of art as a part of life, one that is as rich in semiotics as it is in aesthetics.
Patrick Hill’s concrete tableaux included in "Marbles" is mindful of its materials in the rawest of forms. Like a Richard Serra black paint stick wall drawing, the monochromatic usage of a medium built up leads the eye to translate the painting towards a sculpture. Hill paints with concrete in aggressively diagonal stripes. Its grey, heavy textures find themselves not on the floor, but floating vertically on a pale dyed canvas which creates a disbelief of weight and counterbalances masculinity and femininity.
Karl Haendel’s exact graphite pencil drawings may recall Gerhard Richter’s photo-realism, yet through his playful approach to scale and subject matter, his drawings transcend skillful reproductions. Haendel’s work may initially appear to be straightforward because of the familiar content drawn of sharpened pencil tips, torn paper, and larger-than-life razor blades, however, viewers unraveling the obfuscating layers will uncover the insidious humor embedded into his vernacular choices. The subversive narrative implied in Haendel’s imagery engages the viewer’s interest and serves as a trigger for active construction to piece together contextual and open-ended ideas. In this capacity, Haendel’s work operates as a prosthetic artistic device on both a conscious and subconscious level.
Dialectic investigation of artistic process becomes evident in Walead Beshty's work through his documentation of this invisible culture. While a photograph may document a direct moment, Beshty’s photograms are deeper, darker examinations of the production process when it is left to chance. His investigation into the corrosion of an object during its trajectory, provide visual traces or material memory of their own physical lives. Beshty’s seductive, elusive abstractions of an art object contain undeniably poetic and political statements. Beshty notes that his “mail art" in particular also serves as both a nod to Duchamp's “Large Glass” – famously “improved” by injuries sustained during transport.
Curator Betty Nguyen is the founder and Creative Director of First Person Magazine. Nguyen worked with galleries in the UK, San Francisco and New York. In 2006, she curated her first major exhibition at YBCA, "Cosmic Wonder" that was inspired by two memorable words from Bertolt Brecht's The Rise and Fall of Mahogany, "Something's missing." First Person Magazine is a print manifestation of her ongoing commitment to disseminating the dialogue between artists and curators.