The Furies


Visitor Welcome Center, June 4 - July 9, 2016



Press Release


The Furies explores voids and chasms, margins and marginalia, dead ends and ghost images, surfaces and holes. What connects the artists in the exhibition is their appreciation of language – the kind of language that gets lost in translation, language with multiple meanings, language that exists only as a spoken thing, language that is deceitful. They work as a circle of artists without easy definition, exploring ideas of belonging and not belonging in different kinds of communities. While their work manifests itself visually in very different ways, they rely on language as the medium that connects the work to its maker, to its viewer, and to the world around it.

Krista Buecking, Akina Cox, Gilda Davidian, Ariane Vielmetter and Esther Pearl Watson have been meeting over the past several years in Los Angeles as a bi-weekly writing group to discuss their varied practices, to maintain critical engagement with one another, and to support each others’ continued development as artists and writers. In 2013, they organized an immersive group show, Hexenhaus, at a vacant home in Altadena, in which each artist occupied and transformed a specific room. Their intention is not to be understood as a collective, but rather as a group of artists whose distinct practices are nurtured by their mutual friendship and by the contrasts and crossovers in the subject matter they are dedicated to.

Krista Buecking’s work pulls from the conventions of lifestyle marketing and consumerism to make explicit the visceral abstractions (formal, economic and social) that interact to produce the neoliberal subject.

Akina Cox examines the integral role of myths in reinforcing and promoting belief systems. By using humble materials and techniques, Cox points to the intimate spaces where stories are shared, and values absorbed.

Gilda Davidian’s practice explores how images form relationships to places and how memories are shaped through photographs. She is interested in how language and information is translated and transferred transgenerationally.

Ariane Vielmetter’s drawings and objects attempt to navigate the contradictions of the female body, a subject perceived to be both shallow and boundless, susceptible to discipline and disregard alike.

Esther Pearl Watson’s paintings and comics play with vernacular of self-taught art to question the slippage of memory, language and narrative.

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