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Kim Abeles
Carbon Studies; Location Studies; Nature StudiesPhantom Galleries L.A.
Los Angeles
www.phantomgalleriesla.com
Carbon Studies; Location Studies; Nature Studies
Kim Abeles
George W Bush in 30 Days of Smog, smog on dinner plate, 9 ½" diameter, 2008
Courtesy of the artist; photo Ken Marchionno
George W Bush in 30 Days of Smog, smog on dinner plate, 9 ½" diameter, 2008
Courtesy of the artist; photo Ken Marchionno
Neatly paralleling the way she spreads about particulate matter, Kim Abeles mounted three concurrent solo exhibitions at far-flung corners of greater Los Angeles. An Edgar Varela-curated exhibition at the Phantom Galleries/Continental Building was the most comprehensive of the three, offering the freshest work, while the Torrance Art Museum displayed selections from many of the same series through a different curatorial prism (smog versus travelogue). At Harvard-Westlake, a week's worth of trash, worked over in a sculptural collaboration with the students, tied into Abeles's previous public projects.
The cheeky 1992 series Commemorative Smog Plates runs from McKinley (who presided over the first pair of pollution-emitting factories in the U.S. -- car factories in Detroit) through Reagan (whose policies were frequently anti-environmental). Here Abeles renders deeply scored portraiture and precise writing with her trademark "ink" -- smog amassed on surfaces suspended out the window of her downtown studio and "hand" -- stencils adhered to the surfaces. The darkness varies, as atmospheric conditions shifted over the course of the twenty to forty days of exposure. Earlier works such as the Smog Masks function like drawings, their cartoonish renderings at odds with the topic's gravitas. There's always a sociopolitical undercurrent in Abeles's interactions with neighborhoods. Dodger Stadium, for instance, with its typical elongated model trees dramatically extending out and off aerial maps, deconstructs city centers in socio-environmental terms.
The audio/video Wind at Continental may have been the best single work among all the exhibitions, buoyed by the synergetic industrial feel of its surroundings with its rough yet stylized evocation of natural phenomena. At the Continental space, all Abeles's work resonated with the finely finished walls, worn concrete floor, and the fluffy dirty lint on the exposed beams overhead, as well as the view outside, which put the city itself in proximity with captured, aestheticized traces of it in the room -- and if you breathed deeply, in your bloodstream too.
The cheeky 1992 series Commemorative Smog Plates runs from McKinley (who presided over the first pair of pollution-emitting factories in the U.S. -- car factories in Detroit) through Reagan (whose policies were frequently anti-environmental). Here Abeles renders deeply scored portraiture and precise writing with her trademark "ink" -- smog amassed on surfaces suspended out the window of her downtown studio and "hand" -- stencils adhered to the surfaces. The darkness varies, as atmospheric conditions shifted over the course of the twenty to forty days of exposure. Earlier works such as the Smog Masks function like drawings, their cartoonish renderings at odds with the topic's gravitas. There's always a sociopolitical undercurrent in Abeles's interactions with neighborhoods. Dodger Stadium, for instance, with its typical elongated model trees dramatically extending out and off aerial maps, deconstructs city centers in socio-environmental terms.
The audio/video Wind at Continental may have been the best single work among all the exhibitions, buoyed by the synergetic industrial feel of its surroundings with its rough yet stylized evocation of natural phenomena. At the Continental space, all Abeles's work resonated with the finely finished walls, worn concrete floor, and the fluffy dirty lint on the exposed beams overhead, as well as the view outside, which put the city itself in proximity with captured, aestheticized traces of it in the room -- and if you breathed deeply, in your bloodstream too.