THE Magazine - Los Angeles

As its title suggests, the Beautiful/Decay A to Z group presented a conceptual dichotomy. The twenty-six artists in the exhibition were bound together as a curatorial collective, with work ranging from abstract to illustrative, marking the ten-year anniversary of Beautiful/Decay magazine. The overall mood of the show could be described as apocalyptic, but no heavy feeling pervaded, even though most of the work was dark in tone and subject matter. What predominated were colorful stories presenting the people, places, and landscape of ludicrous tragedy and the truth behind seemingly imaginary scenarios.
An owl plays guitar in Ai Kijima's detailed, fused tapestry I'll Remember You. Vast scenes of annihilation are ironically portrayed in two small landscapes, Jacob Magraw's Mount Eerie and Pearl C. Hsiung's Shushaton. Abstract works added the energy of chaos and destruction, as in Mark Shoening's Splay and Simmons and Burke's Fire #2. Heroes were present, too, be they representative of some noble commander in Scott Anderson's Kamandant or inferred by the relics of an urban shaman, as in Pepe Mar's Monster Clusters. The protagonist of Wendell Gladstone's Things Fall Apart hung in meticulously tacky grandeur, surrounded by symbols of consumerist tendencies and social threads. Another hero appeared in Robbie Conal's, Dock's Psychedelic No-No. This glitter-embellished impasto skeleton danced and mocked passersby from the picture window facing the street.

Neither the grouping nor the work itself was in any way self-indulgent. Rather, the art was executed with dignity and evident pride, imparting substance without calling attention to its own intelligence. Such work injects humor into the face of adversity, and this show struck a balance between beauty and decay. The message was that in everything good there is something just too good to be true, and that out of everything horrific, something beautiful can result.