William Powhida
CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY
975 Chung King Road
October 24–December 23
William Powhida, The Lost Night, 2009, graphite, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper, 30 x 22".
Insider art-world jokes—as caricature, if not a kind of portraiture—speak volumes about the “contemporary” moment and often end up serving as important social and historical documents as they age. Consider the rich anthology of nineteenth-century Parisian satiric cartoons (those of Honoré Daumier, Henri Meyer, or Paul Iribe), which mock the Salon scene and its establishment. The New York–based artist William Powhida might well be considered today’s Daumier, and this exhibition proves that the art of art-world satire (as a genre? A tradition?) remains a witty and biting form of discourse.
Like many of his past projects, Powhida’s newest works revolve around the fictional character “William Powhida,” a successful enfant terrible artist/idol. Narrated through hand-drawn, trompe l’oeil printed matter—lists seemingly torn from a spiral-bound notebook, glossy magazine spreads seemingly taped to the wall, the six-page layout of an LA Weekly exposé—this show relates the newest chapter in the career of “Powhida”; the artist, having burned his bridges in New York, descends on Los Angeles, getting tangled up with the city’s B-list celebrities, egomaniac art patrons, burger joints, strippers, booze, and materialism. To Powhida, the city and its industries are raw material. His short video Powhida (Trailer), 2009, for example, draws on LA’s cache of professional actors, voice talents, commercial editors, and production studios to plug a fabricated biopic fictionally directed by Steven Soderbergh and produced by “Peres/Saatchi/Boone Pictures.”
While Powhida’s art-world critique is revealing and amusing, what is more noteworthy is the way in which the artist connects that commentary to place. As a site-specific practice, Powhida’s artwork lampoons not only Los Angeles (as it has done with New York, Seattle, and Aspen, Colorado, in the past) but also the position of celebrity, the location of persona, the site of invention, and the gray area of authenticity. And it is through this scrutiny that the artist’s own identity and role within the art world become as much targets as everything else.
— Catherine Taft
Josephine Pryde
RICHARD TELLES FINE ART
7380 Beverly Blvd
October 31–December 19
Josephine Pryde, Adoption (13), 2009, color photograph, 39 1/2 x 29 1/2".
Building off last year’s body of photographs that depicted three young women posed in totemic attitudes of motherhood, Josephine Pryde turns her lens to images of infancy in her latest exhibition (and first in Los Angeles), “La Vie d’artiste” (Life of the Artist). Fourteen large photographs from this year capture often awkward and close-up views of a towheaded toddler adrift in a studio setup. All but one are in color and titled Adoption, thereby casting the otherwise nonnarrative scenario as a kind of parodic audition for the role of child to an unseen mother or, perhaps, a reverse adoption conducted by the unwitting child in search of a suitable parent.
Given the frequently sentimental and cloying associations of child portraiture, the unflattering character of these shots is something of a relief, but that alone isn’t much to be thankful for. Rather, we can be exuberantly thankful for the resonance of the show’s title, taken from French songwriter Leo Ferré’s achingly sad yet rousing poem “La Vie d’artiste,” which Pryde performed with piano accompaniment on the exhibition’s opening night. It is a devastating, Leonard Cohen–esque ode to loss and disillusionment, culminating with a conflicted affirmation of artistic will and perseverance: “I’ll go on with my artist’s life.”
Pryde’s very need to voice such a declaration implies a serious consideration of its opposite, a deep questioning of purpose and practice. Paired with the photographs, Ferré’s confessional song (transcribed on cards at the gallery) transforms Pryde’s potentially conservative series of images into a poignant, quasi-allegorical gesture that suggests aspects of subjecthood, linking reproduction and artistic practice: the artist as whining infant, the artist as absent mother. Pryde somehow demystifies the romance of “the artist’s life” while invoking its chilling poetry.
— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Travis Somerville
BEN MALTZ GALLERY AT THE OTIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
9045 Lincoln Boulevard
October 3–December 12
Travis Somerville, The New Land of Lincoln, 2009, oil, oil stick, and mixed media on paper on canvas, 80 x 96".
Travis Somerville’s work addresses the tangled knot of issues surrounding the history of race in America. Using such loaded images as a noose, hooded clansmen, and the Confederate flag in a self-consciously liberal way is laced with difficulties, yet Somerville takes such challenges on with gusto in a new exhibition, “Dedicated to the Proposition.” Conceptualized as a contemporary response to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address, the exhibition is fraught with aggressive images, including a sculpture of Lincoln’s head on a ball and chain, and assorted representations of people in blackface.
Several large paintings and collages are composed on canvases layered with song sheets, newspaper clippings, and advertisements from the 1960s, the tumultuous decade in which Somerville came of age in a white liberal household in Georgia. Filled with powerful imagery, these works are laden with historical and allegorical narratives that together form a thought-provoking visual inquiry. Three large installations, including a series of water fountains with labels inspired by US census categories and corresponding imagery based on stereotypes, are more heavy-handed and leave less room for interpretation.
The detail and care with which Somerville constructs each work, alongside the artist’s insistence that viewers consider complex and unresolved issues—including prejudice, post-Katrina New Orleans, urban blight, the conditions of migrant workers, and the treatment of Muslims in America after 9/11—create a charged and vital body of work.
— Annie Buckley
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