by Sam Schultz
When word spread that New York’s David Zwirner Gallery was investing in a multi-building compound on the edge of Los Angeles’ Koreatown several smaller galleries moved locations to hopefully catch and benefit from the droves of collectors headed into one of Zwirner’s two spaces. Chateau Shatto, The Brick, James Fuentes Gallery, Morán Morán, Wilding Cran, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary and Ochi Projects all sprung up in response.
The sheer concentration of spaces within a few square blocks (now re-branded as “Melrose Hill”) meant the area was now a one-stop destination for an evening of gallery hopping. Your intrepid reporter now presents to you the fruit of a dutiful evening of said hopping:
The three person exhibition “Bent Sun” at Reisig and Taylor was sculpture-heavy with an intriguing 4-inch ceramic sculpture by Trey Ross front and center. Ross’s miniatures combine delicate materials like porcelain and cubic zirconia, with an equally delicate palette and composition. Delightfully unfashionable.
These bravura performances were offset by a free-standing six-foot-tall multi-piece multi-colored sculpture by Talya Petrillo that looks not entirely unlike tiny bits of broken crayon melted together. The various colorful abstract grids in automotive paint by Frantz Jean-Baptiste hung at the back of the space and were no doubt chosen due to a certain high-saturation similarity to Petrillo’s palette. All good clean fun, but they suffer in comparison with Ross.
Next door at Ochi Projects, a tightly-packed crowd gathered for Hannah Tishkoff’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, “Beginning of a Poem.” Here she presented a number of disjointed manic hippie dream-girl works under the rubric “portraits as diagrams and systems.” The press release also mentions that Tishkoff’s title is a play on Paul Klee’s philosophy on how forms take shape.
Tishkoff is less the next Klee than a sign that audiences are casting around for someone who can lay claim to Klee’s playful-but-substantive spirit, reminding us of what we can do without constantly reminding us what is being done in our name. Tishkoff simply reminds you what you could do if you had time to make your teen diary entries bigger and put them in a gallery.
Wilding Cran featured an exhibition by (inexplicably) mid-career artist Fran Siegel. The materials say “pigment” and the press release says something about ecology and the “botanical visual language of Portuguese azulejo tiles” but these are pictures of flowers. Also leaves. They are, if we are generous, the kind of inoffensively decorative images you’d see in the lobby of an expensive but not particularly creative hotel. If you look directly at one for more than four seconds you fall asleep. The only remarkable things about them are that they’re being shown at a gallery that also shows the likes of Polly Borland and that so many supposedly cutting-edge spaces are showing things that look exactly like them.
Image: Talya Petrillo at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary