“Clappers”, a new exhibition by Kathleen Henderson at Track 16’s downtown Los Angeles’ location, is a timely—if unfashionable—punch to the gut.
It consists of small drawings on paper created with oil and oil stick in a jarring and limited color palette of greens, pinks, purples, and blacks inspired by a recent artist residency in Spoleto, Italy. There, according to the press release, the artist “came across the story of anti-Semite and “first fascist,” Marquis de Mores, a French aristocrat and duelist who spent time in the American West before returning to Europe and earning the nickname the “Butcher of Paris.”
This is not immediately apparent—what one sees at first is a cute and fumblingly naïve vision, playful enough that the viewer crosses the room to see the darkness in the details.
The works combine the simplicity and directness of Crayola drawings with the serpentine political commentary of Philip Guston, resulting in a deathly sweet take on climate change and the current rise of American fascism. In “Empty Shell Pineapple,” two clouds—one smiling and the other crying—sit over a single family house while a person bathes in a flooded front lawn lake. “Death on the Bed” features two ghostly, hooded, fuchsia beings smiling and making a fuchsia bed—something in the stained texture and limp, blood-trail line captures the slow bleeding undergirding contemporary American reality.
My immediate reaction was that this exhibition should have had a line out the door. There is much to discuss here about the stunned, precarious position of the artist as observer of unlaterable and mounting horror.
Henderson has sidled up against a violent something here, wearing a painted smile the whole time. She preaches a childlike gospel asking that we examine the smiling acceptance of fascism and death in a garden we are too stricken, tired and distracted to weed.
Image: Courtesy Track 16