Park View’s current show, A New Rhythm, features an impressive lineup of artists: there are works on display by Charles Atlas, Benjamin Carlson, Nancy Lupo, and Silke Otto-Knapp. Tucked two blocks away from the shaded, grassy hills of MacArthur Park, Park View is a gallery space in Paul Soto’s apartment, each wall immaculately spackled and white-washed, furniture and personal effects tucked discreetly out of sight. As a result, it’s an interesting–and symbiotic–fusion of domestic space and a “white cube” gallery. Soto has curated the show to play with these notions of domesticity and the art-viewing public.
Benjamin Carlson’s Untitled (2015), a canvas of molded gesso and paint taking the shape of shredded cardboard from an online shipping container, hangs wryly in a walk-in closet. In the living room, Nancy Lupo’s Tuxedo Feeder (2014), made of Magic-Smooth epoxy speckled with black and white quinoa, looks like a granite couch offering visitors no comfortable place to sit. Nearby, Silke Otto-Knapp’s painting Seascape (third movement), 2013 engages in conversation with Charles Atlas’s 1984 dance film Jump: rendered in somnolent silver and black pigment, Otto-Knapp depicts Yvonne Rainer pressing her body into an inscrutable ground during a performance of Seascape. Ghostly as a fading daguerrotype, the painting contrasts sharply with the exuberantly colored, flying bodies and wacky costumes of Atlas’s film.
As Soto writes in the exhibition statement, Atlas’s film and Otto-Knapp’s painting frame the exhibition using dance as a bodily metaphor:
Distinctive strategies of abstraction highlight multiple areas of life and relate them back to a bodily awareness. The works may be interpreted as representations of dancing bodies, shopping bodies, screaming bodies, seeing bodies, imbibing bodies, caretaking bodies, and styled bodies.
Dance functions as a metaphor, with each work trapping arrhythmic experiences of reality with a paradoxical lightness into forms and images that capture the moment. Overall, the exhibition proposes a new rhythm that is grounded by a discipline that seeks to defy gravity, “an exactitude of
vertigo.”
A New Rhythm
On view until April 5
836 S. Park View St.
Los Angeles, CA 90057