Abigail Ogilvy Gallery | Los Angeles is pleased to present their third exhibition in their new Los Angeles gallery. Under this mask, another mask, is a group exhibition curated by Sam Adams, featuring works by Seuil Chung, Leah Guadagnoli, Jen P. Harris, Julia Kunin, Leeza Meksin, Tuesday Smillie, and Scott Vander Veen. Spanning painting, fiber sculpture, textile, and ceramics, the twenty-nine works in this exhibition convey intimacy and vulnerability through meticulous processes of layering, suturing, and abstracting.
The gender-fluid Surrealist Claude Cahun quipped, “Under this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces.” Following Cahun, the artists in this exhibition fuse interiority and exteriority, recombining architectural elements and body parts in liberatory ways. Thresholds become places to stop and rest. Load-bearing structures are reduced to ornaments. Exits double as entrances. Signs are depleted of fixed meanings. Bright and kaleidoscopic, the works evoke bodies but none render a body whole. The artists offer exquisite corpses of spinning legs, monumental breasts, throbbing eyes, and skin-like surfaces–stretched and punctured. These bodies-in-pieces subvert the gridded architectures surrounding them, refusing facile narratives and normative expectations of gender and sexuality.
Under this mask, another mask revels in non-binary modes of representation and the possibility of revealing oneself through tender gestures of masking.
The exhibition runs through February 17th, 2024. The gallery invites the public to join them from 6 – 8:30pm on Saturday, January 20th for an opening reception of Under this mask, another mask.
