Apparitions: Group Show

“Apparitions”  is a balancing act – a suspension of being present, absent and everything in-between. Artists Christopher Baliwas, erika niko barrios, Sophia Berman, Kelsey Boncato, Josiah Ihem, Cory McMahon and Shima Taj Bakhsh have devoted the last year making work alone and sharing it amongst each other virtually. Their online group interactions have led to overlapping ideas on their recent works: a collection of bodily dissociation, obscurity, and displacement left to question their drifting states. 

With their diverse backgrounds and satellite presence, the group stems from a virtual art salon facilitated by Miljohn Ruperto at the end of 2020. Artists were invited to question the opacity in the contemporary art world while sharing their past and current works. The space of conversation is held through virtual meetings, discussing peer feedback, group readings, along with conceptual and practical ideas in art. The salon has expanded to more guest participants –curators, gallerists and other artists who add to the conversation and overall curiosity of a practicing artist.

Reflective on the nature of the group’s inception, the work operates as a combatting force: transparency, distortion of sound, frames of erasure and movement, direction, while invasive shadow entities and rituals inform the space. Using both historical and phenomenological frameworks, the exhibition plays with themes on the body in relation to space, value, and identity.

With 2022 being the White Anniversary of Dodger Stadium and Human Resources location at the foot of Dodger Stadium, Christopher Baliwas continues developing these sets of work around the concept of “all time” and the idea of the camera obscura as a “home – a site of resistance” (bell hooks). Pulling from the history of displacement tied to Dodger Stadium and its audio/visual technology known as DodgerVision, the camera obscura becomes a “centrifugal work that begins with goodbye” (Nathaniel Mackey). 

erika niko barrios’ installation, not in this dimension / chthonic echoes conjures creeping tentacular entities that indeterminately move between human and non-human realms. This sculptural work builds upon their 2021 exhibition entitled, chthonic ruins, and engages with that which is monstrous and demonic as sites of agency and allegories for queerness, absolute otherness and the limits of human thought.

Sophia Berman’s Idols engage cultural and personal (re)production. Carved up plastic sheets bearing faces of celebrities hang from thin metal thread. The pieces engage the tenuous and unsure places between what’s mass versus individually produced, replicable versus unique, delicate versus biodegradable. 

Exploring potent aesthetics of nature, Kelsey Boncato’s digital photograph series depicts her handmade paper wasp nests mounted in a variety of domestic and structural spaces. Playing as architectural interventions, the sculptures are positioned above a shower, in a youth’s bedroom, basement stairs, a meditation bench, a tea room in a garden, and a playground slide. Titled Intrusive Nest and Malevolent Surveillance, Boncato sneaks her nests into intimate, private, and vulnerable situations –hijacking the power of nature.

Josiah Ihem’s Awaiting, Cypher, Passenger video composites together headless tai chi forms under a full moon. Against saturated color framing, the dual bodies’ movements are offset. The sequential poses and transitions in between them reflect rhythm, energy, and element of water while representations of the moon’s push and pull mirror a sense of imitation, vitality, and decay.

Travel frames are the protective shrouds that artworks are transported to and from in. They are an important component in the preservation of art, but also in the exhibition of artworks. Cory McMahon’s photographs play upon the idea of art being autonomous from the numerous forces that bring it to display.

Shima Taj Bakhsh’s “No city is in the city” is part of an ongoing project that observes, embodies, and speculates about the cultural and social implications of an anonymous gravestone located in Qom, Iran. The only identifying information marking the gravestone is “Kaboutar, the child of Ali” (کبوتر فرزند علی). In Farsi, the name “Kaboutar” translates to pigeon. The pigeon’s visibility in the city and their “unruly” characteristic, along with the invisibility of the anonymous grave, all question the authority and hierarchy in urban order. “No city is in the city” combines forms inspired by the Iranian cemetery’s architecture with newspaper archives reflecting on pigeons as city dwellers and constant companions of humankind. 

Through methods which imitate, distort, transfer, and fragment images, all together, the group exhibition presents diverse works examining the inherent qualities of apparitions and how these notions call to a kind of resistance to territories, perception, and contact.  

Christopher Baliwas is a Filipino American interdisciplinary artist born in the Bay Area and based in Los Angeles. He is the eldest son of Jackie and Thor Baliwas, and a new father.  With the practice of photography as a homeplace for him, it is often taken over by mediums of sound, sculpture, or writing. Baliwas’s work seeks for an inversion of perception through the camera obscura, the unspectacular, the rudimentary, and stories of family as an attempt to question time, site(sight), and ownership. Under the alias, reallynathan, Baliwas independently released the album “O” in 2020, which has served as a portal to develop his own(?) relationship to the concept of “All Time”.

erika niko barrios (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the greater Los Angeles area. They received their M.F.A. from California State University, Long Beach in 2020 and their B.A. in gender & women’s studies from University of California, Berkeley in 2011. They create sculpture and installations that engage historical discourses on madness, the unhuman, and magic through ritual processes and a queer lens.

Sophia Berman is a Los Angeles based artist. Her work spans photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and writing, exploring participation and replication in pop and sub cultures.  

Kelsey Boncato is an artist and animator who works in drawing, video, and sculpture. Her recent work presents phenomenological relationships and possibilities questioning the control of identity, time, and nature. Boncato’s interactive multimedia work FOREST in collaboration with sound composer Daniel Oldham premiered at SXSW and exhibited internationally in 2019. Notable group exhibitions include Subconscious Sensibilities at Site Gallery, Sheffield Doc Fest UK, VR@OIAF at Ottawa Art Gallery, and was awarded Best Experience in VRHAM! Hamburg, Germany. Recipient of the 2016 Discovery Scholar Prize, she holds a B.A. in Art from the University of Southern California with an emphasis in intermedia and printmaking. Boncato lives and works in Los Angeles.

Josiah Ihem is a freestyle dancer and interdiciplinary artist based in Palm Springs California. He is a California State Bakersfield alumm and is from a world renowned dance crew named Squishy Docious based in the Inland Empire/Los Angeles. His recent work focuses on themes and concepts relating to images, presence, and sequences to examine human behavior. 

Cory McMahon is an intermedia artist from Las Vegas, Nevada. He received his MFA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His work often confronts anxieties of belonging, identity, and home. These themes are undeniably influenced by his formative years on the periphery of a city eclipsed by the industry of selling dreams and desires. 

Shima Taj Bakhsh is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist currently residing in Long Beach. Much of her work is concerned with questioning the material conditions of bodies and borders. She engages with a variety of media to create architecture fragments that embody nonlinear narratives shifting from generation to generation. The time-based, sculptural configurations in her work represent a constant liminal state wherein cultural and social edges rub up against each other, encounter other timelines, and bridge histories.

Stoking the Flame: Elliot Reed with Susanne Song-Yi Griem

Elliot Reed’s Pull was filmed in Slovakia at Pajštún castle with Susanne Songi Greim. In a rental car, they drove across the Austrian border. After hiking up the mountain for over an hour with bags full of supplies, they wove into the trees and landscape surrounding the castle, drawing into the hill and melting ice just before sunset.

The project was filmed January 2020 and edited between March and May of 2021.

Elliot Reed is an artist and director based in New York. He assembles bodies, movement, and narrative within exhibition space, wielding performance as a tool. Their projects span video, dance, performance, and sculpture highlighting the ways seen (and unseen) actors make their mark.

Elliot is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019–20 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Exhibitions include a commission with JACK Quartet (2021), Metro Pictures (2021), MoMA PS1 (2020/21), OCD Chinatown (2021), The Getty Center (2018), Hammer Museum (2016), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (2018), The Broad (2017), and performances in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Mexico City, Vienna, and Hamburg. Their next show opens Fall 2021 at Kunsthaus Glarus.

http://www.elliotreedlabs.com/

Harmonic Oscillation — M. A. Guevara


Harmonic Oscillation

M. A. Guevara

Human Resources-LA

410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Organized by Hugo Cervantes 

November 6 – 28, 2021

Perfect harmony is not static. Harmony is a forging of many to achieve at best a type of unison. Its amalgamation is often brutal, antagonistic, and at it’s best transformative, blurring the lines between where some thing one ends and the other begins. For the artist M. A. Guevara, harmony, like alchemy, involves precision and repetition: each harmonic blast makes way for the next one, refining the harmony’s rhythmic, visual, and sensual sequence. 

This  process is present in Guevara’s self-portraits, writings, videos, and paintings, where layered images and textures crystalize into opaque images that reference personal histories, hedonistic fantasies, doubling as a form of critique. Guevara’s portraits often bloat and swell faces, incorporating mesoamerican motifs and overstressed facial features that allude to the dysmorphic culture of racial capitalism and its legacies of pain.  His interest in the limits of continuity and legibility emanate throughout his oeuvre, which is reflected in his deployment of continuous patterns of hedonism and gratification, stoicism and sentimentality, and death and creation.

For his debut solo exhibition, Harmonic Oscillation, M. A. Guevara has formed  a new set of works which further his studies in texture and self-portraiture, and veer between personal history and staunch critique. Together the works constellate processes of searching, dismantling, and fortification, in an attempt to  move beyond fixed cycles of life and death. In lieu, M.A. Guevera anchors himself in processes of becoming in his work, preferring the bend and curve of their cycles to linear progression.


M. A. Guevara (b. 1997, Inland Empire, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work comprises the fields of portraiture: painting, writing, and film. He is the author of the short stories Peacock, Gusano, and Featherless, His writings are held in the collection at (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Guevara has shown work with Dirty Looks, Coaxial, Tom of Finland Foundation, and Gamma Galeria Guadalajara. He is a recipient of Human Resources-LA’s 2020 time, money, space residency.

The Artist and Curator would like to thank Corazon Del Sol, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Anna Betbeze, Claudia, Peter Tomka, Hailey Loman, Kate Rouhandeh, Human Resources-LA, all of our friends and family, and San Simon, La Santísima Muerte.

Photography by Zenaido Zamora

Harmonic Oscillation

M.A. Guevara

November 6th – 28th

Curated by Hugo Cervantes

Opening reception, November 6th 5pm-8pm
(Masks are required to enter HRLA)

HRLA is open by appointment and Friday-Sunday from 12-5pm.

Harmony is not static perfection. Harmony is a forging of many to achieve unison. It’s amalgamation is often brutal, antagonistic, and at it’s best transformative blurring the lines between where one ends and the other begins. For the artist M. A. Guevara, harmony like alchemy is a task of precision and repetition, where one harmonic blast makes way for the next one, identifying and refining the harmony’s rhythmic, visual, or sensual sequence. 

It is a process present in Guevara’s self-portraits, writings, videos, and paintings, where layering images and textures together crystalize into opaque images referencing personal histories to seismic hedonistic fantasies and critical critique. Guevara’s portraiture often bloat and swell the face incorporating mesoamerican motifs to overstressed facial features speaking to the dysmorphic culture of racial capitalism and its enduring legacy of pain. His interest in the limits of continuity and legibility emanate throughout his oeuvre drawn to the continuous patterns of hedonism and gratification, stoicism and sentimentality, and death and creation. 

For his debut solo exhibition Harmonic Oscillation at Human Resources-Los Angeles M. A. Guevara has forged a new set of works further illustrating his studies in texture and self-portraiture veering between personal history and staunch critique. Together the works constellate a consistent searching, dismantling, and fortification of oneself with a mission of moving beyond fixed cycles of life and death. In lieu M.A. Guevera orbits towards the bend and curve of cycles preferring their constant becoming as a point of departure in his work.

M. A. Guevara (b. 1997, Inland Empire, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work comprises the fields of portraiture: painting, writing, and film. He is the author of the short stories Peacock, Gusano, and Fatherless. His writings are held at institutions like LACA (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.) Guevara has shown work with Dirty Looks, Coaxial, Tom of Finland Foundation, and Gamma Galeria Guadalajara. He is a recipient of Human Resources-LA’s 2020 time, money, space residency.

G.Brenner Live at HRLA

G. Brenner’s live rendition of ‘Caustic’ at Human Resources-Los Angeles off of their debut album ‘Brushfire’ out August 20th via Very Jazzed.

Producers: Amara Higuera, Gabriel Brenner & Hugo Cervantes
Director: Amara Higuera

Director of Photography: Amara Higuera
Styling: Gabriel Brenner
Hair: Nicole Arteaga
Makeup: Gabriel Brenner

Editor: Amara Higuera
Lighting Direction: Amara Higuera
Sound: Gabriel Brenner, Hugo Cevantes & Ruairi O’Brien

Special Thanks:
Human Resources – Los Angeles
Nika Chilewich
Sara Frier
LAR Arts