Do Sensibilities Have Sides

Jenalee Harmon

Hannah Karsen

Pauline Shaw

Joshua West Smith

Elevator Mondays is pleased to announce Do Sensibilities Have Sides an exhibition co-organized by Don Edler and Hannah Karsen.

Do Sensibilities Have Sides explores the fragility of a form. In thinking about the trace of a referent, the show questions how we experience a thing - how we are made to think of the thing by its residue. Subsisting within a shared reveal, the works provide a place to question what one’s sensibilities can denote. The exhibition includes photography, sculpture and drawing.

In addition to the gallery exhibition, Hannah Karsen will curate an evolving email chain via the gallery email list throughout the duration of the show. By connecting various points of reference, these emails serve to distill meaning within a considered context by outlining one’s own sensibilities through specific forms.

Jenalee Harmon’s surreal studio photographs depict scenes within a layered deception of the flattened picture plane. The images combine studio apparatuses with glimpses of the figure to stage and obscure. This reserved reveal uses the body to softly suggest something not outside of reality but within a space that is pointedly articulated to question it.

Hannah Karsen’s recent drawings serve as efflorescences of the body of a bouquet. Made up of flower matter and pigment, these works both ruin and retain. Her work accumulates a shared sensibility that becomes set up through a relationship of language and a caring for the boundaries and limitations of sentimentalism.

Pauline Shaw’s sculptures explore a fragility of the body, a holding space for the tenuous balance the body asks for. The material components of her work concretize a consideration of something bodily, ethereal, abject. The relationship of these works to her own hand further holds a regard for thinking about one’s own vulnerability.

Joshua West Smith’s sculpture accesses a borrowed likeness through a shared technique. Included in the show is a small carving by Smith’s grandfather which highlights ways of making shared through generations. The layered referent within Smith’s work holds a memory of something existing before, a persisting form, to question what can be perceived. An openness in making an object in this way strives for an ambiguity that shies away from being named.

Jenalee Harmon received her MFA in studio art from UC Santa Barbara and her BFA from the San Francisco Institute of Art, San Francisco, CA. Harmon has exhibited at Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA, Elephant, Los Angeles, CA, and High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA. Harmon has held residencies at Ox-Bow, Ox-Bow, MI and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Hannah Karsen received her MFA in visual art from UC Riverside and her BFA and BA in Art History from Chapman University. Karsen has exhibited at LACE, Los Angeles; Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe and the UCLA New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles. Karsen lives and works in Los Angeles.

Pauline Shaw received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Shaw has exhibited widely with solo exhibitions at the Musee des Beaux Arts, Bordeaux, France and group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA. Shaw lives and works in Los Angeles.

Joshua West Smith received his MFA in visual art from UC Riverside and a BFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR. Smith has exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Anderson Ranch, Snowmass, CO; and Marin MOCA, Novato, CA. Smith is the Co-director of Tilt Export. Smith lives and works in Riverside, CA.

Elevator Mondays is an artist-run curatorial project inside a converted freight elevator founded by Don Edler. The project focuses on bringing together working artists in a social exhibition space to foster dialogue and community through exhibitions and special programing.