Four Exhibitions

Liz Ahn

Emily Marchand

Jimena Sarno

Noah Spindler

Liz Ahn "Homebody"

Visitor Welcome Center presents homebody, a solo exhibition by Liz Ahn.

Do you know where we’re going?

Tell me something, something about where we are and how it got to be

Where we’re at is like the landscaped embossed on state quarters: vaguely familiar, some signs, a lot of necessity on trust. We’ve had an unremarkable day and maybe that’s what drove us here. That and the car. We’ve been wondering, mostly silently, how any of this came to be. We’ve heard myths and theories ranging from natural extra and non-extra terrestrial evolution to apparitions and creatures creating the world around us. There’s no way we believe the same story but we’re here together and we like each other’s company. At least I hope we do. I know I love you from the time we’ve spent together. Oh oh oh oh OH I’m remembering now so much of what it was like before I met you and I’m guessing now so much of what it will be like knowing you more. Both the past and future are a taste in the back of my throat I can taste it mostly when I exhale and my tongue is fumbling to understand it more trying to dig deep into it to see if there’s a core that’ll give it any more.

Is it satisfying?

No.

Liz Ahn (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) uses painting and sculpture to explore the futility of language and exchange. She employs domestic symbols and readymade objects to investigate the anxiety, humor, and relationships in daily life. Her work puts form to the unsaid, forgotten, frustration, ego, shame, sexiness, and love within herself and everyone and everything around her. Ahn received her MFA from Columbia University and BA from UCLA. She lives and works in New York City.

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Emily Marchand "Nature, Red In Tooth And Claw"

Visitor Welcome Center presents Nature, Red In Tooth And Claw, a new installation by Emily Marchand. Continuing her use of organic materials and processes, Marchand offers a reflection into our precarious relationship to environmental degradation, food scarcity, and survival. Images of bones, knots, tools, matches, seeds, clouds, and the sun carefully arrange themselves into a triangular edifice. At the base sits a black ceramic basin holding a collection of ceramic sculptures and tiles in a salt water bath. Over the course of the exhibition, the piece erodes, affectively oscillating between monument and memorial. Her work insists on the possibility of life within decay and selvage, where transformation depends on vulnerability and hopeful play, and where tomorrow’s promise ripples through the undercurrent of a fragile present.

Emily Marchand (b. Sacramento, CA) works with food, textiles, and sculpture to explore ideas of survivalism, preservation, and the decentralization of humans in relation to ecology and nature. She works with earthen materials that have transformative abilities, such as clay, salt, fabrics, and metals. Marchand received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Selected projects include homeLA, Genius Loci at Setareh Gallery (Düsseldorf, DE), Leaning Tower of Pisa at DXIX (Venice, CA), soft ammunition at NowSpace (Los Angeles, CA), and Artists + Institutions at MAK Center (Los Angeles, CA).

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Jimena Sarno "Taracatá Trabaja"

Visitor Welcome Center presents Taracatá Trabaja, a solo exhibition by Jimena Sarno. Considering the gallery’s urban surroundings, taracatá trabaja is a site-specific, sculpture and sound installation that turns the iconic rooftop sign into an analogue broadcasting site. Diagonally dividing the gallery interior, the piece is situated in dialogue with the exterior cityscape through the two windows of the space. The sign’s metal structure holds fifty porcelain plates hand thrown by the artist, each a container of a musical movement conceptualized by the artist and composed by Argentinian musician, Axel Krygier. The score, inscribed onto the plates, will be read and performed live during the opening reception.

Taracatá Trabaja uses the iconic Argentinian folk song, Malambo del Hornerito, as a point of departure. It is an ode to the Argentinian national bird—the serially procreating, monogamous, and hard working hornero who builds his home from spit and dirt. The malambo is a traditional Argentinian competitive tap dance for men. The musical composition of taracatá trabaja is derived from the two onomatopoeias in the folk song: taracatá, characterizing the sound of laborious work (i.e. fields being plowed and nails being hammered) and chapalea, a verb evolving from the sound of squelching in mud. Centering the hornero within an economy of sound, Sarno reveals the failure of meritocracy to recognize self-determination and imagination within the body politic. In taracatá trabaja, the tenderly hand drawn hornero rests and enjoys himself on the porcelain surface, flying and perching throughout the piece to remind one of the comforts and complexities of making a home.

Jimena Sarno is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and organizer. She works across a range of media including installation, sound, video, text and sculpture. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and currently living in Los Angeles, her experience as a South American immigrant informs her practice. Her work has been exhibited at Lace, The Mistake Room, Human Resources, Pøst, the Museum of Latin American Art, UCI Contemporary Art Center, Control Room, The Luminary, Fellows of Contemporary Art and Grand Central Art Center among others. She is the recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant.

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Noah Spindler "First Wish"

Visitor Welcome Center presents First Wish, a solo exhibition by Noah Spindler. Made while living in Michigan over the past two years, First Wish is a reflection of the artist's longing for Southern California, where he spent the majority of his life. Sculpted from materials found in the built environment, such as drywall, plastic, cardboard, and trees, Spindler furnishes an empty room from the distance that is poetry, the longing that grows into form, and the heartache that brokers return.

Sitting in the corners of the room, three sculptures carved from fallen palm fronds recall the base of urban light posts. Window guards made from crushed egg shells and feathers speak to the fallacy of security within urban and suburban homes. Fixated on nostalgia teetering between protection and destruction, a drywall replica of the artist’s childhood toy, a U.S. bomber aircraft, looms above. Together, the sculptures expose the infrastructural and social connections and fissures in his lived experience. Punctuating pivotal moments of his upbringing, the artist asks visitors to turn to the banal, through which the American dream materializes and erodes. From the slow burn of a beautifully dilapidated sunset, the artist builds a space where his spirit finds solace and where the hazy, thickening smog of Southern California becomes an amnesiac’s paradise.

Noah Spindler (b. 1986, Laguna Beach, CA) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He studied photography at Orange Coast College and received a BA from UCLA in Art. Spindler has shown with Control Room and Gait LA, and has been reviewed in Carla.