Three Exhibitions

Caitlin Lonegan

Mark Todd

Esther Pearl Watson

Caitlin Lonegan "Points of View"

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Los Angeles based painter, Caitlin Lonegan. Points of View presents a new series of paintings begun in 2015 and completed in 2018. Each painting in this body of work is an exploration of flickering light, mutable color, and shifting spatial relationships.

In her studio and in exhibitions of her work, Lonegan is interested in cultivating an experience that is always engaged with discovery and surprise; her work shares an ongoing investigation of her own perception and the instability of meaning. She paints in an abstract language that appears loose, a style with ingrained references to modernism. Despite the appearance of an intuitive approach, Lonegan’s practice is time-intensive: she moves between paper and several canvases and panels at once, considering how a mark made here has a profoundly different affect than a mark made there; how the viewer’s perception of a reflective pigment, for example, changes with context. This considered approach to composition allows the artist to combine ephemeral or disparate ideas in a single composition and across an entire group of works.

When she began working on the paintings that compose Points of View, Lonegan quickly realized that each painting was emerging from a memory of a specific light effect, probably reflections off a car’s windshield, projecting through the security screen door and barred windows of her studio in Glendale, CA. The movement of light through these various imperfect lenses created a rapid succession of new images of a familiar place where multiple perceptions of color and space existed nearly simultaneously. Lonegan used this potent sensory experience, combined with strategies gleaned from literary and visual sources, where the authors or visual artists used shifts in point of view, from fact to fiction, or poetry to prose, to develop a rational system and set of parameters that determine gesture, color, and material in the paintings. While this system is not necessarily visible in the resulting works, Lonegan has left clues in the form of colors and gestures that repeat and mutate depending on from where and in what space or light conditions they are viewed.

In the summer of 2018, Lonegan’s first monograph will be released. Titled For Dorothea, the catalog documents the full trajectory of her last body of work created between 2012 – 2014, including her sketches on paper. In late June, Lonegan will open a solo exhibition featuring additional works from Points of View at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna. Another forthcoming solo project in 2018 include an offsite project with Tif Sigfrids (based in Athens, GA). Previously, Lonegan has had two solo exhibitions with Acme in Los Angeles, CA. She has also been included in several group exhibitions including “Abstraction Now!” at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria; “Made in LA 2014,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and “Wake up Early Fear Death” curated by Phillip Kaiser at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna. Caitlin Lonegan received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010 and a BA from Yale University in 2005.

---

Mark Todd "Two-Hit Wonder (and a Half)"

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is thrilled to announce an exhibition of work by Los Angeles based artist Mark Todd. Todd’s paintings of record covers on panel for imaginary musical acts trade in puns, googly eyes, and a little bit of nostalgia for browsing through racks and bins, picking music to listen to by visual cues.

The album covers Todd creates seem like they could be painted from life (and in fact painting covers from his own record collection was the initial genesis of this project), but a second look reveals that while the fonts and the musicians’ poses might feel familiar, there are some strange incongruities that just don’t feel quite true to life-- like a song titled “Exquisite Tonsils” on an album titled Rusty Spurs Sings a Treasury of his Romantic Hits. Todd’s album covers are accompanied by ceramic sculptures of the records themselves. Like the paintings, the sculptures aren’t a perfect approximation of reality. The handmade, improvisational quality of Todd’s paintings and ceramics offer a convincing case for the pleasures of the tangible, analogue world.

Mark Todd (b. 1970, Las Vegas, NV) received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in 1993. His recent exhibitions include “Don’t Go To Hell Without Saying Goodbye,” at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, TX; “Covered,” at LaLuz de Jesus, Los Angeles, CA; and “With Open Eyes,” at Grafikens Hus, Mariefried, Sweden.

---

Esther Pearl Watson "The Universe"

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Esther Pearl Watson. Watson, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in series of small towns outside of Dallas, Texas with her siblings, mother, and flying saucer-building father, Gene. Her father’s flying saucers and the nomadic aspects of her childhood inspire her “memory paintings,” which playfully narrate the experience of an economically precarious family living in rural America. Watson’s work highlights an absurd, persistent, and particularly American optimism that only seems to grow stronger in the face of failures of family, policy and the American Dream.

Watson’s paintings depict farmland and highways, oil rigs and pay day loan storefronts, playgrounds and parking lots each with a brief memory written in the corner of the painting to describe the scene. All the while, glittering flying saucers dot the sky and the children, usually pictured in something of a cheerful tumble, seem to be the ones narrating the text as if recollecting the facts years later. In one scene, we see Esther in her living room studio, surrounded by glittering flying saucer paintings, her animals asleep on the wooden floor. The text in the upper corner of the painting, which also serves as the title, reads “Sierra Madre, California. Dream Keeper. Gene Watson returned to Italy and no longer builds large flying saucers. Esther Pearl Watson. 2018.”

Esther Pearl Watson has an MFA from CalArts. Her paintings have been exhibited worldwide including at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Her award-winning comic ”Unlovable” is published in Bust Magazine and with Fantagraphics. She has published Blood Lady Commandos, on Vice online and Welcome to Crapland on Adult Swim online. She has taught at Oxbow Artist Residency, The Lexicon of Sexicana at Columbia College in Chicago, and Artist-in-Residence at Grafikiens Hus in Mariefred, Sweden and is currently teaching at Art Center College of Design.