Series: One Thing After Another
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Series: One Thing After Another /
Juried by Matt Stromberg
Curatorial Statement
Series: One Thing After Another brings together 35 contemporary artists who explore seriality, repetition, and sequence in their work. Historically, artists have chosen to work in series for myriad purposes: using narrative panels, Renaissance artists depicted episodes in the lives of saints, whereas Impressionists captured changes in light and color by creating numerous studies of the same scene. In the 20th century, modern artists probed the boundless potential of abstraction through variations on a theme, while post-war minimalist and conceptual artists employed seriality as a way to remove subjectivity, relinquishing creative control to predetermined formal systems.
The works included in this show represent the bountiful heterogeneity of seriality, both in terms of WHY artists have chosen to work in sequence, as well as HOW they do so: the message and the medium. Despite this disparateness, I was struck by a unifying thread as I reviewed the submissions online, that has less to do with art’s creation than its reception. The process of looking at these series offered a remedy to the frenetic way we often engage with images though our screens. Rather than indifferently scrolling through an endless chain of single images, I was forced to slow down, to carefully evaluate several works in relation to each other, to tease out the formal, material, and thematic threads connecting them. Ironically, it is the serial nature of these artworks — which artists have used for a century to reflect contemporary alienation — that thwarts digital flattening and disconnection. The phrase “One Thing After Another”— which , on the surface, could suggest unceasing, banal succession—takes on a more expansive connotation here: perpetually unfolding discovery.
About the Juror
Matt Stromberg is a freelance arts writer and educator based in Los Angeles. He is a frequent contributor to Hyperallergic and has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and KCRW Art Insider, amongst other publications. He teaches Art Appreciation and Introduction to Modernism at Mt. San Jacinto College.
Wall 1: Narrative
Jessica Baker / Michael Ajerman / Julie Carcione Cavaz / Glen Holland / Nicholas Phitides
The artists in this section focus on the narrative potential of seriality, telling stories through multiple, related works. Jessica Baker stitches her late mother’s well-worn playing cards into loose grids, intimate assemblages that convey a sense of pathos and loss. Michael Ajerman has created dozens of drawings and paintings of the neighborhood cat who first snuck into his London apartment in 2020, documenting their relationship as well as his own artistic development. Julie Carcione Cavaz’s lace collars depict the mythological figure Medusa, their delicate rayon threads forming the sinuous deadly snakes that sprout from her head. In quite distinct ways, Glen Holland and Nicholas Phitides portray scenes of weird, anxious America. Holland imbues the everyday with dream-like disquiet, while Phitides’ stark, disjointed canvases convey a foreboding unease about the future.
Jessica Baker
Michael Ajerman
Julie Carcione Cavaz
Glen Holland
Nicholas Phitides
Wall 2: Nature and the Built Environment
Neil Griess / Kim Tanzer / Monique Fouquet / Lainey Peltier / Marc Phares / Maria Bjorkdahl / Hannah Duggan
Nature and the built environment have long been fertile subjects for artists working in series, from 19th century naturalists documenting flora and fauna, to the Bechers’ architectural typologies. The artists on this wall continue to find inspiration in the world around them, be it natural or man-made. Neil Greiss draws on satellite images to create paintings of buildings that once stood in his childhood neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, fusing the haze of memory with the dispassionate clarity of technology. Kim Tanzer’s 1:1 depictions of tree bark hover between representation and abstraction, as meticulous renderings of surface texture dissolve into color and form. Monique Fouquet focuses on various types of woodgrain, though her watercolors are based on digital images from wood veneer suppliers, highlighting our mediated experience of nature. Marc Phares and Lainey Peltier both choose water as their subject, but the results could not be more divergent. Phares’ nearly photorealistic gouaches capture the rich visual and biological soup of coastal waters, whereas Peltier’s minimalist, monochromatic canvases give the faintest suggestion of waves with her restrained fields of lyrical blue brushstokes. Maria Bjorkdahl painstakingly renders the sidewalks of Los Angeles in ink and watercolor, each painting depicting the individual cracks and mottled greys of specific patches of street in the anonymous urban landscape. Hannah Duggan turns her eye to mundane domestic spaces, chronicling subtle variations in light and composition that reveal glimpses of her interior life.
Neil Griess
Kim Tanzer
Monique Fouquet
Lainey Peltier
Marc Phares
Maria Bjorkdahl
Hannah Duggan
Wall 3: Abstraction and Pattern
Belinda Yang / Fabiola Gironi / Justin Phillips / Ariana Padovano / Emre Meydan / Rajee Aryal / John Richardson / Will Suglia
Modern and contemporary artists have explored abstract motifs and patterns by working in sequence, from Josef Albers’ iconic Homage to the Square series to countless artists working in minimalism, post-minimalism, the pattern and decoration movement, and beyond. The artists in this section continue to mine formal variations, each taking a different route through abstraction. Belinda Yang’s modular ceramic sculptures are based on natural forms, which she abstracts, duplicates, and reconfigures into unique tessellations. Fabiola Gironi’s daily routine consists of creating one painting over the course of one hour, and the resulting series reveals an almost real-time account of her wrestling with formal concerns of color, form, scale, and composition. Justin Phillips relies on chance, intuition, and pre-determined rules to create his minimal, mixed-media works that subtly subvert the rigidity of the grid. The grid provides a site of disruption as well for Ariana Padovano, who transforms digital pixels into vibrant, woozy ink drawings. Emre Meydan and Rajee Aryal similarly probe the space between technological order and the handmade. Meydan writes computer code to create images, which he then turns into physical artworks through painting or knitting; while Aryal uses software to create dense fields of layered text that are then fabricated as textiles or paintings. John Richardson’s sculptures resemble a kind of mutant architecture, folded planes of plywood that he partially layers with thick, epoxy putty, providing an organic foil to the forms’ rigid geometries. Will Suglia drastically alters the appearance of identical sculptural elements through different paint applications, making the familiar alien.
Belinda Yang
Fabiola Gironi
Justin Phillips
Ariana Padovano
Emre Meydan
Rajee Aryal
John Richardson
Will Suglia
Wall 4: The Body
Nicole Belle / Roxanne Darling / Manas Ranjan / Emma Schwartz / Ceres Madoo / Mary Porterfield / Humna Raza / Kimberly Robertson
The artists in this section showcase the human body through variation and seriality, as a device for both formal and narrative investigations. Photographers Nicole Belle and Roxanne Darling both take vastly different approaches to self-portraiture. Belle’s self-portraits can be seen as vestiges of performances in which she playfully riffs on the staid traditions of studio photography. Darling’s photographs depict her nude body in various natural settings, presented almost as part of the landscape, with a mix of candor and humor. Manas Ranjan’s graphic woodcuts and monoprints convey a sense of bodily anxiety, through the repetition of a gaping, toothsome maw, or trembling hands. A trio of paintings by Emma Schwartz depict contorted hands as they pantomime a religious children’s rhyme, perhaps a portent of spiritual agony. Ceres Madoo’s ceramic female figures stand upside-down, supported by thick pillars of hair, bulwarks against the injustice of the status quo. Mary Porterfield and Humna Raza each employ the figure in their deeply personal work: Porterfield’s large-scale transparent cut-outs lay bare the grief of caring for aging and dying parents, while in Raza’s gripping charcoal, chalk, and ink drawings, hair plays a metaphorical role through which she explores her own identity. In Kimberly Robertson’s beaded Haunting series, the body is absent, replaced by bloodied vests representing journalists, doctors, and aid workers killed in Gaza.Sophie Spinelle
Nicole Belle
Roxanne Darling
Manas Ranjan
Emma Schwartz
Ceres Madoo
Mary Porterfield
Humna Raza
Kimberly Robertson
Wall 5: Conceptualism
Dylan DeWitt / Christine Gaffney / Judith G Levy / Mahdi Dolatyari / Yik Heng Lee / Joyce Polance / Kirsten Simonsen
The final wall features artists whose use of seriality is rooted in a conceptual framework. Dylan DeWitt’s carefully-constructed works cheekily raise questions about artifice and authenticity. Through performance and sculpture, Christine Gaffney offers a feminist rejoinder to minimalism’s phallocentrism. Judith G. Levy uses repetition to harrowing effect in her memorial to murdered trans and non-binary individuals. Mahdi Dolatyari uses Persian calligraphy to investigate slippages in meaning and understanding, while Yik Heng Lee explores how the meaning of an appropriated image shifts, as it moves from photograph to woven pattern. Joyce Polance’s paintings of her therapist upend the established relationship between therapist and patient, while engaging issues around memory and recognition. Named after songs by the Eagles, Kirsten Simonsen’s tranquil color field postcards take on a darkly ironic tone, conjuring commodified paradise and despoiled nature.
Dylan DeWitt
Christine Gaffney
Christine Gaffney
Giving and Giving
Video
2:06
NFS
Christine Gaffney
Lady Parts 1
Video
0:46
NFS
Christine Gaffney
Lady Parts - Part Two
Performance / video
0:10
NFS