Los Angeles has been in the throes of a gallery boom for a few years now, with major blue-chip players opening outposts throughout the city, from mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace Gallery to top New York galleries like Marian Goodman, Sean Kelly, and Lisson. But smaller and more upstart galleries continue cropping up at a steady clip, too, and brim with ambitious art, ranging from large-scale installations to daring painting shows. If you prefer more intimate galleries to the crowds at the likes of Frieze and Felix, get to stepping to these shows while they’re still open.
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Karla Diaz at 18th Street Art Center
Image Credit: Courtesy 18th Street Arts Center and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles When Karla Diaz co-founded Slanguage Studio in Wilmington over two decades ago, she and fellow artist Mario Ybarra Jr. intended to use it as a studio space for their respective art practices. Slanguage has since become a crucial community resource and a platform for emerging artists, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, rooted in the idea that reflecting on the nuances of one’s life—however ubiquitous and ordinary they might seem—can both provide a sturdy foundation and abundant terrain for artistic inspiration. (The organization was recently highlighted as one of six artist-run spaces in a group exhibition, “Ordinary People,” at the Long Beach Museum of Art.)
Diaz has applied that notion of introspection to her own painting practice, especially in the new works she created her show at 18th Street Art Center. The show’s title, “Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” nods to a warning Diaz heard all the time in her Mexican American household growing up, particularly since she had a proclivity for drawing on the walls as a child. With equal parts whimsy and clarity, Diaz depicts the likes of swap meets, protests, and bedrooms, tapping into the disparate places and people that, crucially, make a life.
Through June 22, at Airport Campus, Propeller Gallery, 3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405.
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Shota Nakamura and Matt Copson at Clearing
Image Credit: ©Paul Salveson/Courtesy the artist and Clearing, New York, Brussels, and Los Angeles For its first exhibitions of 2024, Clearing, which also has spaces in New York and Brussels, has a pair of solo shows for painter Shota Nakamura and artist and director Matt Copson. When Nakamura was a child, he would stand in the foothills of the Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, in Yamanashi, Japan, and gaze out at the dappling hues of soaring mountain vistas. Those memories seep into Nakamura’s “light room,” a lovely meditation on the natural world that draws inspiration from the likes of Bonnard’s paintings of “le petit déjeuner.”
After immersing yourself in Nakamura’s placid scenes, step into the Koreatown gallery’s diminutive back room for something similarly captivating, albeit on the opposite end of the spectrum: Copson’s “Of Coming Age,” a laser animation projection starring a psychedelic-looking baby rocking back and forth on a swing. Hovering over an ocean of fire, the work’s doe-eyed young hero goes on to sing a cursed lullaby that features rhyming “strange situation” with “ugly castration” and “entertaining damnation.” Tellingly, the baby’s disturbing incantation was co-written by provocateur musician Caroline Polachek, with whom Copson’s frequently collaborated on music videos.
Through March 2, at 530 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004.
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“Borrowed Recipes” at Commonwealth and Council
Image Credit: Photo Paul Salveson For the group show “Borrowed Recipes,” a cohort of multi-disciplinary artists—Anna Sew Hoy, Carmen Argote, David Alekhuogie, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Jesse Chun, and Patricia Fernández—mulled over what we inherit and internalize from our families, and how those influences crop up in idiosyncratic ways. The name of the game here is tactile. Gazing at Sew Hoy’s sculpture Prone, where finger imprints live alongside scratches on the pink-glazed log, you can practically hear the squelching of clay. Argote’s father dreamed of being an architect, which partially informed her towering installation Scrap Pocket, resembling a skyscraper piercing through the center of the gallery. The gallery’s second room is devoted to Fernández’s decade-long exploration of the wood carving trade she learned from her grandfather, José Luis Carcedo, who died last year. Meticulous wooden frames abound, some bearing the star motif prevalent in Burgos, Spain, where her family is from, and others are inlaid with bits of chicken bone. In one especially moving piece, Fernández took on the task of completing a drawer that Carcedo began carving but didn’t finish—a poignant meditation on traditions carried forth beyond death.
Through March 2, at 3006 West 7th Street, Suite 220, Los Angeles, CA 90005.
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Ouattara Watts at Karma
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Karma It’s not unusual for an artist to meld a variety of seemingly disparate influences in their work. But none of them have quite done it like Ouattara Watts, a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York by way of Côte d’Ivoire who’s been active in the art world for over half a century. In his first LA solo show, Watts imbues his practice of creating wall-hung acrylic paintings made using drop cloths onto which she adds found materials to forge works that are absorbing in scope and feeling. Numerology, music, rituals, and ciphers—@ and Pi, among others—are not just symbols discernible in his work but also studies that are inextricable from Watts’s creative process. “There are a lot of codes in my work: figures, numbers, alchemy,” he once told an interviewer. “Spontaneity leads to creation, creation leads to research. We fall into science. Science and art are complimentary.”
Through March 16, at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA 90046.
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Mercedes Dorame at Oxy Arts
Image Credit: Courtesy Oxy Arts Since she was a teenager, artist and photographer Mercedes Dorame has been called on as a consultant when construction projects throughout Los Angeles County find Indigenous artifacts buried in the soil they’re excavating. “It’s super important. But you don’t have any power,” she told the Los Angeles Times of her ongoing consulting job. Dorame’s work as an artist and photographer focuses on cultural histories within nature, rooted in her vantage point as a Tongva woman, and has become a way of harnessing a kind of power. On view at Oxy Arts, Dorame’s exhibition, “Where Sky Touches Water,” focuses on the riveting and unusual beauty of ecological landscapes on Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) and Pimugna (Catalina Island) through photograph and sculpture, including a series of bowls cast in concrete. Driven by her gift for framing, Dorame’s layered images, like a hyper-saturated one of seagrass that is textured so it appears to seep through the inkjet print, or one showing an overcast scene of rolling fog giving way to a mountainside in the distance, reveal themselves to you slowly and ultimately linger in your mind.
Through April 20, at 4757 York Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90042.