racecar
Jenny Gagalka
August 3 - September 8, 2018
@
Monaco
2701 Cherokee Street
Saint Louis, MO
In short, the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed. Which means that for at least parts of this trajectory, time indeed runs backwards, from an emptied out future to nurturing a stagnant imaginary past, sustained by disruptive design.
Hito Steyerl (2016)
Good Weather is excited to present Jenny Gagalka’s second solo exhibition with the gallery at Monaco in St. Louis. racecar is a palindrome built around the title of Gagalka's first show with the gallery—E—a letter that acts as a stand-in for everything: the engineered rhythm of everyday and its eternal cycle which we embrace and ostensibly race and endure. The stereoscopic installation of a suite of five double-sided paintings perfectly illustrates this palindromatic hover with the imagery of a camel stepping on its own foot. Within the walls of the exhibition space, the curatorial project friendsh.jp will present Loss Shopper, a concurrent show by Gagalka’s collaborative drawing project with Los Angeles-based artists Beaux Mendes and William Wasserman, labeled En Plein Error. The exhibitions open Aug 3, 2018 and are on view until Sep 8, 2018.
Jenny Gagalka (b. 1984 Vancouver, British Columbia) lives in Los Angeles, California. She recently graduated from the MFA program at UCLA in Painting & Drawing and is currently a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
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Loss Shopper
Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes, and William Wasserman
friendsh.jp is honored to present the exhibition Loss Shopper by Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes, and William Wasserman, within the walls of Jenny Gagalka’s solo exhibition racecar presented by Good Weather at Monaco. For the exhibition, the artists have prepared a statement about their collaborative drawing practice:
Since the spring of 2017, we have ventured across Southern California, Utah, and Nevada to draw en plein air. This practice includes both drawing outside and the transformation of hotels/ motels into temporary studios along the way. Drawing from observation en plein air is our point of departure. We work with chalk pastel on paper, either all together at the same time, or by passing drawings back and forth. At night, we retreat to the motel room where we hang landscapes, inhabited only hours ago, on the walls. Recently, these drawings have reappeared in a collective mass in large scale drawings that call to question what a contemporary historical painting would look like. In the end, the drawings depict a fictitious cast of characters born of otherworldly landscapes.
The portraits are a combination of all of our faces—we take turns drawing one another onto the same surface. The characters that finally emerge have the quality of collective kin: dissipated Jameson, his paramour Helen Fennel, and baby Qquarles, paternity/maternity unknown. These drawings undergo a process of doing and undoing, eventually settling into a sequined equilibrium. As our own physiognomies fade away, these new offspring become the object of observation - an engine for more collaborative works.
It is a constant negotiation to work in a triad with the question of what to destroy and what to let be. Painting always lays the new over the old, but refers back in time. We become the viewer, the observer, and not the creator. As travelers drawing from observation in a specific site, we also become voyeurs. We form a close friendship with each other and a relationship to the artworks. The armature of collaboration is key—it is interacting with things you don’t understand. The characters that emerge behave as creators.
Here three distinct voices speak to each other through drawing, and styles adapt to each other through observation of the other. We have paradoxically created a fourth style that is made up of three seemingly uncooperative individual styles.
Our individual methods could not be more different, yet through the triad of Beaux/Jenny/ William, a fourth artist emerges, The Captain. We are left with portraits that really are not, and landscapes of who knows where. These people and places are tired, deranged, and also loud with their mouths wide open. In fact they open and close in mid speech like little hydrothermal vents found at the deepest part of the Pacific ocean floor, which release carbon providing life to organisms that, in complete darkness, could otherwise not be. The past is evident through the unerasable marks left on the paper after re-re-reworking.
Jenny Gagalka (b. 1984 Vancouver, British Columbia) lives in Los Angeles, California. She recently graduated from the MFA program at UCLA in Painting & Drawing and is currently a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Beaux Mendes (b. 1987 New York City, New York) received a BA from Wesleyan University in Intellectual History in 2010 and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2014, they founded Treasure Town, an exhibition platform and the location of the archives of Nathaniel Green.
William Wasserman (b. 1990 Vanderburgh, Indiana) received a BFA in 2013 from Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writing from June to July of 2004 can be found online at: www.deviantart.com/nestingnaira.