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    Cathartic Creatures

    September 21-November 4

    Cathartic Creatures features six artists whose practices engage the uncanny. Sensuous paintings and sculpture straddle beauty and monstrosity, abstraction and familiarity. Artists in the exhibition include Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (Los Angeles, CA), Atsushi Kaga (Dublin, Ireland/Kyoto, Japan), Takuro Kuwata (Gifu, Japan), Woody De Othello (Oakland, CA), Grace Weaver (Brooklyn, NY), and Mie Yim (New York, NY) whose life-affirming creations call on the possibilities of science fiction and fantasy. The exhibition opens on September 21 and runs through November 4, 2023.

    Atsushi Kaga’s fantastical vignettes feature recurring characters, like a cartoonish rabbit with extra-large ears named Usacchi. Inspired by manga, whimsical animals populate a world that draws rich floral embellishments from Dutch still life paintings and gold-leafed backgrounds from Japanese screen paintings to explore personal narratives. In Irish breakfast with the family of the cats (2023), an acrylic on canvas painting, the artist’s seven cats—one a skeleton—sit at a table with Usacchi like a Last Supper where darkness lurks. New to Kaga’s cast of characters, a donkey features prominently in a painting about the loss of his mother, You can still talk to me with your absence (2023), and similarly a new 3D printed sculpture of Usacchi shows the donkey sitting in a circular cut-out in the rabbit’s stomach.
    Woody De Othello’s surreal and playful ceramic sculptures craft domestic and household objects to inflated size, imbuing them with emotion and spirituality. In Light of My Eye (2023), a bright blue patinated bronze step ladder holds an assortment of ceramic forms. Domestic objects like a boombox, a stack of books, a wobbly mirror and wilted houseplants question how our human experiences manifest through the objects that surround us. New in this work, a clay sculpture of the artist’s dog Mia sits on top of the ladder—a cathartic creature both shaping and bearing witness to the occurrences of the everyday.
    Takuro Kuwata’s viscerally striking ceramic sculptures explore the material’s playfulness and inherent elements of chance. Using thickly coated glazes that explode in the kiln, Kuwata transforms traditional shapes, like a tea bowl and a vase, into grotesque forms. Lustrous platinum and gold pigmented glazes contrast punctured, craggily surfaces. In one tea bowl, Kuwata incorporated stones into his clay mix that cause the clay vessel to rupture and ooze from within.
    Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. reimagines the genre of “landscape” paintings, capturing cultural histories of public spaces in LA’s Boyle Heights and San Francisco’s Mission district. Two new paintings on wood panel imagine a fictitious botánica in the Mission—a store selling herbs, charms, and candles used in religious rituals. The paintings appear like weatherworn shop signs, faded, graffitied and painted over. Dirtied patinas juxtapose freshly painted graphics, like the mustached Jesús Malverde, a “Robin Hood” and patron saint among drug traffickers. On one painting, the rhinestone-studded figure of Santa Muerte draped in a rainbow-colored robe beckons with assurances of protection against gun violence, while on another painting, a rosy chuparosa, or Hummingbird candle, promises to manifest love.
    Mie Yim’s gestural marks and careful dabs of paint oscillate between chaos and order in her large-scale abstract oil paintings. Organic forms appear charged in a juicy palette of magenta, green, yellow, and blue that recall the otherworldly colors of deep-sea coral reefs. Prickly orbs explode into pointillist color fields. Tubular channels mingle and intertwine into ecstatic networks. In Juggler (2023), the purple limbs of a large octopus juggle polychromatic balls in a metaphor for motherhood or the multi-tasker. Cyclone (2023) takes its title from a Coney Island roller-coaster. In what began as a vertical painting and over months turned to a horizontal orientation, its composition alludes to life’s twists that are at once terrifying and euphoric.
    Grace Weaver’s large oil on canvas, Floor-painting (2023), portrays an awkwardly positioned woman surrounded by floating objects. Using masonry brushes to apply wet-on-wet paint, Weaver’s big, loose brushstrokes render simplified forms—the woman’s body, paint tubes, a cell phone, and a square blue rag—on a flat, brick-red surface. Everything appears unencumbered by gravity, imparting a sense of boisterousness amid the mundane. In two watercolors, Weaver’s protagonist is a social media influencer. She is a confident persona whose downward gaze suggests the viewer has caught her in a moment of self-doubt.