Frieze LA 2023
February 16-19, 2023
Booth #E17
For Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a curated presentation featuring work by artists who explore spirit and survival through ancestral legacies, the natural environment, and the mythological. Borrowing its title from Ocean Vuong’s epistolary ode to his mother, the poetic exhibition celebrates the privilege of being alive.
Rose B. Simpson’s ceramic sculpture Mourn (2022) uses earth, the natural environment, to address emotional and existential impacts of our collective humanity.
Loie Hollowell’s Heavy Burden (2022) incorporates casts of a friend’s breast—their deep blue connoting the weightiness of water. A self-portrait by Rebecca Ness shows the artist in her studio surrounded by objects—like the crayon box that reappears in her paintings—as traces of the everyday that insist upon the artist’s presence in this life.
Inspired by Haitian and African mythologies—such as Ra, the Egyptian creation deity—Woody De Othello’s sculpture seeing the sun (2023) signifies a spiritual ascent. Each step of the large, bronze step ladder holds ceramic objects that relate to the sun’s energy in our everyday lives, like plants, sunglasses, and ball caps, while a kneeling ceramic figure sits atop the ladder in a prayer-like position.
Reclaiming family histories, Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette’s pink, glowing Mirror Bar (2022) celebrates the legacy of San Francisco’s first black-owned gay bar—The New Eagle Creek Saloon—opened by the artist’s father in 1990.
A new painting by Sam Falls seems to capture the wind in deeply hued silhouettes of native bluegrasses. Made in upstate New York, Falls exposed the canvas to the elements—wind, rain, and sun—and the passage of time, as marked by raccoon tracks that trace across the top. As such, American Wind (2022) is a primary source of the environment at a given time and place.
Dashiell Manley's lush paintings memorialize life and the passing of time. Their dense and tactile surfaces are made with just two kinds of brushstrokes: a short, rhythmic, repetitive stroke, which relates to a mindful focus on the process of painting itself, and occasional drifting transgressive lines, which signal—and attempt to correct—moments of distraction.
