David Kordansky Gallery

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present All Opposing Players, a group exhibition curated by The Racial Imaginary Institute, featuring works by Lotte Andersen, Ed Fornieles, and Shaun Leonardo. The exhibition will be on view July 23 through August 27, 2022. An opening reception will take place from 6 – 8 PM on Friday, July 22. As part of the exhibition, on Saturday, July 23 at 11 AM, Leonardo will present a live workshop that incorporates audience participation to investigate how platforms of discussion may be rethought and possibly reinvented.

All Opposing Players explores the complex phenomenon of nationalism in the work of Andersen, Fornieles, and Leonardo, who utilize game-playing to explore the dangerous and the utopian potential of the “we.” The artists’ objects, videos, and performances address these concerns on a variety of scales, ranging from the deeply personal to the outwardly global, sometimes in challenging and contradictory ways. This project is situated within The Racial Imaginary Institute’s (TRII) wider research into nationalism, and poses questions such as: How much should we invest in ideas of the “we”? And how can we reimagine nation, tribe, and community?

Founded in 2016 by the author Claudia Rankine, The Racial Imaginary Institute seeks to change the way we imagine race in the United States and internationally by lifting up and connecting the work of artists, writers, knowledge producers, and activists with audiences seeking thoughtful, innovative conversations and experiences. The members of TRII believe that “the work of defining and changing culture is all of ours.” Institute members curating this exhibition include Makayla Bailey, Samantha Ozer, and Simon Wu.

Anthony Pearson has developed a formal vocabulary informed by photography, painting, and sculpture. For more than twenty years, he has been producing an interrelated body of objects in which subtle evolutions of material, color, and mood elicit meditative looking and quietly immersive perceptual experiences. Recent groups of wall-based sculptures, which he calls Casements and Coupled Casements, are made by pouring pigmented Hydrocal cement into bunched sections of fabric; when the dry cement is removed, finished, and installed on the wall, its shapes and volumes evoke a wide range of geological and organic forms. Upright Casements, works produced in a similar way and installed on pedestals, reveal yet another dimension of these materials—as well as the forces of light and gravity that move and illuminate them.

A careful observer of ambient conditions and a Los Angeles native, Pearson is an artist who channels the spirit of the Light and Space movement. This exhibition, for instance, is a calibrated installation; individual works contribute to an overall composition where the play between luminosity, shadow, physical and visual weight, and the viewer’s eye and body unfolds with quiet intensity. Even when removed from an exhibition context and seen on their own, Pearson’s sculptures imbue their surroundings with a concentrated sense of repose and draw attention to the kinds of fleeting changes that make otherwise static architectural settings come alive.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Ivan Morley, on view from July 23 through August 27, 2022. An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 22 from 6 until 8 PM.

Ivan Morley combines virtuosic craftsmanship, a committed sense of place, and deep knowledge of the discipline of painting to create works that take on the medium’s major narratives even as they glorify its minor pathways. For twenty-five years, he has made works that challenge expectations about how paintings should be made and what they should depict. He has long employed seemingly “lower” techniques and materials, such as the embroidery that is the focus of this exhibition; at the same time, he is the author of a strange but immediately recognizable set of images and stylistic modes.

Drawing upon the conventions of the still life genre, Morley’s new paintings were made directly from his observation of constructed props and other objects in his studio, including a sawhorse, a backdrop made of triangular shapes, and a length of chain. Whereas Morley’s earlier works possessed a narrative sensibility influenced by his interest in vernacular source material—often related to anecdotal social histories of California—the paintings in this exhibition are primarily concerned with sensory perception. In previous paintings, as the art historian John C. Welchman has described, Morley “[inverted] and [modified] the rhetorical device of ekphrasis,” creating “a drift of sensations… that flow from text to image, rather than the other way around.” Just as these earlier works reversed the orientation of the ekphrastic exercise—taking up an artistic tradition while also subverting it—Morley’s new paintings position themselves as still lifes even as his integration of multiple techniques in their making interrogates such standardized classifications.