Wilding Cran Gallery

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present A Day In The Life, a curatorial assemblage of the memories and everyday influences of emerging artist, Jonah Elijah.

In an effort to capture the essence of life in his hometown of Houston, Texas, Jonah Elijah invites the viewer to take a walk in his shoes, harnessing everything from oil paint and pastel, to newsprint and found objects. Through an odyssey punctuated by snapshots of street scenes and basketball courts, shopping carts and sneakers, A Day In The Life introduces the viewer to a series of vignettes that guide us through the experience of a young black man growing up in America.
Throughout his practice, the now Los Angeles- based artist utilizes representational and abstract approaches to painting in order to isolate and examine the impact of certain images, objects, and rituals that came to characterize his adolescence. At once thoughtfully methodical and implicitly organic, Elijah revisits the sites of his memories by experimenting with point of view. Through an aesthetic commentary on the ways in which we are able to re-evaluate our modes of perception, the
artist questions the significance of where we stand in relation to our memories, to one another, to animals and insects, to telephone poles and mountaintops.

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present The Muse and the Simurgh, a solo show of new ceramic works by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Elder.

Elder’s practice pays tribute to the diverse traditions and histories of her Iraqi & Scottish ancestors. Merging their ancestral experiences and cultural iconography with those of her contemporary Los Angeles upbringing, she creates a visual identity of her own.

“My ceramic practice is the most immediate and visceral attempt to engage these ancient cultures, with the most ancient and organic medium: clay. I understand vases as modern relics, each piece of stoneware illustratively engraved and influenced as much by Greek and Persian mythology as by Amphora vases, the natural etchings and hieroglyphs found inside the Lascaux Cave, and computer-generated map-making. In my hand-painted vessels I carve signs and symbols that merge these mythologies with signifiers from my own quotidien existence, weaving ancient languages with pictorial narratives connected to the subconscious. They chart my own psycho-geography as it overlaps with the physical geography of my studio and social life in Los Angeles.”