LOS ANGELES, CA.- In FEEL BETTER, her second solo exhibition of multi-media works at
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Miyoshi Barosh focuses on the shift in responsibility from society to the individual to create and sustain meaningful lives and, concurrently, the way cultural failure has become internalized. Value, however, in Barosh's work is a "projection of ourselves onto things" like cute animals, mythic landscapes, cultural aphorisms, and the built environment. Her use of vernacular craft processes and folk traditions in combination with digital technologies contradict ideas about progress and technological determinism.
Her work Arcadia is an assemblage of accumulation, consumption, and destruction with its faux dimensionality as a folksy-crude parody of Tron and the landscapes of computer gaming in conjunction with home videos of cats from YouTube. In this mediated experience of nature, reduced to floralpatterned fabrics and digitized kittens, animals are consumed as constructs of cuteness, an addictive escape to an interiorized "happy place." The images of the kittens reflect a culturally induced need for self-medication.
An extension of the ideas elaborated in Arcadia, I ♥ Kitties are layered, screened, Instagram-perfected reproductions of captured kitty heads, the new celebrity icons of the digital age, at once eye candy and hypnotic drug.
From a kind of interiorized form of self-medication to projecting out onto the landscape and built memorials, Monuments to the Failed Future refers to industrial capitalism's utopian promise of shared wealth. Barosh's models parody male-dominated power as represented by public monuments and projects. The individual titles within the Monuments series, for example, Model for the Monument to a Manipulative State of Well-Being is strident, manifesto-like in opposition to the inflated model itself. Each "model" is also depicted in situ on a digital photogravure print made from vintage postcards of scenic America: the projected landscapes of our collective national consciousness. Today, with the rapid growth of technological innovation, the assuagement of negative emotions has taken the place of any progressive social action. This, and the decentralization of power, has made the monument superfluous.
The title work, Feel Better, is a billboard-sized, large text proclamation exhorting readers to action: to affect emotional change. The inadequacies of this text to conform to higher graphic standards subsume its ability to accomplish that which it demands. With material, process, and text, Barosh makes work that is a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity.
"Through the intense materiality of language-as-sculpture, the work activates a kind of monumental craftsmanship that oscillates between the fleeting virtuality of a Facebook 'wall' and the timeless finality of a tombstone."
Annetta Kapon, BOMB, Fall 2013
Miyoshi Barosh is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist working in a wide range of materials and techniques including craft processes and found objects while exposing the socio-political underpinnings of American culture. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, most recently in the exhibition Woman, War, and Industry, curated by Amy Galpin, at the San Diego Museum of Art, and Size Really Does Matter, at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Other recent exhibitions include Cheerful and Heroic: Eight Perspectives on the Art of Failure, curated by Lauren Lockhart, at Southwestern College Art Gallery, The Loop Show, curated by China Adams, at the Beacon Arts Building, Los Angeles, and We're Not Here to Waste Time! (Artforum Critics Pick) at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. She was also artist-inresidence (2010) at the New Children's Museum in San Diego, where she presented the monumental installation I am the one who will make a difference. As an editor and publisher, she has worked on booklength interviews with artists such as Vija Celmins, Mike Kelley, and John Miller as well as with writers Sylvère Lotringer, David Rattray, and Ralph Rugoff.
Miyoshi Barosh was born in Los Angeles, CA; she lives and works in Pasadena. Barosh received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She also attended Yale Summer School of Art and Music and Parsons School of Design Summer School in New York City.
