LOS ANGELES, CA.- Honor Fraser Gallery is presenting William Leavitt: The small laboratory. Accompanying The small laboratory is Recent Paintings by Katy Crowe, Raúl Guerrero, Janet Jenkins and William Leavitt, curated by Leavitt. The exhibitions are on view from January 16 through February 20, 2016.
In his sculptures, paintings, drawings, and plays, William Leavitt offers up familiar yet strange worlds suspended in time. The small laboratory is both a sculpture and a stage set for a play with the same title. Percolating liquids, faux flames, copper wires and various antennae suggest an active science laboratory, but the absence of anyone carrying out experiments leaves the narrative open ended. As such, the backdrop does not disappear into the shadows, but instead becomes the subject of our attention. Like many of Leavitt's sculpture-cum-stage sets, The small laboratory seems to exist in a perpetual state of becoming or in a moment in the just past. The sense that something may take place any second or has just occurred generates a pleasantly disorienting atmosphere that confronts our expectations of conventional static sculpture.
Leavitt’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings have often featured scientific references like telescopes and molecular models as well as references to the futuristic architecture and design that is common in the built environment of post-World War II southern California. In The small laboratory, the tropes of a science lab indicate ongoing experiments of some sort, but what is being studied remains unstated. The play that Leavitt has written to be performed with the sculpture involves three scientists working together in a laboratory on critical experiments. The play's intrigue arises not only from the urgency of their work, but from the age-old, all too human dramas of competition and desire.
Since the late 1960s, Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt's work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including an extensive survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2011. His work has been included in thematic exhibitions around the world and is included in public collections such as Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Curated by William Leavitt, Recent Paintings shares space with his installation of The small laboratory and brings together four artists whose lives have intersected personally and professionally for decades.
Katy Crowe's quiet abstractions draw on nature and ancient architecture. Using a palette that often recalls desert landscapes, Crowe layers, repeats and weaves images like nets, spirals, and ladders with stripes and ovals that alternately reveal and conceal illusionistic depth. Mesmerizing in their deceptively simple compositions, Crowe's paintings suggest both reverie and rumination.
Investigating the historical roots of visual tropes through complicated (and often darkly humorous) compositions, Raúl Guerrero employs conventional painting styles to upend cultural assumptions and stereotypes. Combining imagery from American pop culture, European art history and the histories of native North Americans, Guerrero calls attention to foundational narratives that are increasingly marginalized in our late capitalist world.
Janet Jenkins photographs graffiti on lampposts, parking meters, newspaper boxes and other mundane features of the urban landscape to inspire her recent series of paintings. Building her surfaces with both brushes and rags to create a mottled texture, Jenkins then uses oil stick to carefully reproduce the ubiquitous graffiti. Meaningless to the uninitiated, Jenkins transposes these mysterious linguistic communiqués into compelling drawn images.
William Leavitt's unpopulated landscapes and interiors at times recall the aesthetics of advertising, architectural drawings and especially theater-design sketches. Often related to his plays, Leavitt's paintings and drawings allude to narrative without entirely revealing their stories. Enlarged sections of his compositions within elliptical bubbles welcome us to view details of the pictured environments, as in marketing materials for a new housing development or product line.
