Artists: Milano Chow, Ann Greene Kelly, Daniel Rios Rodriguez
Venue: Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
Date: July 15 – August 31, 2017
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
Press Release:
Michael Benevento is pleased to present Milano Chow, Ann Greene Kelly and Daniel Rios Rodriguez.
Los Angeles-based artist Milano Chow has established a consistent aesthetic that subtly incorporates collage effects into intricate graphite drawings of architectural environments. Chow’s works reference several types of architectural forms, both interior and exterior, and commonly focus on decorative elements and grand spaces. In Surreal fragments of scenes and tight close-ups of building facades, Chow’s collaged figures quietly inhabit their spaces, often partially visible through windows. With both filmic and graphic qualities that feel slightly more perfect than reality, the beautifully rendered architectural elements are sharp and clean and contemporary, like designer stages for high fashion photography built to feel like Old European aristocratic elegance. The collaged figures, pulled from high fashion magazines, appear contemporary yet somehow also timeless. They seem to wander in their spaces much like models or actors, projecting emotive qualities like longing, vulnerability, and loss with robotic precision, but without the ability to truly connect with one another.
The interdisciplinary practice of Los Angeles-based artist Ann Greene Kelly is driven by sculptural combines that often affect found materials with hand-made additions and alterations. A brick pattern engraved in white plaster completely covers the surface of a sculptural composition. Upon closer examination the sculptural arrangement is revealed to be a connected encirclement of child-sized chairs encased in something like miniature white brick scale skin, as if some sort of cartoon parasite had entered real life and grown all over or from within the chairs, forever encrusting them together in a shared circle. Hovering between benign household objects, real societal detritus, and fantasy wasteland, Kelly’s objects take on anthropomorphic qualities like vulnerability and hope. They seem to promise that the vulnerable, the abused, and the disenfranchised will always continue their meek march forward despite the absurdity of life and despite the inevitable crushing reality.
The small-scale assemblage/paintings by San Antonio-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez are characterized by regional specificity, non-canonical aesthetic inspiration, and iconography. His work is linked to regional folk and craft histories while simultaneously referencing canonical impasto painting and assemblage. Rodriguez produces unique shaped painting surfaces for semi-pictorial iconographic compositions painted in heavy impasto, with additional sculptural relief provided by simple found materials like nails, stones, and rope. The impasto quality of the painting bursts out of the small tight spaces and defined graphic edges of the imagery. The found objects are painted and arranged to work as components embedded in the imagery and framing devices, or as separately defined objects that feel like spiritual trinkets or offerings at an alter. Allusions to mystical and symbolic pictorial information run through the paintings, with specific attention to indigenous American iconography.
