Winslow Garage
Opening October 25th/ 3-6 pm. Holly Topping/ Djinn, Sirens, and Other Troubles
Holly Topping
Djinn, Sirens and Other Troubles
Opening October 25th
Winslow Garage is pleased to present Djinns, Sirens, and Other Troubles by Los Angeles artist Holly Topping. In this exhibition, Topping presents an installation of painted hanging gourds, small paintings on wood crosscuts, and a selection of watercolors on paper. Known for her highly skilled paintings of figures with cheeky contemporary concerns, this work presents the artist in full play mode. Naughty sprites cavort through air and sea causing the occasional disaster and disembodied arms elegantly smoke cigarettes in fantasy landscapes. Drawing from mythology, memory, and contemporary experience, these works reveal the strange ways we adapt to uncertainty and catastrophe.
Holly Topping is a Los Angeles–based artist and educator whose paintings explore the strange intersections of personal history, cultural memory, gender, humor, and unease. She received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and has exhibited extensively in Los Angeles and nationally, including solo exhibitions at Angles Gallery and Orange Coast College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Bass Museum of Art, Torrance Art Museum, and the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, and is held in the collections of the Bass Museum of Art and the Museum of Sex in New York. Topping has been a tenured professor of art at Orange Coast College since 2008.
Sarah Granett
The Galloping Snail
Our perception has to be tickled all the time. --Agnès Varda
At a gallop, the snail! We scribble while crawling in the wake of God.
We live more quickly than ourselves, the pen doesn’t follow. To paint the present, which is
passing us by, we stop the present.
--Hélène Cixous, Without End, No, State of Drawingness, No, Rather: The Executioner’s
Taking Off
After the Galloping Snail, 2019
18 minutes, loop.
After the Galloping Snail is a digital slide show by Sarah Granett. It gathers and presents a
sequence of digital collage-drawings which were initially shared on the instagram feed
@phoneypntng. These images were made by Granett from 2014-2017 using an android
phone, its native camera function and the drawing app, PicsArt.
By taking phone-photographs, and drawing on tthem, and manipulating them digitally, the
artist practices a graffiti-esque, material-defying engagement with time and place. Granett
describes the process as compulsive, habitual and addictive, driven by desire, feeling,
reverence and curiosity for the temporal world.
This drawing activity was repeated on a near-daily basis snd generated nearly 1000 imagea,
of which roughly 600 were posted to @phoneypntng.
Now presented in a slide show format, the images are set in the system of a projected video
loop. The viewer cannot pause, rewind or speed forward. In this context, the images replace
typical units of time and position the viewer in a durational experience marked by drawing.
In this experience of image and time, Granett suggests we might think of the visual cadence
as a variety of respiration in which these images-- improvised, provisional records of fleeting
experience-- pass in and out, and carry us along.
________________
Sarah Granett is a visual artist. Her work investigates painting and its structures through
psycho-materially engaged abstraction. Granett earned an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts.
She also studied at Bard College (BA), the New York Studio School, and CSU Sacramento.