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.
Anne Kay
Parent Material
Both embracing and dissecting the concept and material of drawing, artist Anne Kay presents a compelling installation of photographic reproductions based on illustrations from covers of eighteenth and nineteenth century novels. These novels written by female authors of the time including Mary Shelly, Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, and Mary Ann Evans ( writing under the pen name George Elliot), offer Kay access into the attitudes and customs of the time and highlight the transitory nature of cultural values and ideals.
Choosing to create a series of pencil drawings based on book illustrations “ that seem intended to represent the novel’s entire narrative in one image”, Kay frees the images to separate from their source material and create new narratives of their own. These are drawings that have been photocopied, physically cut from their backgrounds, hinged with grommets, and pinned to the wall with dissecting needles. Arranged with a nod to the classic mystery novel, this eclectic selection of images clearly carries its history with it, but is now free to tell a wholly new story.
Anne Kay is an Australian visual artist, currently working in drawing, photography and photomontage. She is a graduate of the MFA program at CalArts, supported by a Samstag International Travelling Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in Australia since 1992 at contemporary artspaces, artist-run-galleries and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. The Museum of Contemporary Art acquired a work produced collaboratively with Jane Polkinghorne for the MCA’s Contemporary Art Archive. In 2005-6, Anne completed an interactive video installation for a major Sydney public art commission. Anne has worked collaboratively with other artists on a number of occasions and has been active in various Sydney Artist Run Initiatives. She was also a sessional academic for seven years at various universities in and around Sydney.