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.
LA Woman
A Group Exhibition organized by Elizabeth Wild at Pierce College with work by
Claudia Bucher, Elizabeth Withstandley, Beth Elliot, Holly Topping, Mary Anna Pomonis, Julie Zemel, Patricia Mitchell, Rachael Neubauer, Cindy Rehm, Allison Stewart, and Haunted, feminist video shorts by Craftswoman House.
LA Woman: On Her Own Terms is a group exhibition of female visual artists who have a connection to Winslow Garage, an artist-run project space in Silverlake. Conceived as an exchange between Winslow Garage and Australian project space Marrickville Garage, the exhibition highlights the diversity of creative works produced by professional women artists residing in Los Angeles who have utilized the unique benefits provided by a non-traditional venue. Project spaces free artists to produce new or experimental works that may fall outside of their usual milieu without the pressure of commercial sales. Winslow Garage offers artists deadlines for the completion of ideas, exhibition opportunities for transitional periods, and potential peer engagement in an intimate setting.
For this exhibition, works were selected that both reflect an arguably feminine quality and also take into consideration some aspect of the environs or culture of the City of Los Angeles. From personal meditations to more overt political statements, these works investigate many of the concerns of Southern Californians from the exquisite natural landscape to the artifice of Hollywood. Through collage, painting, video, sculpture, and photography, many of the artists present fragmented images of the self or environment. Like the passing of cars on the freeway, the viewer has time to focus briefly on a detail of hair, a passing email, the blue sky, or a line of text. Others filter anxiety and escapist fantasies through technology. Survivalist skills and utopian dreams hardwire their way into reality. Not to be ignored, the Entertainment Industry makes itself visible on the glittering surface of a sculpture or in a mother’s studio portrait of her child. Included artists are Claudia Bucher, Beth Elliot, Mary Anna Pomonis, Patricia Mitchell, Rachael Neubauer, Cindy Rehm, Allison Stewart, Holly Topping, Elizabeth Withstandley and Julie Zemel.
The diversity of woman’s creative vision is further augmented by the inclusion of the video program Haunted. Haunted is an impressive series of feminist video shorts by Craftswoman House a group whose mission is “to foster dialogue on feminist issues through projects and exhibitions that pay homage to the rich legacy of feminist art in Southern California.” The program which has been shown at Winslow Garage among other venues includes the work of Ursula Brookbank, Simone Stoll, Nina Lassie, Min Choi, Anne Colvin, Elizabeth Leister, Micol Hebron, Marisa Williamson, Shana Robbins & Alberto Roman, and Tracy Abbott Szatan.