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.
Cindy Rehm
The Unconsumated Act
"Unleashed and raging, she belongs to the race of waves. She arises, she approaches, she lifts up, she reaches, covers over, washes a shore, flows embracing the cliffs least undulation, already she is another, arising again, throwing the fringed vastness of her body up high…”
-Hélène Cixous “The Newly Born Woman”
For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Rehm has taken the title of a cryptic and sparsely documented work that dancer Hélène Vanel performed for the opening of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism. While details vary, all accounts describe the work as an erotically charged hysterical fit performed on disheveled beds inside Duchamp’s coal sack room. The evocative photographs of Vanel’s performance served as the inspiration for Rehm’s new series of drawings that continue her exploration into the complex relationship between the female body, representation, and myth.
While “The Unconsummated Act” has been noted as the first surrealist dance, Vanel has been nearly erased from history and multiple sources report that she perished in a concentration camp. In fact, she lived into her eighties and in later life penned a memoir of her rich life in the avant garde of Paris and London.
The exhibition is accompanied by an artist pamphlet featuring a collage by Rehm and a text by Sara Fowler.
Cindy Rehm is an artist and an educator. She is the co-founder and director of Craftswoman House, a project dedicated to presenting feminist centered works in Southern California. From 2003-2006, Rehm directed the DIY installation space spare room in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship in Media from the Tennessee State Arts Commission, a Learning to Love You More Grant, and a Faculty Development Grant from Middle Tennessee State University.
Rehm’s work in drawing, performance, and video has been shown at national and international venues including: Woman Made Gallery: Chicago, LACE; Los Angeles, Goliath Visual Space; Brooklyn, Paul Robeson Gallery; Rutgers, ARC Gallery; Chicago, Transformer; Washington DC, Interaction IV; Sardinia, Italy, and the Archeological Museum; Varna, Bulgaria and at Mains d’Oeuvres; Saint Ouen, France. Rehm’s work may be viewed at cindyrehm.com