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.
Stephanie Stein
Recent Landscapes: Orienting Our Interiority into the Exterior World
Stephanie Stein is an artist who grew up in NYC in the 1970’s looking at the Great Chinese Landscape paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reading stories of arctic adventures and tall ships sailing into the open sea. In her most recent work, she presents a selection of shan shui (“mountain water”) paintings rendered in ethereal blue and white tones and reigned in by a faint grid system or displaying some barely visible type of registration mark. These navigation tools are orienteering points for entering Stein’s imagined landscapes. Assessing the sublime from across vast distances, the artist paints “to feel what it would be like in that place.”
Oddly reminiscent of the great lonely spaces found in early 18th century painting, these works serve as escapes into an untouched natural world and simultaneously act as reminders that the natural world may no longer be able to provide us sanctuary from the failure of human order.
These are beautiful paintings: beautifully rendered, beautifully contemplated and not to be missed.
Stein has a BFA in Printmaking from the Philadelphia College of Art, studied at Temple University Rome, and is currently pursuing a Masters of Human Development at Pacific Oaks College. Stein has traveled throughout Europe and North Africa and shows her work in New York and Los Angeles.