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.
Nathan Weikert
THE FOLLOWING
The recent work of Los Angeles artist Nathan Weikert explores the dark underbelly of contemporary media images. Weikert’s sensuous charcoal drawings are largely sourced from the subject matter typical of doomscrolling and include “portraits” of victims of abuse, the abusers, and the culture of activities surrounding them. Well-known figures may be altered through various pictorial treatments and can feel as if they have been smeared or caressed into their current state of notoriety. These skillfully translated images pose questions about power and ask us to consider both the depicted and the image itself. Weikert’s work is both the product of and possibly an antidote to our current obsession with habitual, mindless media consumption. Nathan Weikert was born in Kettering, Ohio and studied painting at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In addition to a BFA, Weikert holds a BS and MA in art education and currently works as the Director of Graduate Admission at the ArtCenter College of Design. Nathan has exhibited his work in Ohio and Los Angeles.