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.
Jane and Anthony Polkinghorne
Polk-a-Polk Films
Polk-a-Polk Productions is the Australian brother and sister film making team Anthony and Jane Polkinghorne. Over the last few years they have brought a very particular ‘vision’ to the short film genre. Their vision is not predicated on insights into human emotion, but is rather a deep probe into toilet humour that is combined with a rambunctious and camp sensibility. Humour and disgust blend together in a perverse almost non-sexual way, and perhaps that is
the most perverse thing of all.
By utilizing the same group of actors a strange continuity builds up as each film is viewed. But the continuity is not of plot or character. This is a continuity of disgust, absurd personas and filthy actions all streamlined into films running no longer than 7 minutes. There is no time to get bored although the more squeamish may simply be repulsed into leaving.
Polk-a-Polk films are populated with zombies. monsters, space sluts, and other over wrought, over signified film staples. However through the device of humour these filmic signs are rendered ludicrous and more often than not reduced to or brought asunder by the scatological .
Parental warning: There is nudity, there is dancing, there is mud.
Bio:
Apart from their sibling relationship Polk-a-Polk Productions have been working together since 1991??. A lack of ambition and of course finances has left them cursed to only make films running 7 minutes or less. Jane has been living in Los Angeles for the past 2 years, while Anthony has been based in Sydney. Hopefully their reunion later this month will bear fruit and more of their genius will make it to the big screen soon, although they would also be happy with the small screen!