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.
Carment Amengual/ Disembodied by Intelligence
The video reworks Sketches for a Piece on Language and Power, originally commissioned by Prospect Art in 2024, into three short staged scenes exploring the appropriation and redefinition of words such as “life,” “freedom,” and “memory.” Amengual stages these transformations through a deliberately “poor” and grotesque visual language drawn from black light theatre, shadow theatre, and interwar cinema. These archaic and technologically modest forms acknowledge art’s limitations while asking what forms of agency it might nevertheless make possible.
Two mobile sculptures created for the exhibition extend these concerns into physical space. Made of ceramic, wood, and leather straps, they form suspended phrases in cursive script: Dismembered by Capital and Disembodied by Intelligence. Their materials and construction draw on Amengual’s research into medieval instruments of torture and disciplinary technologies, connecting histories of bodily discipline with contemporary experiences of fragmentation and disembodiment. The body they evoke remains intentionally ambiguous: subjective, social, collective, or all of these at once.
At a moment marked by authoritarianism, genocide, environmental destruction, and the erosion of democratic values, Disembodied by Intelligence does not propose art as a straightforward political solution. Instead, it considers art-making as a way of bringing together what has been fragmented and recovering some measure of agency.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Carmen Amengual (Buenos Aires, 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and independent researcher whose work draws on fragile archives, micro-histories, and oral narratives to examine how histories of resistance circulate and transform over time. Working across experimental cinema, installation, sculpture, sound, and text, she brings incomplete and forgotten materials into the present, exploring the intersections of political memory, biography, and history.
Her recent project A Non-Coincidental Mirror reconstructs the legacy of the Third World Filmmakers Meetings (Algiers, 1973 – Buenos Aires, 1974) while revisiting an unrealized documentary project from the period. The project received a Creative Capital Award (2024), Graham Foundation grants (2023–24), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts research fellowship (2025). Amengual has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship, and a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Buenos Aires and an MFA in Visual Arts from CalArts.
This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture with additional support provided by Yev Kozachuck, CFP® – Financial Advisor at Edward Jones.
Part of this work was developed during a 2024 residency at AUTOMATA, Los Angeles