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Winslow Garage

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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. 

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Gioj De Marco
Apogee

This four-channel site-specific video installation shows the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal existentialist play NO EXIT. Designed initially as a quadrophonic sound piece broadcasted from a dungeon in Northern Ireland, APOGEE evolved into a video adaptation where the characters speak with individual Morse code frequencies instead of voices. The actors enact the entire play, opening and closing their mouths at precisely timed intervals while sitting without moving or emoting. The performances eventually take a toll on the actors' bodies, paralleling the type of torture that Sartre's characters endure in the play, famously described as "hell is other people."

Gioj De Marco's multi-disciplinary art practice focuses on storytelling as a social grooming practice and how the plasticity of language reshapes the cultural landscape. The objects and experiences she develops are conditioned by existentialism, surrealism, 20th-century conceptual art movements, and cinema. De Marco lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is co-founder and co-director of Prospect Art, a forward thinking, not-for-profit visual arts organization.
www.gioj.org