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.
Inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction short story And He Built a Crooked House, Philips’ installation reimagines the story’s dimensional experimentation through a spatial arrangement of sculptures and drawings. Loosely modeled on the unfolded form of a tesseract, the works explore ideas of space-time, connectivity, and perception. Installed within Winslow Garage, the project engages in a site-specific dialogue: while Heinlein’s fictional house embodies sleek geometric precision, the garage’s crooked architecture and uneven floor disrupt the clean minimalism of the black-and-white works, creating tension between site and form.
Using a restrained palette, Philips emphasizes form, texture, and material nuance. Graphite plays a central role in both the drawings and the sculptures—not only as a medium for mark-making, but also as a means of creating surface depth and tonal variation. Referencing Robert Smithson’sidea of spaces that “exist between mind and matter, detached from both,” the installation positions meaning in the shifting relationships between objects, space, and viewer. As visitors navigate the exhibition, these relationships transform, mirroring the instability of Heinlein’scrooked house and the constant reinvention embedded in the fabric of Los Angeles.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Minna Philips is a contemporary artist from India, living in Inglewood, California. Her works explore the nature of reality, particularly the higher dimensional theory in physics that proposes the existence of extra dimensions and “branes” that suggest the confinement of our universe on one of the many membranes in higher dimensions. She is also inspired by natural patterns and the in-between nature of her identity as an immigrant. Her architectural drawings explore spaces as they relate to our bodies and perception, highlighting these ideas. Minna's works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are in private and public collections, including the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA). Her work Memory is part of the Moon Gallery project based in the Netherlands and will eventually find a permanent place on the Moon in 2025.