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.
Monica Rodriquez
The Land of Promise
In The Land of Promise, Monica Rodriguez presents a series of drawings that reconsider the Spanish conquest of what would become California. Mixing cartographic land surveys and botanic plant studies, the artist teases out the ruling abstractions at work within the sixteenth and seventeenth century “civilizing” projects to map land, plants and people. In the juxtaposition between the cartographic and the taxonomical, a narrower definition of mapping is destabilized, while the colonial and imperial legacies are made legible in the ongoing language of neutral scientific objectivity. Mapping marks the first step in the command and domination over space. Today the Iberian Empire is gone, Alta California is now Anglo California, and yet the disciplines of science are no less formed by the demands of empire and capital.
Los Angeles-based Puerto Rican artist, Monica Rodriguez's (b.1980), art practice looks at the history and impact of Colonialism on the political, economic, and social conditions in the Americas and the Caribbean region. Rodriguez obtained an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2011, was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York in 2012-13. Rodriguez has exhibited her work internationally. Group exhibitions include Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis (2022), TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz, Spain (2021); Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA (2020); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR (2019); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2019); LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2018); 19th Contemporary Art Festival Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015); among others. Land of Promise is a commissioned work organized thorough our partnership with Prospect Art