House Party

Opening Reception: November 2nd, 2024

3415 Verdugo Rd. LA CA 90065

GGLA is proud to present House Party, the final exhibition in La Casita at 3415 Verdugo Road, the auxiliary gallery space that has accompanied the main gallery at 3407 Verdugo Road. House Party as an exhibition rings true to its name, bringing together friends both new and old, some familiar and others well known yet newly acquainted. With a colorful effervescence and a palpable energy that resonates from work to work, House Party is a fitting culmination for a year of expansive community based exhibitions held under one roof. 

Two paintings by San Francisco based painter Joe Roberts capture the sentiments and energy of the exhibition, both featuring trees covered in so many birds that the works begin to camouflage. One is set in the daytime, with birds of primary colors, oranges, blacks and whites set against a sublime backdrop; the other filled with crows or ravens all set against a dramatic evening backdrop. And despite the density of birds, they stand in relative silence, their accentuated eyes all peering at the viewer as if to ask, “who just interrupted the party”. In another work titled “Curtain Call”, fellow San Francisco based painter Rachel Simon Marino depicts a fever dream of a domestic space, psychedelic orange striped walls and lime green doors fling open to reveal slumping orange ladders in the distance and the shadowy outline of a figure dashing from the scene. In the foreground a pair of royal purple curtains frames an expanding puddle that threatens to subsume two crimson recliners, as orange bricks fall from the ceiling and blue gloved hands clap in celebration of this deranged scene. Works by Los Angeles based-artists Hubert Schmalix and Umar Rashid both share a similar density to those of Roberts and Marino though depicted in vastly different ways–Rashid composes an expansive landscape with a battalion of soldiers stretching and morphing into a horizontally stretched infinity symbol, whereas Schmalix builds a grandiose landscape, broken down into fields of solid color, all with slight variations in hue punctuated by confident and consistently thick linework. Taking a different approach to line is Hilary Pecis’ oil pastel drawing on paper of a radiant bouquet that carries all of the artist’s observational mastery, yet delivers this in an unfamiliar medium which offers a great burst of energy and immediacy. This spirit is perfectly encapsulated in Pecis’ glass vase which feels like a party in itself–stems and reflections depicted through slashes of color set against the occasional deep black mark. 

Contrasting the maximalist extroverted compositions of Rashid, Roberts, Marino, Schmalix and Pecis are works by artists such as Joan Brown, Hilary Pecis, JPW 3 and Woody Othello, that take a more introverted approach focusing on excerpts and small clippings that provide mystery while standing in for the greater whole. Erica Vincenzi’s mysterious, “Only Know Her By the Corners Of Her Skirt”, features two smaller canvases hung together that each share a corner of a draping skirt, exuding human presence without any evidence of the lower extremities of its wearer. Woody Othello’s ceramic lightswitch which is vaguely the same size as the real thing, exudes all the slumping gravitas and innate personality that clay provides, and is further heightened through a beautifully off-kilter mother of pearl lustre. Three smaller canvasses by Los Angeles’ JPW3 feature abstracted side profiles of a single black high heel shoe set upon a deeply witchy green, the edges of the shoe bleeding into the background thereby creating a form that feels almost rune-like and vaguely insidious. Joan Brown on the other hand conjures a bumblebee from an economical set of black ink marks on paper, focusing on the lone bee instead of its complex social structure.