13ThingsLA: January 21
Empirical for your art calendar
A review of the must-see current show at James Fuentes Gallery; new exhibitions opening at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Shatto Gallery, Von Lintel Gallery, Louis Stern Fine Arts, M+B Gallery, and Philip Martin Gallery; and a trove of talks and programs at the Getty Center, Blue Roof Studios, ArtCenter, ICA LA, and Thomas Cooper Studio’s open house with Shana on the mic.
FEATURED REVIEW
Cynthia Lahti: Trouble, on view at James Fuentes Gallery. These poignant and perfectly imperfect ceramics sit inside a moment where the medium has reasserted itself as a corporeal proxy whether or not the body is depicted—breakable, heat-scarred, colorific, stubbornly resilient, and more interesting with battle scars; and Lahti makes the metaphor literal with gusto. The deliriously unprecious figures slump, kneel, brace, and lean, their anatomies pushed off axis by gravity, glaze, and the will of the kiln; surfaces have thickened and blistered until skin and garment read equally as a surface and a wound. Color does real work, too—acid yellows underfoot, candy-orange boots, milky blues, bruised purples, polka dots that flirt with decoration while actively interrupting legibility—enacting a painterly logic translated into enamel and slip, enhancing and obscuring the forms at the same time. The pathos is assertive and somatic—these are bodies in trouble, the more endearing due to their diminutive scale and the negative space of phantom limbs—but it’s all cut through with a wicked, defiant humor that refuses the collapse, a sharp resistance embedded in gesture, palette, and attitude. Lahti—known to many beyond the gallery world through lending her work to the 2023 film Showing Up starring Michelle Williams as a ceramics sculptor—keeps the emotional temperature high without resorting to melodrama, letting her glazes pool, crack, and shine where flesh would strain, insisting that fragility and toughness are not opposites but concurrent states here inside the crucible. Through February 14 in Melrose Hill; jamesfuentes.com. —SND
