13ThingsLA: January 28
Nebular Transits for your art calendar
Change is in the air (and the cosmos), can you feel it? Let’s evolve together. A review of the extraordinary current exhibition at ICA LA; new exhibitions and events at Gagosian Gallery, LA Center of Photography, LA Public Library, SCI-Arc, Pace Gallery, Keystone Art Space, Performance Art Museum at 18th Street, Good Naked at DON’T LOOK Projects Annex, Giant Robot, Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, and Jack Rutberg Fine Arts; plus planting a forest in Grand Park.
FEATURED REVIEW
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes now open at ICA LA. Vásquez de la Horra situates the female body inside a cosmology of landforms, cycles, and recurring cellular patterns, drawing on a visual lineage of matriarchal mysticism in which anatomy and terrain operate as a single, multidimensional, psycho-spiritual ecosystem. Her gynomorphic figures appear as mountains, stems, and vessels, as the eponymous volcanoes function in long snow-capped ranges and as solo majestic peaks; these are emblems of feminine agency, tied to regenerative cycles of gestation, birth, life, death, and explosion. The exhibition’s diversity of medium, scale, and method—and its frequent moments of wry humor, visual punning, and physiological drama—keep its framework active, with the many small works on paper behaving as concentrated character or idea studies, each one isolating a single transformation among hundreds. The beguiling and often quartered larger compositions assemble multiple storylines into pictorial fields where sea, horizon, and anatomy interlock through shifts of proportion, perspective, and resonance. Art historical memory runs through the work as well, calling to the visionary surrealism of Leonora Carrington and the feminist mythologies of Judithe Hernandez, positioning Vásquez de la Horra within a tradition that treats landscape as a psychical diagram and the body (especially women’s bodies) as carriers of planetary knowledge and the seeds of rebellion. Free; on view downtown through March 1; theicala.org. —SND
