13ThingsLA: January 7
Priceless for your art calendar
Was your New Year’s resolution to see more art this year? Well, that’d be one easily kept—especially with the help of the 13ThingsLA art calendar. This week we recommend exhibitions and events at Good Mother Gallery, Photographic Arts Council LA (with Shana online!), DON’T LOOK Projects (with Shana in person!), Billis Williams Gallery, Nazarian/Curcio Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Wilding Cran, Matter Studio Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art, REDCAT, and LA Phil.
FEATURED PICK
Rabi Towing: We Buy Souls opens Saturday, January 10, 5-7pm at Good Mother Gallery. “WE BUY SOULS.” On the street, the posters look like freaky dares, speaking a language of low-yield advertising—flat red type, a phone number, and an indecent proposal. Wheat-pasted across cities and wired to a working hotline, the project has generated tens of thousands of voicemails—confessions, threats, jokes, negotiations, prayers—each caller asked to assign a price to the immaterial, each message folding belief, desperation, outrage, bravado, fear, and humor into a surreal and unexpectedly poignant oral history snapshot. Inside the gallery, Rabi consolidates four years of public action into a multiplatform installation of painting, sculpture, video, audio, and live participation. Suites of corporate-grade graphics, legally binding contracts, embossed certificates, surveillance-chic display modes, and meticulously fabricated objects amplify both the entertainment and the unease of the situation. Rabi’s background in street art and other public interventions anchors the project’s physical logic of repetitive postering, while his documentarian impulse shapes how the material is gathered, edited, and presented. The result moves at the speed of commerce and with the tenderness of a confessional, inviting absurdist interaction without collapsing into parody. The philosophical, ontological, and literary possibilities of this discourse are as infinite and many-splendored as your lifeforce itself—so what’s it worth to you? On view in West Adams through February 14; goodmothergallery.com. —SND
