For The Armory Show 2022, Nino Mier Gallery presents LA Fitness, a series of new oil paintings and screenprints by Los Angeles-based artist Jake Longstreth. These landscapes, all in or around Los Angeles, foreground eucalyptus and pine trees with scenes typical to the region. Some locations are more well-known than others — two paintings titled Chavez Ravine show us the farthest reaches of the Dodger Stadium parking lot as glimpsed from Elysian Park. Mount Lee I and Mount Lee II are named for the peak where the famous Hollywood sign sits. Where is the sign? Just out of view, obscured by the essentially life-sized pine tree that bisect the paintings. Fontana shows us the exhibition’s titular LA Fitness rooftop replete with air conditioning units, while Redlands depicts the back of a Home Depot, both buildings foregrounded with the arching limbs of eucalyptus trees.
It might be tempting to read these paintings as some sort of indictment or commentary. The novelist Carson Mell belies us of this notion, essaying in the gallery’s monograph on Longstreth’s work, published last year:
Jake's paintings aren't all big box stores either. There are also dry rolling hills studded with sage-colored shrubs, isolated trees, smoggy, occasionally cloudy skies. Often these are painted alongside imposing architecture and lonely parking lots. To me, these function not as a juxtaposition—some kind of nature vs. the built environment narrative—but the opposite. I see the hills accentuating the naturalness of the buildings and asphalt plots. Despite man's pretensions and adeptness at executing hard angles and straight lines, he remains an animal. As such, his structures belong among beaver dams, beehives, and birds’ nests. All things manifest from the same mortal wellspring, and eventually the hard angles and straight lines of man will transition back into the wavy lines of the hills and trees. A column or two may remain, but a column holding nothing is but a rock.
Los Angeles Pines is a suite of four silkscreen prints. Pine trunks and needles serve as the central subject, while quintessential LA landscapes recede into the distance of each scene. Though pine trees are ubiquitous in LA, it is not a tree particularly associated with the city in the popular imagination. Competing in the same landscape with the iconic palms, the exotic eucalyptus and the shade-dense ficus trees, the pine tree is often a sort of lonely specimen. Longstreth decided the densely intricate bark and light-absorbing needles would be a unique vantage point from which to consider Los Angeles.
Working with master printer Daniel Wlazlak, the artist found a new graphic language to translate his oil painting practice into silkscreen printing. To begin, Longstreth precisely designed each print by executing acrylic-on-paper paintings at a corresponding scale to the final prints. He then gave the paintings to Wlazlak who began his translation of Longstreth’s work through silkscreen. Longstreth would frequently visit the printer’s studio in Gardena, suggesting alterations to colors and finally painting the pine needles, palm fronds and eucalyptus leaves onto the mylar himself, retaining his distinct hand. The final prints deftly marry the subtlety and rigor of Longstreth’s oil paintings with the graphic punch of silkscreen printing.
Jake Longstreth (b. 1977, Sharon, CT; lives and works in Los Angeles) received his MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. He has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Almine Rech, New York; David Kordansky, Los Angeles; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco; Crisp Ellert Museum, St. Augustine, Florida; Monya Rowe Gallery, New York; M Woods, Beijing; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.