Cracked; loosely thru the night visions., Mindy Shapero’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, features new sculptures and works on canvas. The exhibition develops Shapero’s ongoing investigation of the relationship between painting and sculpture, pushing the limits of each medium in new directions. For the first time, sculptures hang from the ceiling, while her works on canvas appropriate materials from past sculptures in service of Shapero’s gold-flecked, psychedelic approach to abstraction. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles from March 24 – April 29, 2023.
Cracked; loosely thru the night visions. comprises a cyclical engagement with sculpture and painting. To create her sculptures, the artist bends one, long rod into a tangled, spherical form, what she calls “a scribble in space.” The rod and its adornments—a panoply of beads, junk jewelry, fragments of broken toys and other found detritus—are painted black, lending a quasi-gothic quality to the form. Materials from the sculptures become stencils with which Shapero creates her multi-layered picture planes. These objects are spray painted and re-composed many times throughout the canvas, resulting in a final image that blurs the linear progression of its making. In Shapero’s works—both sculpture and canvas—beginning and end collapse in on each other.
Shapero’s work is a bricolage of “high” and “low” aesthetics, testifying to her widespread interests in kitsch, grunge, art history and religious iconography. Forgotten or discarded items form the bedrock of her compositions, both reducing the waste produced in the sculptural process and imbuing the works with an anti-institutional, punk ethos. At this stage, the paintings recall Mike Kelley’s series of Memory Ware mixed media works on wood panel—a significant influence on the artist, who once worked in Kelley’s studio. After layering objects ranging from keys to bottle lids, she spray paints her canvas, resulting in pockets of negative space where there once lay three dimensional objects. Shapero then creates shining compositions by “painting with glue” and applying silver and gold leaf to fill in or outline shapes.
For Shapero, the “night vision” is an image that has been burned onto one’s psyche, laden with meaning that unfolds the longer one sits with it. Indeed, the exhibition’s paintings can only be fully perceived with time. Large patterns overlay smaller, repeated patterns, creating a tension between macroscopic and microscopic structures within the work. A configuration visible when viewing a corner of a work up-close will give way to larger radiations or swirls when viewed at a distance. Further, the paintings transform based on the time of day and lighting conditions in a room, as the ample gold and silver-leafing reflects direct light differently than suffused light or shadow. Like a night vision, the paintings and sculptures are seductive, drawing viewers in to their resplendent configurations.
Mindy Shapero (b. 1974 in Louisville, KY; lives and works in Los Angeles) earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Shapero’s work has been shown extensively in institutions across the United States in exhibitions organized by Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.