Walter Maciel Gallery hosts an exhibition walk-through of Lookout by Cynthia Ona Innis as well as Teach a Man to… by Nathan Vincent with art critic and author, Shana Nys Dambrot. The event takes place on Friday, March 1, 2024, at 1pm, and will provide a casual conversation with both artists. This is an opportunity for the public to learn more about the process, inspiration and also the technique of each artist’s studio practice. The exhibitions run through March 2, 2024.
Cynthia Ona Innis
Lookout kicking by Cynthia Ona Innis is the ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. The show includes a new series of mixed media paintings and a two-channel video projection. It further investigates the effects of light on the landscape. Additionally, the exhibit focuses on how weather patterns and stages of the sun and moon also engage with the work. Innis creates abstract paintings through a series of processes that tap her experience as a type of lookout.
The new work focuses on her collective observations of locale growing up in San Diego and living in the Bay Area and Idaho. Her work reflects the explorations in the different and similar environments unique to each. The artists utilizes a series of processes. Innis physically pours and applies pigments directly on to fabrics. Often times, she uses caustic bleach to remove color and other instances acrylic and ink is applied to add more painted information.
Artwork by Cynthia Ona Innis
She often builds up areas of the surface with densely painted and saturated pigments while letting the splashes and drips of paint mark the canvas as proof of her experience. The manipulated fabrics include cotton, canvas, nylon, and silver lamé that are cut into strips and reassembled as striated compositions mimicking the kinetic energy of natural processes.
Bringing together congruent and contrasting painted and stitched sections, these discontinuous bands of fabric suspend and intertwine different moments alluding to the remnants of experiences that are separated by time and definition. The disjunction of forms allows for multiple perspectives at once, simultaneously capturing the seen and unseen, what is above and below ground. A few of the paintings on paper include a new technique of dissolving imagery of natural environments taken from pages of National Geographic magazines and reworking the information into abstractions.
Nathan Vincent
Teach a man to… by Nathan Vincent opens in Gallery 4. It ncludes sculptures made of crafted yarn and is a continuation of Vincent’s recent installation of Locker Room
Vincent’s knit and crocheted sculptures explore gender roles and the challenges that arise from straying from prescribed norms. Having grown up the son of a conservative pastor in the Midwest, he learned to crochet as a young boy. Despite his interest, his mother initially hesitated to teach him what she considered to be a feminine craft.
Vincent’s art career started in New York as a figurative painter. However, as he became frustrated with finding his painterly style, he picked back up with knitting as a medium to explore soft sculpture. He later added crochet, often combining both stitch techniques in one artwork. Vincent’s deliberate selection of these stereotypically gendered mediums made the viewers question assumptions around objects and activities. It called to attention the impact general beliefs as to how we define ourselves. In addition it spotlights how we look at others based on the gender we were assigned at birth.
On view: January 6, 2024 – March 2, 2024
What: Cynthia Ona Innis and Nathan Vincent
Where: Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., LA
When: Running through March 2, 2024
Website: http://waltermacielgallery.com
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