As Is Gallery celebrates two Los Angeles artists – Jackie Castillo, and Bob Burchman (b. 1946, New York, NY). There will be an artist reception on Saturday, October 30, 2021 from 2:00 – 5:00pm. 

“Gutting, a site-specific installation by Jackie Castillo, immerses the viewer within the entrails of a working-class home, a site common to turning neighborhoods in Los Angeles. A site typically witnessed from the safety of the sidewalk, the immersive scale breaks the habitual, forcing a somatic experience of the role housing and homeownership plays in the city’s social inequality amid an affordable housing crisis—and yet, a displaced window shutter becomes a ladder of ascension, a warped awning transforms into a road forward, and kitchen cabinet voids lead to unexplored possibilities.”

Burchman makes medium size paintings (often 48 x 36,” though sometimes larger) in the style of the 1970’s American photorealists. And like his predecessors, Burchman favors images of transparency, translucency and reflectivity. But whereas the original photorealists would often focus on the department store display windows, diners, gas stations and car dealerships of the commercial American streetscape, Burchman refocuses the photorealist project onto the sites of high culture—art galleries, private collections and, most notably, the art museum. There he directs his camera phone at protective plexiglass frames and other reflective surfaces, capturing both the underlying image and surface reflections—other artworks, attentive viewers, gallery architecture, lighting devices—and then represents these interactions in the series of oil-on-canvas paintings which follow. And it is there too, inside the museum, where this artist’s work takes an unexpectedly personal turn as it becomes apparent that Burchman, a largely self-trained outsider, is motivated by a complex mixture of respect and resentment. “Pick me! Why aren’t I in the museum? Why them and not not me?,” Burchman’s paintings seem to ask. Such raw emotions, which other more thoroughly trained and professionalized artists frequently share but are careful not to express, expose a sense of vulnerability that gives these already thoughtful and expertly realized artworks an additionally haunting power.

On view: October 30 – December 18, 2021

What:  Jackie Castillo, Bob Burchman
Where: As Is Gallery, 1133 Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90015
Website: https://www.as-is.la