LOS ANGELES — Kim Abeles: Social Furniture (1976–2023) is a much-deserved retrospective showcasing 50 years of art by a highly inventive visionary artist-activist who practices what she preaches. Organized around six related and overlapping themes, the exhibition at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, includes sculptures, installations, and mixed-media works. Some address socially relevant topics, such as inequality in education and the endangered environment. Others show compassion for those who society tends to marginalize, including people with AIDS, victims of domestic abuse, and the incarcerated.
To anchor each section, Abeles installed a sculptural table as a metaphor for engaging community and for the idea that, in a democracy, everyone deserves a seat. Although her process and style are in the tradition of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, whose gutsy assemblages similarly call attention to social injustices, Abeles’s art is more subtle, while always conceptually brilliant. Several of her undertakings have involved community outreach and art-making workshops that led to healing and social change. In this respect, she aligns herself with Southern California artists Suzanne Lacy and Barbara T. Smith.
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Living in Los Angeles, Abeles is sensitive to the problem of air pollution, and she has confronted the topic with remarkable ingenuity. In the late 1980s, she developed a system for making “prints” from particulate matter by placing stencils over plates, fabric, or plastic left for days at a time on the rooftop of her studio. In “Asher Brown Durand’s ‘The Hunter’ in Thirty Days of Smog” (2000), she replicates a Hudson River School painting in the form of a month’s worth of smog. Her choice of imagery, of course, is a simple reminder that the natural world is in jeopardy.
Other environmental projects include “Sixty Days of Los Angeles Sky Patch” (1993) and “Waiting/Watching” (2012). The former recalls an oversized Pantone color chart but is actually a sequencing of painted squares, which the artist made by painting outdoors while observing sky through a square cut-out in a home-spun easel. The latter is a video wall that at first resembles wallpaper with a Matisse-inspired design, only its patterns are made up of photos of lichens, which are used by scientists to study and monitor pollution. The overall composition is punctuated with videos and stills of freeway traffic and children’s eyes, indicating both the source and victims of smog.
Abeles’s success as an activist, collaborator, teacher, and healer is represented by the installation “Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence” (2011), which consists of a sculptural table and a wall of objects. For two years, the artist conducted workshops with victims of domestic violence and their supporters. Each participant wrote a thought or memory on Mylar paper and wrapped this around an object symbolizing the abuser or event. Next they added layers of yarn and plaster gauze before painting their “oyster” in a lush or metallic palette. The installation’s table documents the process in concentric rings that include the materials used by the participants and inset videos of them at work. On the wall are rows of the finished objects, tied to each other with ribbons and mounted on satin pillows. Above these emblems of survival are poignant texts relaying some of the concealed messages.
Among Abeles’s latest projects is The Artifacts of Solitary Confinement, a series of small sculptures made by incarcerated people in isolation. Collected over three years by artist/prison guard Mike Knox and exhibited on a table entitled “frugalworld” (2023), they range from dice fashioned with hardened toilet paper, bread, sugar, Kool-Aid, and tooth powder to a jewelry box constructed from potato chip bags. These hauntingly beautiful objects, made by artists with extremely limited resources, are symbols of human resilience and the nurturing power of creativity, even when tapped in the direst of circumstances. Through her innovative, poetic, collaborative approach to political art-making, Abeles continues to raise consciousness about many of today’s pressing issues, while repeatedly bettering people’s lives.
Kim Abeles: Social Furniture (1976–2023) continues at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles (5151 State University Drive, El Sereno, Los Angeles) through October 28. The exhibition was curated by Mika M. Cho, Director, Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Galler
Source: Hyperallergic.com