Loss Shopper
August 3 – September 8, 2018
friendsh.jp presenting Loss Shopper with Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes, and William Wasserman within the walls of Good Weather's exhibition at Monaco from Aug 3–Sep 8, 2018.
Within the walls of the space, the curatorial project friendsh.jp will present a concurrent show titled Loss Shopper by Gagalka’s collaborative drawing project with Los Angeles-based artists Beaux Mendes and William Wasserman. The exhibitions open Aug 3, 2018 and are on view until Sep 8, 2018.
A maddening crowd of pastel drawings on paper appear to be portraits of specific people and landscapes containing otherworldly monuments. The work was made by Beaux Mendes, William Wasserman, and Jenny Gagalka.
Each image of departure calls for a different trajectory of representation, and this is why things look different (and call for different materials, supports, scale, interaction of color, involvement or removal of hand). It is because they behave differently when looked at through the lense of time and space tethered to a specific place that has been removed. To work from observation is a specific choice—an attempt of self-removal and deflection from an authoritarian voice. These paintings depend on the viewer to be able to discern the difference between looking for something and looking at something.
The point of departure is simply that. The beginning. An example. The departure is specific, but the end is unbounded. It is a node from which repetitive imagery echoes beyond the closed system that created it in the first place. This echo is presented now, here, corralled into the installation and viewed simultaneously: a new system that, because it can be observed through time and space, gives birth to a new simulated subject. Now another round of observation can begin. The work fluctuates between different modes of observation under the quantum lens that things in fact behave differently when looked at. The constant is observation, but the subjects are variable. It can be anything but it cannot be everything.
Beaux Mendes (b. 1987 New York City, New York) received a BA from Wesleyan University in Intellectual History in 2010 and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2014, they founded Treasure Town, an exhibition platform and the location of the archives of Nathaniel Green.
William Wasserman (b. 1990 Vanderburgh, Indiana) received a BFA in 2013 from Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writing from June to July of 2004 can be found online at: www.deviantart.com/nestingnaira
