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Harper’s is happy to current two solo exhibitions in Los Angeles: Stacy Leigh’s Beneath New Administration and Todd Bienvenu’s Rabble Rouser. Collectively, Leigh and Bienvenu invite us to problem gender roles by their naughty, raunchy, and humorous figurative work.
In Beneath New Administration, Stacy Leigh creates another universe the place ladies are within the midst of revolt and able to take over management. The artist’s curiosity in world-building started in her childhood when accumulating dolls turned an obsession and an escape from life’s stressors. By means of portray, Leigh continues to think about a wealthy fantastical world, the place centuries of patriarchy start to crumble. On this new physique of labor, Leigh executes loud and daring acrylic canvases that includes empowered ladies, all of whom are figments of her creativeness. The intense, bucolic suburban landscapes stand in distinction with a subject that’s at occasions darkish and unsettling. In Leigh’s woman-driven world, males are dropping useless like flies: the male presence is made identified solely by pairs of legs on the edges of her compositions. The lads, positioned face down on the ground, may be discovered on busy New York Metropolis sidewalks, behind shrubs in a lush forest, or smashed below a pink Pontiac Firebird. Purple bikini-clad femme bots descend to Earth and method males as a litmus take a look at, turning them into canines as a punishment for misbehaving. Leigh’s ambiguous material hints at violence with out explicitly exhibiting it.
Beneath New Administration tells each a private and political story. The collection offers Leigh with a car to precise frustrations over her ongoing authorized battle towards the all-male board of her condominium constructing. A former stockbroker, Leigh has skilled her fair proportion of misogyny as a girl working in Wall Avenue’s all-boys membership. Then again, Beneath New Administration is a commentary on institutionally sanctioned boundaries positioned on ladies—rescinding reproductive rights, normalizing a gender wage hole, and perpetuating harassment and violence. Regardless of being rooted in social critique, Leigh’s work don’t take themselves too significantly; they’re coated with humor from their titles, Women of Leisure Don’t All the time do Lunch, to their hidden messages, resembling a doormat that spells out “Nope,” a canned drink known as “Massive D Power,” or a storefront with a “Revolt” signal. On this almost separatist society, Leigh’s ladies are revisionists selecting to reject ache and stay to their full potential, with out males obstructing their means. Even when it means having to get rid of them.
In Rabble Rouser, the content material of Todd Bienvenu’s textured acrylic canvases is autobiographical, offering an lively look into his pursuits in browsing, skating, punk music, and his position as a husband and soon-to-be father. In densely layered work, Bienvenu packs an unbelievably massive group of surfers into one area to catch a wave. The heavy layers go away an imprint of the artist, one thing he finds refreshing in a digital age. In a single occasion, a sea of palms guides a crowd surfer at a live performance, whereas in one other portray, spectators at a soccer sport rush the sphere. The crowds are so massive that faces start to blur and mix into each other, changing into abstracted. The artist’s deep curiosity in gentle offers the work a cinematic high quality and directs our eye to a focus. Maybe probably the most cinematic and imaginative of all is TMNT, the place we discover a group of punks, armed with poles and knives, combating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a darkish alley. Right here, the artist is harkening again to the fictional characters of his personal childhood—a self-reflexive train for the expectant dad. Who’s the rabble-rouser on this physique of labor? The musician on stage, the chief of the gang, or the artist himself?
Bienvenu’s spouse makes a number of appearances on this collection; the artist chooses to create unconventional portraits, the place her essence is captured greater than her likeness. Moderately than be sucked into a big crowd, she is offered to us as a solitary determine, whether or not she is on a roof in Brooklyn taking within the Manhattan skyline at evening or within the ocean trying over her shoulder. Bienvenu all the time inserts his humorousness into the works; in Massive Wedgie, his spouse is caught within the act of choosing at her bikini backside, revealing a powerful tan line. Maybe these snapshot portraits deliberately distinction with the chaotic, action-filled canvases to point out that for Bienvenu, his spouse is a supply of solace, stillness, and calm. The artist is admittedly self-reflexive and self-conscious, constantly pondering what it means to be a heterosexual man, a accomplice, and a father. He additionally wonders the place he matches inside the lineage of male artists, particularly the Summary Expressionists of Nineteen Fifties New York, whom he tries to maneuver away from each formally and personally. Bienvenu makes a acutely aware effort to counter these artists’ reputations as alcoholics and abusers by main with compassion. Each self-deprecating and delicate, he captures another male power, one which steers away from poisonous masculinity. —Tina Barouti
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