Booth C6
For Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Shulamit Nazarian presents a three-person booth of new sculpture by Los Angeles-based Cammie Staros, and paintings by Los Angeles-based Wendell Gladstone and New York-based Wendy White.
Cammie Staros’ hand-built objects marry contemporary sculpture, Modernism, antiquity, and craft. Looking to the voluptuous amphorae of ancient Greece and Egypt, Staros’ sculptures are both historically rooted and disarmingly present. Limb-like wooden structures emerge from the booth’s walls adorned with neon and ceramics. Mysterious totemic and bulbous forms occupy the floor, their eyes gazing back at the viewer. These objects experiment with subtle humor and fetishization through their bodily scale and anthropomorphic detailing––handles follow the curves of arms and smooth bellies protrude in clay—articulating the sculptures’ relationship to the human body.
In the paintings of Wendell Gladstone, built-up canvases shatter the visual plane like skillful collages. Exuding a sculptural physicality, his meticulously rendered paintings beg viewers to engage from all vantage points and permit layers of relief to emerge and disappear. Compositionally, the contours of one figure provide shape for another, and the background of the paintings offer windows for other subjects to peep through, echoing the viewer’s gaze. Gladstone’s dystopian narratives burst at the seams, birthing a cast of characters that take over as pastel colors, precise contours, and pristine airbrushed surfaces parody the darkness of his motley crews.
Wendy White’s paintings break the rectilinear perimeter of the canvas, jutting up like the New York skyline or dripping down onto the wall and floor. White’s use of spray paint and airbrush recall the graffitied abandoned pools and storefronts of her native Southern California, where cement bared witness to tides of skate and surf culture. Her frenetic scripts cross out their predecessors and compete with superimposed commercial trademarks. White’s work conjures an acute sense of nostalgia, leaning into hues evocative of beach weather as a backdrop for her viewers’ own projections of longing and melancholy.
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