Make Room is pleased to present group exhibition We Felt Such Strength That We Wanted to Be Gentle. The exhibition features works by ASMA, Becky Kolsrud, Peng Ke, Ilona Szwarc, Catalina Ouyang, Astra Huimeng Wang, and Xinyue Yan. These works convey facts about the artists’ inner emotions and psyche, as well as their responses to the external environment. For many of them, to make art is to whisper to themselves, a gentle motion that kindles a sense of strength and resilience.

The exhibition is on view at GalleryPlatform.LA from May 28 to June 3, 2020. 

  • Ilona Szwarc
    Ilona Szwarc, The remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, 2019
    Archival Pigment Print
    24 × 30 inches
    Edition of 3 + 2AP
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    Ilona Szwarc

    Ilona Szwarc, who was born in Warsaw and spent her adolescence in a small town in Texas, plies the ambiguity of her own memories to explore shifts in time and body. Her photographs gesture towards a repressed wildness—a flash of teeth disturbs the too-quiet powder room; a soft mass of white hair glows amidst ornamental glass. In Szwarc’s work, the changes are both real and surreal; the memories true and false; the danger at once as removed as an old wives tale and as close as a stranger in the mirror.

  • Catalina Ouyang
     
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    Catalina Ouyang

    “While making ‘risk assessment’, my thinking about fear and transformation expanded into an assessment of the conditions that produce those responses. I was thinking very loosely about moments of crisis and emergency, and the very visceral ways that the body and psyche respond in those situations and their aftermaths; as well as the particular spaces of learning in which these responses occur, or are trained to occur. ”


    —Catalina Ouyang, “Crisis as portal”, interview with Gabriel Cohen on AQNB.

    • Xinyue Yan, Hold on #3, 2020 Oil on canvas, 16 1/2 × 19 3/5 inches

      Xinyue Yan, Hold on #3, 2020
      Oil on canvas,
      16 1/2 × 19 3/5 inches
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    • Peng Ke, Dolphin, Shenzhen, 2015 Archival Inkjet Print 42 × 36 inches Edition of 5 + 3 AP

      Peng Ke, Dolphin, Shenzhen, 2015
      Archival Inkjet Print
      42 × 36 inches
      Edition of 5 + 3 AP
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  • Xinyue Yan was born in China and currently lives and works in Shanghai. She graduated from Royal Academy of Fine Art Antwerp with an MFA in painting in 2018. Yan’s work portraits the tension in everyday life under the fast developing urban environment. In her painting, she manipulates objects and subjects into different painterly forms, the real of reality and the unreal of fantasy are mixed, and the dynamic and the tranquil are combined—revealing the conflict between being a part of society and being an individual. Yan shows her burlesque attitude in her paintings that induces the viewers to break free from the serious reality of the contemporary and (re)gain an exuberant vitality yet contemplative atmosphere.

    “Peng Ke primarily uses analog photography to create images particular to experiences in rapidly developing cities across China. She depicts private  situations and public environments—focusing on formal quirks and intuitive patterns of behaviors influenced by the diverse material and media that surrounds us. Her practice moves beyond the genre of ‘straight photography’, drawing attention to the feeling of living in a city unmoored by dramatic changes, but also looking to unexpected languages that happen when different realities coalesce together to create a new logic within the frame.” —Billy Tang

     

  • ASMA

    ASMA, The hand feeding the snake, 2019
    Felted steel wool, steel frame, chain
    29 1/2 × 23 inches

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    ASMA

    “The synthetic quality of that luminosity complements the industrially processed materials out of which ASMA (Matias Armendaris and Hanya Belia) has fashioned its unnatural flower: Strands of steel wool have been carefully woven and then sprayed with a gray, felt-like substance. Delicate yet off-putting, it has the presence of a robot gone rogue. Animated and alien, the impossible blossom embodies the artifice of the present.” —DAVID PAGEL,”Forget the corpse flower. ‘Blossoming Carcass’ at this gallery has alien appeal”, Los Angeles Times, September 2019

     

  • Astra Huimeng Wang, Ode to Orderly Joy, 2019

    10 photographs, video (26 minutes 53 seconds), artist’s documentation including initial research and selected sketches, a comprehensive written instruction for the delivery of the performance, Edition 4+1 AP

    Drawing upon research on a systematic body of texts and scholarly tradition in the Western cultural discourse, Astra Huimeng Wang’s practice spans performance, installation, video, sculpture, and the Internet. In her new iteration of the Fourth Movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a choir sings and chants variations on the “Joy” theme in unison while being confined. A haunting and melancholic overtone prevails. While the choir members perform a familiar composition that historically served as a symbol of national pride and socio-economic prosperity, their confinement, however, suggests a lack of power, casting light on the rising risks of irrational nationalism and decline in liberties that we’re facing today.

     

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  • Astra Huimeng Wang, Ode to Orderly Joy, 2019
    10 photographs, video (26 minutes 53 seconds), artist’s documentation including initial research and selected sketches, a comprehensive written instruction for the delivery of the performance including a contract which will allow the performance to be reacted under artist’s guidance
    Edition of 4 and 1 artist’s proof
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    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
  • Becky Kolsrud

    Becky Kolsrud, As Above, So Below, 2020
    Oil on canvas
    66 × 174 inches (3 panels, 66 × 58 inches each)

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    Becky Kolsrud

    The triptych As Above, So Below by Becky Kolsrud, has a circular composition with three vignettes sitting under an inferno horizon. In one panel, a depiction of a woman holds a disembodied male head; in another, a pink skull sits below a female head emerging from a lake—a memento mori of sorts. The third panel shows a bisected figure—posed like a collapsed marionette as well as the Black Dahlia murder victim, one of Los Angeles’ most iconic and surreal true crime stories. This work conflates the personal with a bricolage history of Western painting.