WATER & FLOWER
Wilding Cran Gallery
Los Angeles, CA
June 29 - July 27, 2024
Curated by Michael Slenske
Summertime in Los Angeles invites us to explore that perpetual dialogue between the mundane and the majestic, the essential utilities. Or, as Angelenos know them: Water & Power. Summer is the season we are most reliant on the utility companies and the time when they are most prone to failure, sometimes leading to man-made/natural disasters. Drawing inspiration from active water systems, land art, the tradition of Southern California pool painting, and the Dutch Golden Age, where artists like Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch transformed floral still lifes into allegorical tapestries of life’s fleeting nature, the passage of time, sensuality, the afterlife, and the dance of light and shadow, Water & Flower at Wilding Cran Gallery revisits these themes through a modern prism.
Curated by Michael Slenske, Water & Flower underscores the transient beauty of our constructed environments amidst an era of decline. Through narrative watercolors, the reckless allure of floral constructions and deteriorating waterways are unveiled, portraying them as spaces of folly and failure. Oil paintings and ceramics envision fantastical flora and fauna emerging from utopian, dystopian, and Pop landscapes. The exhibition also captures the essence of SoCal pool culture, reflecting on how these repositories of leisure and introspection simultaneously embody desolation and decadence in a period of drought and fire.
The exhibition also features totemic and kinetic sculptures with open and closed water—and sound—systems that serve as mediums to contemplate alternative realities for these vital resources. As Mike Davis astutely observed, "The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future." Between the spaces of those future ruins, Water & Flower is a vantage point to re-examine our life-sustaining utilities, contemplating LA’s abundant yet scarce resources so intricately linked with the overburdened systems that support us. In doing so, it beckons us to look at the delicate balance between human ingenuity and the natural world, the sacred and the sublime, urging us to find harmony in the chaos of our post-modern existence.
Artists:
Alex Becerra, Billy Al Bengston, Theodore Boyer, Virginia Broersma, Lily Clark, AJ Collins, Chris Cran, Gerald Davis, Francesca Gabbiani, Edward Givis, Robert Gunderman, Olivia Hill, Salomon Huerta, Jasmine Little, Matthew Nichols, Jackie Rines, Ben Sakoguchi, Moral Turgeman, Liz Walsh and Sterling Wells
PRESS:
SWELTER
Good Mother Gallery
Los Angeles, CA
June 3 - 24, 2023
Good Mother Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce 'Swelter', our Summer Group Exhibition featuring works from 14 emerging artists.
The essence of summer lies in the subtle, yet profound, shift it brings to our lives. A time when nostalgia merges with the present, awakening a unique blend of freedom, youthful exuberance, and boundless possibilities. This summer-themed art show aims to capture the understated enchantment of the season, evoking memories of long days spent basking in the sun, exploring uncharted territories, and embracing life's simple pleasures. Join us in this ode to summer, where art transcends time, and together, we rediscover the magic that lies within those fleeting, sun-drenched moments.
Featured Artists:
Eli Kauffman • Hunter Harvey • Meegan Barnes • Fay Sanders • Sally Jerome • Jack Kenna • Zac Hoffman • Jeff Rubio • Dustin Brown • Virginia Broersma • Lisa Rock • Luke Van H • Devin Liston • Jonah Elijah
Good Mother Gallery is located at 1212 S. Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, California 90021
THESE CREATURES
Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art
Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga, CA
September 9 - November 23, 2019 - May 12, 2018
In 1979, Nancy Buchanan made a fifty-eight second anti-advertisement with a male voiceover that marvels over the daily machinations of women. Like an anthropologist sharing his observations of a primitive tribe, his ironic awe reveals a position of authority. Women are the other, mysterious beings, who should always be approached with suspicion. This mistrust of women persists through time and can be seen in the persecution of witches, the invention of the female ailment called hysteria, and contemporary distaste for women’s ambition, especially in the arena of politics. Forty years after Buchanan made These Creatures, women are still grappling with issues around representation and autonomy. Female bodies are always under observation from the outside, and from within…”what secrets do they possess?”
These Creatures will derive from an intersectional feminist approach and will include female-identified artists who engage content that includes the performance and subversion of femininity, the monstrous feminine, the feminine as fetish, commodification of the female body, and expressions of female rage.
Artists:
Johanna Braun, Virginia Broersma, Ursula Brookbank, Nancy Buchanan, Michelle Carla Handel, Carolina Hicks, Angie Jennings, Aubrey Ingmar Manson, Sarana Mehra, Heather Rasmussen, Jaklin Romine, Jinal Sangoi, Mariangeles Soto-Diaz, and Kandis Williams.
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Art and Cake
DREAM WAVERS
March 18 - May 12, 2018
Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
Flags fly in this expansive outdoor exhibition of waving signals, but the works in Dream Wavers break with conventional vexillography. Instead, this group show celebrates diverse approaches – through subversive content and materially experimental interpretations of the flag.
Twenty-four artists from across the US offer a range of distinct perspectives on identity, particularly in the current political and social landscape. Dream Wavers explore fissures and confluences–both personal and public–calling attention to vanishing communities; critically assessing urbanism, human rights, and political challenges; or quietly gesturing to remote histories, myths, and personal symbology. The act of raising these flags is a gesture of unveiling and revealing–to amend, renew, and support our present moment and our possible futures.
Broersma’s flag - entitled Take Me - is nod to the pirate flag, and depicts an accusation as its warning, the pointed finger as its weapon. Backed by shadows of violence, this emblem rests on a collective history of abuse towards vulnerable bodies. It represents a dawning allegiance to movements such as #metoo and #timesup.
Curated by Katie Kirk along with with STNDRD.
Artists:
Liv Anrud, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Virginia Broersma, Andrew Cortes, Jamie Felton, Sarita Garcia, José Guadalupe Garza, Emily Blythe Jones, Marianne Laury, Alex Lukas, Aubrey Ingmar Manson,Yvette Mayorga, Ahmed Ozsever, Tim Portlock, Edo Rosenblith, Miriam Ruiz, Julia Schwartz, Janie Stamm, RL Tillman, Cristina Victor, Tessie Salcido Whitmore, Work/Play, Jon Young, Lindsay Preston Zappas.
PRESS:
Art and Cake
TROPHIES - solo exhibition
The Lodge
Los Angeles, CA
March 12 - April 9, 2016
In this series of work, Broersma mines her own personal history for the moments that shaped her perception of what was and wasn’t appropriate about the body. Fleshy forms twist and contort themselves into impossible arrangements, suggesting the lengths we go to in order to satisfy the expectations of others. In both literal and figurative terms, she considers the trophies she received and the aspects of herself they awarded. Then addressing the flip-side, several works in the show imply figures hiding their actions in tangled landscapes by moonlight. Ideas of reward, shame, presentation and taboos meander throughout the paintings, delving into what is showcased and what is hidden.
Reviewed in Artillery Magazine.
DITHYRAMBIC - solo exhibition
Autonomie Projects
Los Angeles, CA
September 12 - October 11, 2015
'The paintings of Broersma occupy an enigmatic space where anthropomorphic gestures collide with classical genre painting. Her bent, twisted and twirling forms weave the figure and the environment together into a seamless pictorial event. Executed in a manner that is both haptic and subtle, Broersma's painterly vocabulary mixes a reserved sensualism with dithyrambic operations. As such, her unique take on classical themes like 'the bathers' and 'the odalisque' challenge not only traditional ideas of beauty and design, but they explore the shifting space between figurative naturalism and the (post-)modern preoccupation with formlessness." - Grant Vetter, excerpt from Dithyrambic catalog essay
A catalog was produced with funding from the California Institute of Contemporary Arts and is available here.
