Time Wounds All Heals
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Time Wounds All Heals, an exhibition curated by Los Angeles artist and critic Daniel Gerwin that examines the legacy of Lucio Fontana among contemporary artists. This presentation gathers works by Anna Betbeze, Sarah Cromarty, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Daniel Gerwin, Elana Herzog, and Simon Slater, all of whom work aggressively with their mediums to generate subject matter, engaging a materialist realism flowing from Fontana’s innovations. The exhibition title is a play on the twisting of the phrase “time heals all wounds”, which is normally inverted to “time wounds all heels”, suggesting that nobody escapes life unscathed. In Gerwin’s reformulation of this wordplay, the implication is that no injury is ever fully healed, a core concept underlying the assembled artworks.
In 1958, Fontana nudged the course of art history when he took a blade to canvas and created his first Cuts. Fontana also referred to these works as “Spatial Concepts”, emphasizing his application of sculptural principles to painting language, creating objects that imbued the painting surface with actual dimensional space rather than its pictorial illusion. Less well known than the Cuts are his punctured ceramics, extensively perforated as though by a shotgun. Fontana pioneered an approach to realism in which he relocated content from the representational function to physical facture, a key tenet of modernism. Lacerating, burning, shredding, and chopping are violent in some contexts, but can be refined conceptual actions in others. The artists in this exhibition, like Fontana before them, create art whose physicality directly addresses the body through its haptic attunement. Anna Betbeze’s Dirty Sun (2017) is made from flokati rug that she has torn, burned, shaved, and dyed to resemble the pelt of a shaggy monster, displayed less like a trophy than some abject facsimile of the Golden Fleece. Sarah Cromarty’s raw, untitled constructions involve crudely cut cardboard and forcefully hacked plywood, that in combination with painted photographs, transform into magical and even romantic tableaux. T.J. Dedeaux-Norris’s tapestry, Killing The Black Body (2019), consists of fabrics she dissects and splices together in new configurations to evoke the bodily and emotional assaults she hopes to repair and the destructive cycles she hopes to break. Daniel Gerwin cuts painted wood forms and joins them in new configurations, with An Evening Walk (2019) being both a peaceful family memory and the sum of a series of destructions and recompositions. Elana Herzog’s paper pulp and textile works, as well as her altered logs, use making and unmaking to consider aspects of ephemerality and entropy, pleasure and pain, and attraction and repulsion. Simon Slater’s January In Leucotomy City (2019) is painted on a canvas he altered by removing the weft, or transverse fibers, from the weave, turning the painting into an arrangement of long vertical threads that references distressed jeans, tie-dye, office posters, internet ad banners, and store signage.
Artist Biographies:
Anna Betbeze has had solo exhibitions at Nina Johnson Miami, Markus Lüttgen Cologne, Luxembourg & Dayan in London, Kate Werble Gallery New York, and Francois Ghebaly in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown at institutions such as MOMA PS1, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and other galleries and institutions around the world. Her works are in the permanent collections of The Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and the High Museum in Atlanta. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Modern Painters, New York Magazine, Frieze, and The Los Angeles Times. She is a recent recipient of the Rome Prize. Betbeze lives and works in Los Angeles and is on faculty at University of California Riverside.
Sarah Cromarty (1980 - 2018) received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012, and her BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2006. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles at Klowden Mann, Night Gallery, Briggs Meleksetian Gallery, Charlie James Gallery, Sixspace and Circus Gallery, among many others, Bucket Rider Gallery in Chicago, POPA in Buenos Aires, Zic Zerp in Rotterdam and CANADA gallery in New York. Her work has been written about in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and White Hot Magazine, Hyperallergic, and many others. She passed away unexpectedly in 2018 at 37 years old, leaving behind a Los Angeles community devastated by her loss and committed to her legacy.
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris fka Tameka Jenean Norris was born in Guam and received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; Prospect.3 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Walker Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Performa 13; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam,Netherlands, Sundance Film Festival, New York, NY, Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA among many others. Norris has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fountainhead Residency, Grant Wood Colony Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. She is the 2017 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is currently a tenure track Assistant Professor at University of Iowa.
Daniel Gerwin has had solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including in New York and Los Angeles, and his latest solo exhibition opened on May 4th at River Gallery in LA. He is featured in the 2019 Pacific Coast issue of New American Paintings, and his work has been reviewed in ArtCritical, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications. Gerwin has taught painting, drawing, and theory, and his writing on contemporary art has been published in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, ArtCritical, Blog of the LA Review of Books, and others. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his BA from Yale University. He has taught at University of California Davis, University of the Arts, University of Iowa, and University of Pennsylvania. In 2004 he was awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center, and in 2016 he was a Resident Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Gerwin lives and works in Los Angeles.
Elana Herzog lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from Alfred University. Herzog is a recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Among her solo and two person exhibitions are those at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, Studio 10 in Bushwick, New York, at The Boiler (Pierogi), in Brooklyn, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; Smack Mellon in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Diverseworks in Houston, Texas. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has participated in numerous group shows at institutions such as The Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, The Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and at The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City. She has also been awarded residencies including at the MacDowell Colony, the Albers Foundation, Gertrude Contemporary in Australia, the Farpath Foundation in Dijon, France, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. Herzog received a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant in 2017, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007, NYFA Fellowships in 2007 and 1999, the 2004 Lillian Elliot Award, the 2003 Lambent Fund Fellowship and the 1999 Joan Mitchell Award. She has been a visiting artist at multiple universities and other institutions and was a lecturer at Yale University from 2012-2016.
Simon Slater lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago(2006) and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2008). Simon has exhibited his work in galleries nationally, including Jolie Laide Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Fowler Art Space (Brooklyn NY), and Roots and Culture Gallery(Chicago, IL). He has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Art Review, and Title Magazine.