Spine: Madeline Hollander, Eva LeWitt, Ragen Moss

Saturday, December 1, 2018: 7-9pm
Saturday, December 8, 2018: 3-6pm
Saturday, December 15, 2018: 3-6pm
Saturday, February 2, 2019: 3-6pm
Sunday, February 3, 2019: 3-6pm

JOAN is pleased to present Spine: Madeline Hollander, Eva LeWitt, Ragen Moss, a three-person exhibition featuring a new performance series by Madeline Hollander (b. 1986, Los Angeles; lives in New York), a site-specific installation by Eva LeWitt (b. 1985, Spoleto, Italy; lives in New York), and a selection of recent sculptures by Ragen Moss (b. New York; lives in Los Angeles). Spine looks at the ways in which the three artists play with notions of interiority and exteriority to address spatiality—be it social, political, or psychological space.

In LeWitt’s Untitled (Los Angeles), panels of silkscreen mesh and organza, in brilliant yellows and oranges or moody purples, blues, and grays, curve around the gallery, carving out, obscuring, and blurring its corners. Resembling a proscenium arch, the resulting curvilinear compositions map line and color as both fixed and permeable. As the curtains accrue, the translucent fabric becomes increasingly opaque and the color intensifies. When viewed from the side, LeWitt’s fields of floating textiles nearly disappear, transforming into lines in space. Untitled (Los Angeles) functions equally as grid, plane, and frame, offering up a stage wherein viewer, sculpture, and performer collide.

Questions of opacity and transparency similarly take shape in Moss’s series of recent sculptures made of molded pieces of transparent plastic. The torso-like forms bear swaths of paint and written passages culled from US laws regarding rioting. In Consumptive Reader, 1st degree (with Lemon), 2017, a painted tartan pattern is interrupted on one side by the shape of two breasts and, on the other, a book. Through book and breasts we can see a dangling organ in the shape of a lemon. The words “riot in the 1st degree” suggest that the real lemon may in fact be our nation’s laws, in which collective action carries the latent threat of prosecution. Moss’s works are discomforting, if not menacing, in their layering of law and body—specifically the female body. In its rendering, the open book becomes a window into the interior depths of the figure, the book’s spine becoming hers. Moss’s works move beyond surface to confront the interiority of an object or a subject, and the way, as subjects and bodies, we might take up, hold, or give space.

In Hollander’s Red Shoes, dancers perform a series of twenty sequences, combing across, curving around, and weaving through LeWitt and Moss’s works. Propelled by their shoes, they fall in and out of sync as they enact a series of movements that include the translation of common gestures into a vocabulary for their feet, among others. In another sequence, hand gestures typically used to mark a dancer’s choreography are performed while they dance, in effect doubling their feet from two to four. Inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes, in which a dancer, possessed by her pointe shoes, cannot stop moving as long they remain on her feet, Red Shoes examines auto pilot behavior, agency, possession, and the notion of personal and collective responsibility.