The January group show at La Luz De Jesus, which opened this past weekend, featured three exciting artists with totally separate styles from one another. When inspecting Alexandra Manukyan’s modern classical portraits, a world of references was revealed to me – from hidden tattoos on the women in her paintings to the titles of the pieces like “All You Need Is Love.” And after I was introduced to her, Alexandra told me about how she writes out a short story for each one of her paintings, which can be found online.
As the gallery began crowding up with agile bodies, I found myself zooming around the light-hearted leather sculptures of aircrafts and birds by Frieda Gossett – who hearsay has it is the wife of a Clayton Brother and a former high school classmate of Mark Ryden – although none of that really matters. I loved the way in which she chose to display her airplane pieces – since they were placed on custom made stands that made them appear as if they were in mid- flight a million miles above you.
Across from Frieda’s display were Krystopher Sapp’s sculptural collages. And when I asked Krystopher about how he was able to make everything look like it was made out of bone, he told me an interesting story of when he used to work at an antique shop where his boss would put him in a room and tell him to marbleize the junky pieces so that unassuming customers would be tricked into spending more money on them, which Krystopher just found silly – but hey, it worked! – Daniel Rolnik
