Type:
Country:
Venue:
Categories:
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents this program in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Los Angeles.
Join us for discussions around the processes and themes of our local artists’ current exhibitions. Melissa Huddleston will guide us through her exhibition Primordial Spring, and Phung Huynh will lead us through her immersive installation, Return Home.
Refreshments provided.
About the Exhibitions:
Melissa Huddleston: Primordial Spring presents a series of paintings on paper that immerse the viewer in a luminous, prehistoric swamp populated with single-celled organisms, imaginary archaic life forms, and humanoid amphibian figures. Seen in silhouette, the figures’ complex relationships hover at the edge of narrative. Not quite land, not quite sea, swamps and wetlands represent a mingling of ecologies, a crossing of worlds. Encounters happen in these places that don’t happen anywhere else. The imagery in the paintings teems with mutation, decay, sex, death, and the magnificent messiness of life.
The paintings in Primordial Spring utilize processes adapted from historic print and book arts techniques. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is applied to the surface of a water bath, manipulated, and then transferred to paper. The resulting paintings are dense with organic activity, and buoyant swirls of colors floating with mysterious levity.
Phung Huynh: Return Home, brings together an installation of ornately framed graphite drawings and floating photographic banners that seek to ritually unite fragments of sacred Khmer Buddha statue heads that were looted from Cambodia. The artist examines Cambodian sculptures that memorialize the Golden Age of Khmer culture from the 9th to the 15th centuries, particularly the Buddha heads that are currently housed in American art museums and the remnants of the statues' bodies remaining in the temples of Cambodia. Huynh initiates critical dialogues in the pressing matters of repatriation and provenance within the collections of American institutions.
“As a daughter of a Cambodian father who survived war and genocide of the 1970s, I am well aware of how Cambodia became a vulnerable place for destruction and the theft of so many of our statues that are essentially vessels for our divine, ancestors, and cultural heritage. Considering the profound impact of war, genocide, and American imperialism, my artwork is built on the desire (for them) to return home and focuses on the repatriation of ancestral art and heritage to Cambodia.” -- Phung Huynh
Artist:
Melissa Huddleston (b.1981, Elm Springs, AR) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, where she studied painting. Huddleston works as an Assistant Conservator at the Getty Research Institute. Her solo exhibition The Beautician appeared at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive in 2016. Group exhibitions include Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California at the Craft Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, The Collectivists at the Brand Gallery and an artist residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Language of Landscape at the Annenberg Community Beach House, and ¡Dígame! at the Obracadobra Residency in Oaxaca, MX.
Phung Huynh (b.1977, Rạch Giá, VN) holds an MFA from New York University and a BFA from Art Center College of Design, she lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Don’t Call Me FOB, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, CA and Sobrevivir: Healing Through Art and Recognizing the History of Coerced Sterilizations, Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Donut W(hole) at Pepperdine University’s Payson Library, Malibu, CA and Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Museum at California State University, Long Beach, CA; Asia Society Texas, Houston, TX; School of Art and Design, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA; USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA; Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University Los Angeles, CA; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; among others. Huynh has also completed public art commissions for the Metro Orange Line, Metro Silver Line, the Los Angeles Zoo, and the Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. Her work can be found in prominent collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA; Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, Orange, CA; and the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine Art Collection, Pasadena, CA, as well as private collections. Huynh is the recipient of the 2024 Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award, a 2023 Fellow of the Lucas Artists Program at the Montalvo Arts Center for the Arts in Saratoga, CA, and 2022 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artist Fellows, State of California, among numerous other awards.
1110 Mateo Street Los Angeles, CA 90021
- 185 reads
