Stanley’s is thrilled to present new works by Amia Yokoyama and timo fahler at Frieze Los Angeles 2022 as part of the Focus section of the fair, curated by Amanda Hunt. Frieze Los Angeles runs from February 17th through February 20th in Beverly Hills at 9900 Wilshire Blvd.
timo fahler b. 1978 will present new stained glass works that expand on his 2021 solo exhibition at Stanley’s titled, “light, first and foremost.” Through these sculptures, fahler presents interior images of the self via masks held up by an invisible puppeteer. We see the artist’s hands acting as a captain of sorts, yet instead of a soft flesh we see a smooth plaster dyed brown--equally a reflection of fahler’s own personal “idols” and a denial of the white savior presented in traditional Catholic idol iconography. These “alter egos” offer a glimpse into the psyche of the artist, as well as personal narrative, mythology, and identity. The works are fabricated through a traditional process of copper foil, soldered lead, and stained glass. The artist sketches, cuts, and binds the glass together transforming a highly brittle sheet of glass into charged “drawings'' which soften the medium and project stunning tableaus on the background walls behind the sculptures. fahler uses his expertise in sculptural casting to cast his own hands in various charged positions, which seem to defy gravity whilte jutting out of the wall. These hands hold up the glass with ribbons, chains, string, and twine. Every part of the sculpture projects a new meaning through the materials history, usage, and value.
Shown for the first time at the fair, fahler will present “self portrait in blue,” a new large-scale stained glass work further expanding upon the medium into a highly complex 12-part sculpture. “self-portrait in blue” reflects the artist's fascination with death, mortality, and the spiritual transcendence into a higher realm. The work is a visually stunning defiance of gravity, while creating a deeply personal homage to the spiritual and the artist’s greatest fears within his own mortality. Through its simple yet concise messaging, the sculpture reflects the artists’ challenges within the realm of the human, while creating an entrypoint for the viewer's own personal life, deaths, experiences, and spirituality.
Amia Yokoyama will present new sculptural figures that further push the ceramic medium, and employ new technical tactics to scale up the work while adding complexity to the forms. These creatures inhabit all parts of her practice from video, sculpture, to drawing, which Yokoyama uses as a further expansion of her own personal mythology. Her creatures, which resemble cartoonish women, are in fact ethereal monsters, capturing and destroying their prey through the ultimate and final bliss--think Homer’s sirens, but born out of the internet. These figures are transfixed in time, yet fluid in concept, appearing to drip down on the table as they lay.
Yokoyama’s work references Audre Lorde’s invocation of planarian regeneration to develop a metaphor of fantasy and desire in relation to the ever changing process of self-making. Lorde writes: “Until we can conceive the shape of what has not yet been we cannot fill it. Until we can feel beyond what we have been given, what we have found, what we have been told is right.” For Yokoyama, the physical form of the figures embodies concepts of self-regeneration, multiplicity, unstable and ever-changing boundaries.
Yokoyama uses porcelain, the most complex and delicate of ceramic clays, both for its extremely appealing finish and its imperial past. Her use of porcelain, which was looted and appropriated from the Asian continent by colonists almost 1000 years ago, acknowledges its brutal past while celebrating its heritage in the present day. The pieces are handbuilt through an arduous process of coiling clay, refining it, coiling more, culminating in a painstakingly slow drying process. Porcelain as a finished material is the strongest fired clay, but in its wet form is highly fickle and hard to control. After the form is developed, the surface is refined through repeated smoothing and packing by hand. Yokoyama’s glazing techniques further develop the surface into a glass-like reflective shimmer that seems to spill off the clay. Crystalline forms develop in pools where the glaze catches, and as the light hits different elements of the work, the colors shift and new pockets of fractals are exposed.
