A stereotype about Willa Nasatir’s indigenous Los Angeles is that it is a city obsessed with surfaces. But the artist’s performs are a joyful work out in the examine of a surface’s depths—its layers, transparencies, reflections, films—challenging the eye to decode sort by means of sundry smears and shimmers. The sextet of pieces on perspective here—three acrylic-on-canvas paintings and a trio of pictures printed on Plexi—visually rhyme with just one another, partly by a shared fascination with the manifold veneers they depict, stack, and obfuscate.
The portray Slice (all performs 2022), characteristics the catawampus wheel of an auto, which is also a halved lemon. Warm and cool hues spill around 1 another, and specified sorts drip so intensely that they evoke 1960s psychedelia. A look at Kiss #2 may well to start with remind one of a biology textbook’s cross-sectional illustrations of human organs richly layered with tissues and cells right until the eye rests on the unmistakable define of . . . a lawn chair. Go in deeper and you can start off to see the eponymous osculation, even though it’s tricky to, um, “make out” via all the partially overlapping coats of semitranslucent paint.
The photographs depict reflective varieties (jars, shards of pottery, a deadbolt lock) established upon or lodged into reflective surfaces (mirrors? Mylar?) picturing glass and sky. Whilst each individual impression has at its centre a unique and absurd object (a pair of pareidolically stacked electric powered sockets, a shell jammed into a keyhole) what captures one’s awareness is not automatically the cardinal subject matter, but the surfeit of surfaces all close to.
In a put with also handful of clouds like LA, color is generally by some means muted, blasted by the sunlight. All the work in Nasatir’s demonstrate at Gaylord Apartments (a gentle-filled space on the top ground of a mainly household constructing at the edge of Koreatown) appears sun bleached. This top quality phone calls to mind the twin meanings of the phrase exposure, both of those in terms of vulnerability and the photographic method that reveals imagery through chemical compounds and light—nothing superficial about that.
— hannah baer