Katja Farin
Carry, Carries, Carried
September 7 - October 5, 2019
Artforum Critic's Pick
in lieu is pleased to announce Carry, Carries, Carried, an exhibition of eight new paintings by Los Angeles artist Katja Farin. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition, and second exhibition overall, with the gallery.
The works in Carry, Carries, Carried are painted in warmly vibrant tones and feature characters arranged on, adjacent to, or behind theatrical stages. Farin often references the “fireman’s carry” and other first responder’s methods of lifting and carrying victims to safety in the arrangement of her subjects. This positioning of bodies renders subjects’ relationship to one another largely illegible. By placing these subjects within stage environments, Farin investigates the performativity of empathy and power within our intimate relationships.
Not caught off guard, but caught surveying the audience. One viewer looks and locks eyes with the performer. In turn, the performer slowly averts their own eyes as if sensing a mild irritation and repositions them at the back of the theater, reciting that naked theater-goer mantra. The paintings are at this moment of aversion, as they record this slight shift of viewing, scanning, and scrutiny, and induce a purgatory of gaze. Sometimes they are fuzzed in, occasionally the iris is rendered, but it is not offering solace to the viewer, who hopes that they managed (almost absurdly) to glean the actor’s attention, and achieve recognition that they were there, as voyeur and catalyst of performance.
Instead the suspended subjects of these works, those caught in various presentations, are carried by something else: facture lifts the figures, performs their actions. The paintings do not capture the performance or reenact the stage, as though the event should extend the frame; instead it is the paint — the lines, the allusions of temporality, the colors employed, the slight oscillation in scale — that directs, instructs a production unto itself. One where the medium conducts. Cues are taken in equal parts from the paint’s temperament and the surmised audience. While what is given to us are the actors and their scenes they have memorized, it is the fictitious audience seated before the proscenium that executes the painting. We are decidedly not the actors, we are not to sympathize nor find similarity with them; they are not stand-ins. Rather it is our gaze, that of the viewers in the proverbial play below in the orchestra and in the mezzanine above, that comports the actors, rendering them locked, heavy, still.
We are not surprised to find them here, positioned in such acrobatics. In the next moment, if you turn just quickly enough, you surely will not see them transpose. Unencumbered of our trust, as irreverent witnesses calculating their own motions, they are not waiting, but rejoicing in their stasis.
- Mona C. Welch
