in lieu is pleased to present Sparkling or still, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Cherisse Gray.
The exhibition develops around a series of four oil paintings and their sister photographs. The photos are placed along the cross section of oak ballet barres and 300 lbs of metal tubing installed to run parallel to the ceiling and the floor. Each image was taken at the artist’s place of work, an elite Hollywood hotel where she serves cocktails to the entertainment industry’s one percent. The photographs, technically forbidden through an NDA, are not depictions of actors & actresses but instead of behind-the-scenes trash and their holding devices, familiar materials in the hospitality industry. Against, on top of, or below each composition of objects is the persistent buffed glow of stainless steel reflecting and holding things such as beverage garnishes, a coffee cup, a stale powdered pastry, an empty mussel. The paintings are shown in tandem with their referent photographs to complicate questions of original vs copy, bystander vs. participant, and guilty vs. not guilty.
The exhibition operates as an exercise; it is an intimate staging of image-objects as simultaneous performers & audience members. The gallery is a hybridized space for both the warm ups and the intermission; props are danced around and touched, every item carefully positioned in an entropic balance. Viewers are reminded that taste is relative and suggestive poise is always labor, so the artist muses aloud, “How might performing femininity be labeled as regressive in some instances, but radical in others?”
2020 is a symbolically convoluted time to be both femme and cognizant of how gender plays a role in determining credibility-of-voice, subservience to higher power(s), and relative risk within predatory systems. Despite all alleged progress, our relationship to the notion of obedience has changed. Loyalty to the nation-state, the justice system, and the ideologies of male leaders are actively scrutinized across generational lines.
The paintings and their companion images are not stand-ins for different kinds of people per se, but rather they are ordered accordingly to diagram a mutually reliant social hierarchy between person hoods and the constant flow of goods. This hierarchy is one of a hyperconscious translation & mimicry that bears in mind the possible ethical implications of playing pretend within notions of otherness. Visibility is not an end goal– the representation of an archetype is not inherently liberatory!
Thus the gallery operates as a carefully decorated mise-en-scène to investigate the the artist’s relationship to acting as if, or in other words, the often tenuous and wrought appearance of performing feminized labor on behalf of a persistently passive but demanding audience.
Cherisse Gray (b.1990, Manila, Philippines) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. She is a current MFA Sculpture candidate at UCLA and received her BA in Sculpture & Linguistics from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been recently shown at Murmurs (Los Angeles, CA), Kate’s Little Angel (Los Angeles, CA), The Gallery @ Michael’s (Santa Monica, CA), and New Cinema Club (New York, NY).
