Sow & Tailor is pleased to announce You Lead Follow Me, an exhibition of seven Los Angeles based artists. The exhibition features recent and new works by Anja Salonen, Becca Mann, Gwen Hollingsworth, Jessica Williams, Mia Scarpa, Olive Diamond, and Veronica Fernandez. Together the work of these women distill the liminal space between storytelling and memory, to materialize intangible narratives. The exhibition is on view through December 29, 2021
The show takes its title from Olive Diamond’s ceramic panel paintings a glazed tablet that captures in nebulous form the oral history of her ancestral exodus and diaspora. Coalescing grand narratives of community and deeply personal family stories merges memory and fable with baked earth, permanently sealing them within physical record. Also pulling from familial history, Veronica Fernandez’s gestural paintings portray a vivid reimagination of intimate family moments. Within her compositions elements lose focus, faces become obscured and distorted. Fernandez’s paintings portray the passive process of fading memory and their exuberant reanimation through painterly gesture.
Mia Scarpa’s sculptural paintings are assemblages of found objects and multiple layerings of painting styles. The pictorial collages are cacophonous recollections of childhood joy and characters, commingled with collecting and imbuing the common materials with emotional significance and sentiment. Taking from the banal and everyday, Jessica Williams’ work captures a faceless blonde at the local bar Footsies. Neither heroic nor documentary, the simple scene crystalizes a moment in time that hardly warrants memory. Contrasting her anonyme are two iconic pop stars, whose personal lives outshone their talents in many ways - stripped of their privacy and their personal experiences thrust into collective awareness as mass media fodder.
Larger collective consciousness enters into Anja Salonen’s paintings through visions of the symbiocene. Salonen’s works extend to a mystical divination of potential reintegration of the body and nature. Her feminine forms call out to an idyllic and verdant landscape, a desire to return to the memory of what the earth once was. Becca Mann’s darkly illuminated paintings share Salonen’s interests with the natural world. Working from a purely black surface, Mann pulls her animal figures from their murky depths holding in physical form before they disappear back in to the the darkness. Echoed through the landscapes of Gwen Hollingsworth, is an unstable relationship between real and imagined space. Hollingsworth allows personal history and identity to imbue the landscape with meaning - a subjective experience coloring perception.