North America: 8 must-see shows this fall

Fall comes to North America with a burst of color and intensity, and this year, with hopes for change following months of lockdowns. As the artworld shifts back into gear and galleries reopen across the continent, the following eight spaces are showing the work of artists who look to the history of art for inspiration and to its formal traditions as something to break from or expand. Through their eyes, it is also a system of representation of power that can be overturned or appropriated in order to create other worlds, a different reality.

Autumn Ramsey
Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles
Until January 9, 2021

Autumn Ramsey’s paintings combine different art-historical precedents, from Henri Rousseau’s naive animal paintings to monsters from Renaissance works. The exhibition includes representation of various creatures, as well as pieces that flirt with abstraction; the whole presenting a formal system that is deeply symbolic and totally original. ‘Keeping in line with positions of predator and prey that reappear in the works, the exhibition bears elements of both violent threat and complete exhaustion,’ says gallery owner Paul Soto. ‘There are also muted and then sublime elements of beauty that come forward, manifesting like watery and atmospheric apparitions, pulling the world back into [Ramsey’s] spell of paint.’

Julien Creuzet
Document, Chicago
November 6–December 19, 2020

Julien Creuzet’s exhibition titles are poems by the artist. For this show, it begins with the lines:
‘cloud
cloudy glory
doodles
on the leaves
pages, memory
slowly the story
redness sadness
bloody
redness on the skin’,
and continues with a vague, hinted-at description of violence at sea. This new body of work furthers Creuzet’s research into colonialism and its legacies. The exhibition includes a new video work with a soundtrack composed by the artist, as well as new wallpaper works bringing together found imagery, pages from books, and digital compositions. The found objects he is perhaps best known for return in suspended sculptures made up of disparate things, from metal construction rods to items of clothing. The pile-up builds in intensity to create pieces of immense presence that, along with the wall works dominated by blood-red tones, echo the violence of the poem and Creuzet’s larger subject: the trauma of colonial history.

Duane Linklater
Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
Until November 21, 2020

In lieu of a press release, Duane Linklater decided that his second solo exhibition with the gallery would be accompanied by a set of pictures. The selection intersperses stills from The Daughter of Dawn – the first movie made with an all-Indigenous cast, shot in Oklahoma in 1920 – with images from a Super 8 film Linklater made in North Bay, Ontario, on Indigenous land he owns. In addition to the film (transferred to video and set up as a three-channel installation), the artist is showing three 6-meter-high tepees that he first erected in North Bay and moved to the gallery. ‘[The exhibition] has a relationship to Indigenous land rights,’ explains gallery Director Peter Gazendam, adding that the tepees are filled with domestic objects – tropical houseplants, picture frames, an entire (avocado-colored) fridge – which prevent the viewers from entering the structures. But the show remains, the gallerist insists, an immersive experience.

Jesse Wine
Simone Subal Gallery, New York
November 18, 2020–January 9, 2021

‘I love how Jesse’s sculptures sometimes seem to manifest themselves as a rendezvous between Surrealism and Modernism, while at the same time developing their distinct and idiosyncratic language,’ says Simone Subal about the work of Jesse Wine, whose second solo show at her New York gallery coincides with a solo presentation at SculptureCenter in Queens. The exhibition will include a number of brightly colored vertical sculptures that ‘almost function as dancers’ in the space, says Subal. Wine’s works, which sometimes look like anthropomorphic furniture or bodies that have accidentally transformed into inanimate objects, are to be presented along with a set of draped curtains. The result will be less domestic and more prohibitive, preventing the visitor from ever seeing the whole show at once, slowing down the process of viewing.

Carrie Yamaoka
Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Until December 5, 2020

It is not surprising that the title of Yamaoka’s exhibition is a series of verbs: ‘pour crawl cast peel’. These words are an apt reflection of Yamaoka’s process-oriented practice, which merges painting and photography to create objects that could be classified as both paintings and sculptures. The artist often uses Mylar, a stretched, highly reflective polyester film, which serves as both the base and the surface of her pieces. Yamaoka then paints on the Mylar using polyurethane resin that she casts, pours, or brushes on the support. The verb-laden title is taken from the works themselves, such as Pour/Peel (2005/2015), a description of an action that ends up becoming part of the pieces’ identity. The show includes 13 of them, dating from 1991 to 2020, though, as with Pour/Peel, several of those on view have been reworked and changed years after their initial creation. Process can indeed be an endless thing.

March Avery
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
November 14, 2020–January 9, 2021

When March Avery opened a solo show at Blum & Poe’s Manhattan outpost last year, it was the octogenarian New Yorker’s first large-scale exhibition on her home turf in more than 20 years. This LA show follows suit, presenting a selection of oil paintings and watercolors from the 1960s to 2020. Avery’s intimate figurative canvases depict scenes from everyday life, and include portraits of her family and friends, still lifes, landscapes, and documentation of her travels. The artist, whose parents were the painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel, makes paintings that clearly belong to the Modernist tradition while feeling wholly contemporary. They act as a bridge between the past and present.

Raphaël Barontini
Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago
January 16–February 26, 2021

‘The Night of the Purple Moon’, the French artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, is set to transform the space into a galerie des illustres – a riff on the traditional Western picture galleries. Barontini, whose work highlights histories of the African diaspora, reclaims this system of representation that attempted a narration of history through cycles of portraits. He celebrates fictional heroes, picturing them on canvases and flags. The gallery’s director of communications, Emma McKee, describes Barontini’s characters as ‘subjects from the Caribbean – voodoo and magical deities that function as a way for formerly enslaved humans to hold on to their African identity, despite the violence of Western colonialism.’ Barontini’s appropriation of Western art history makes it a medium for an expansion of history, a place for stories rarely told thus far.

Jamian Juliano-Villani
JTT, New York
December 9, 2020–TBC

The distorted realities that Juliano-Villani paints, with intensely unrealistic perspectives, out-of-this-world characters, and loopy superimpositions of disparate objects, have been shown widely since the artist finished her BFA in 2013. But in this new series of works, Juliano-Villani pushes against the grain of painting and breaks away from the picture frame. JTT Director Marie Catalano explains that several paintings will incorporate ‘a wide range of physical objects, both found and fabricated; from a microwave outfitted with interior disco lighting to illuminated commercial signage.' Juliano-Villani’s mad reality may seem a far cry from life, but her ever-inventive and growing technique gives it a remarkable presence.