In Conversation with Helia Pouyanfar about her project Breathing House:

CW: What do you think about the word/idea of displacement? Does your place of origin define who you are- and being displaced from that place- your original home- how do you incorporate that loss with who you are now?

HP: One might define displacement as a rupture in time and place that distinctly marks a before, an after, and a here and a there. I think of displacement as an ongoing event—a constant occurrence where the body is deeply and poetically disoriented from all senses of placement in the world. I am not entirely certain if this disorientation can ever orient itself again, but I question whether that should truly be the goal.

FOYER-LA’s current project, IS IT SAFE, explores the paradox of safety and its co-dependency with fear. Somehow ‘Security’ becomes more about the degree of personal insulation rather than about personal safety. The artists in the project: Ida Applebroog, Jonathon Hexner, Jesse Robinson, Gabriela Salazar, Connie Walsh, look at the desire for safety while simultaneously the futility in it, exposing the underbelly of uncomfortability. 

The idea of an opening, a space in-between, that both distances and draws close, permeates FOYER-LA’s current project STRANGE SENSATION. Time appears to be altered and distilled in this new terrain. The artists’ processes involve acts of everyday observations from their environment and the natural world. Sometimes the result is mystical and otherworldly. Sometimes the translation reaches a simplification of line, form and color. Much of the work, recognizable as landscapes, or as Chase Wilson’s work is described as “an interrupted type of figuration”, emphasizes the “magic” of the normal world as it presents itself to us…

Foyer LA is pleased to present Here in the Desert, photographs and model/sculptures from Michael Ashkin. The work in this exhibition grew out of Ashkin’s lifelong fascination with the New Jersey Meadowlands. Between 1993 and 2000, Ashkin wandered the area and began thinking of the Meadowlands as a site of “found gardens” where hidden struggles within our landscape revealed themselves. With this in mind, he photographed the Meadowlands and built sculptural landscape models using this source material…

In FOYER-LA’s current project, the beginning of something smaller, Jon Seaton and Courtney Duncan mine the depths of humility with their tactile forms made of steel, cinder cones, sand, scoria, acid, iron oxide grounded in an earthy physicality. Seaton and Duncan share a keen sense and respect for materiality. Space itself is utilized as a material; in Seaton’s monoprint drawings and fabricated steel sculptures, it is often hidden, inaccessible, implied and in Duncan’s sculptures space becomes porous and loosely contained as she deconstructs the implied functionality of the vessel…

In FOYER-LA’s current project Proliferation, Ana Maria Devis works within the entanglement of decay and growth. A Bogotá-based artist, Devis utilizes weaving and intricate drawing to generate imaginary realms inspired by natural patterns. Devis sees, and I would even suggest feels, potentiality in all things- the debris of wood, used makeup wipes, the spaces between words and language, fallen hair, shed skins, a conversation…

Selvedge is a self-finished edge constructed in such a way that the threads will not unravel. FOYER-LA’s current project, SELVEDGE, borrows and broadens the term, exploring where an edge exists–the essence of freedom begins. These constructed edges have a relative and shifting nature with the potential to merge with others’ edges. The work of the artists in SELVEDGE, Daniel Babior, Leslie Brack, Gary Cannone, Salomon Huerta, Helia Pouyanfar, Lucy Puls, Jody Rhone, Katayoun Vaziri, explore the malleable state of freedom as,…

In the project, spaces of ongoing negotiations, Walsh juxtaposes a series of photographic pairings of interior architectural details with her amorphous sculptures made of rug-hooked canvas, beeswax, and yarn. The hollow spherical sculptures contorted under the weight of the wax and yarn and obfuscated their interior spaces. The tension between images…

A cube can be unfolded in 11 possible ways. Forms of unfolded cubes, made of orange fabric, are laid out on the floor and folded along their diagonal axis. While the imagined cubes relate to the architecture of the exhibition space the un––folded forms suggest a landscape mode…

In FOYER-LA’s current project, LINEAGE, Eliza Chaikin Kenan enters into a cross-generational dialogue with work her late father, the pioneering computer artist George Merrill Chaikin, created before she was born. In a new series of twenty fabric paintings, Eliza Chaikin Kenan explores how space is demarcated through the manipulation of color, line, and placement…

The project suspended, unsited at FOYER-LA offers a respite from habitual perception generating a held moment of the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral— in space, in time, in awareness. In the fantastical work of Jessica Goehring, Megan Walch, and Nathan See fields of color energy weave together illusionistic, tech-originated, and intuitively constructed space…

In FOYER-LA’s current project, A Possible Fantastical Narrative, Katayoun Vaziri and Mookwon Han expose vulnerability, often with humor, in their narratives investigating the complexities of our relationship to meaning. Through observation, Vaziri constructs domestic spaces with a subtle hope for revolution and change within daily life …

In Foyer-LA’s current project, Blood Makes the Grass Grow, Emily Janowick examines how frameworks- both seen and unseen- guide us through our daily lives. Her installations provide alternative access to familiar architectural environments; encouraging curiosity and exploration…

Unceremoniously invited to “make something of a plywood floor”, the museum decided to embed itself within it. Protruding from that surface like any surgically engorged ass (Has it mentioned the story it’s seeking representation for, revolves around plastic surgery?) the museum set up shop in the trodden “platform” of another’s, similarly sketchy, “art envelope” …

In FOYER-LA’s current project, proximity, Connie Walsh explores the tension between intimate and inaccessible spaces. The viewer crosses a threshold onto a plywood floor raised fifteen inches off the ground: a pedestal for half spherical ceramic sculptures that contain hidden voids. These sculptures, of varying shades of tan, seem to float with weight above the surface in clusters…

FOYER-LA’s current project, silt joy, explores visual or technical grid-like structures that fold in upon themselves to become something new, interdependent, or a kind of index. Jessica Lund’s obsessive record-making of banal moments becomes frozen in time …

Fast Slow Disco, FOYER-LA’s current project, takes its title from a St. Vincent song that features the lyric, “I’m so glad I came but I can’t wait to leave.” The viscosity of our re-entry has a sense of presence and a sense of absence- it is filled with readiness, but has little momentum …

My images are generally figurative, simple (single figure), often self-portraits I use to try and show the complexity of what's on my mind. I mostly tend to use drawing and printmaking to create images that almost always deal with issues surrounding fear, race, isolation, sexuality, spirituality, struggle, …

“Ignore it and it will go away”. That’s the graffiti scribbled on the hallway wall before you open the door to the studios. This hallway graffiti is proceeded by five flights of stairs in the List Art Building at Brown. There’s lots of graffiti here, nefarious some, …

In FOYER-LA’s project, ‘Feb 21 and arrival at the repetition’, Chase Wilson shows a series of paintings with a lust for space. Working wet on wet to make his oil paintings, Wilson creates a time constraint that he describes as “speedy, but somehow refined, in the sense …

In Foyer LA’s new project, Implication of Something Real, artists Phyllis Baldino, Gary Cannone, and David Dodge explore various ways that pattern, structures and systems act as organizing framework and index for human behavior and communication. David Dodge reimagines the language of …

In FOYER-LA’s project DIS-CONTENT, three artists: Amy Barkow, Leslie Brack, and David Schafer explore the yearning to be determinate at a time of exceptional fragility. Amy Barkow describes her time in quarantine as, “allowing her the freedom to explore and work more …

Marina Kappos and a film by Maya Deren. Transfigured is FOYER-LA's first effort to show work during COVID. In addition to regular hours, we have designed the project to also be viewed from outside the space, through the glass facade. The work will be lit and the …

Lucy Puls’ project at FOYER-LA, To_Fall_Freely alludes to the slippage of a poetic façade. Puls starts with a fascination of the discarded- cast-offs from dumpsites, thrift stores, curbsides, and uninhabited houses. Her photographs survey the vacated as containers of memory capturing a ghost like residue of its …

In Uncertainties, a two-person project of Robert MacDonald’s paintings and Laura Cooper’s sculptures, the line is forever alternating between breach and continuity. Both of the artists work with ideas of control and spontaneity within strict procedural boundaries and each explores surface and depth in complex, open-ended, and …

Taken as series of Kodachrome travel shots in the photographer’s earliest working years, “Berlin Zoo, 1988,” 2017 registers the failures of colonial era collecting and categorization. The images of animals in their false habitats captures the melancholic conditions of confinement, and in turn, reverberate outward to a …

The Subject, the Secondary, and the Object displays these elemental roles in various spatial arrangements. Kyoko Oshiro’s floral works sculpt interlaces, where one plant element overlaps another and creates a sense of tension between alternating materials. Patrick Lakey’s female ‘Morrison’ acts as a poetic locator- an aimless figure in …

Foyer-LA hosts a held moment of pure suspension: Static Activity. This group show, explores sensations of both absence and presence, of recharging and redirecting. Michael Ashkin’s “constructed photographs” are spray paintings where different sources of value are radiated onto a flat surface. He thinks of them as …

Located behind a courtyard and before a studio, Foyer-LA was launched as an extension of my practice and an experiment in dialogue. The inaugural project of Foyer-LA is an exhibition of friends, colleagues, and peers from around the world, whose work, like the space in which they are gathered, …