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 intuitively.” Her new sculptures, constructed of tinfoil, readily available during this contained moment, are about the women in her life. The work, each with female names, have depth and volume, yet also seem so fragile they could float away, reflecting the ambivalence of the present time. Leslie Brack’s landscape paintings are derived from media images of recent CA fires, BLM riots, and political arson. “These spectacular images,” she reflects, “just flash by us and we digest them quickly and then the next set comes, like waves.” Leslie Brack’s watercolors of a collapsing world are a meditation on spectacle and an effort to slow down and really see what moves so quickly out of view. David Schafer’s work reduces corporate logos to their essential shapes and colors, leaving familiar yet antiseptic patterns that for Schafer, reveal how the “authoritarianism of our society is invisibly woven into the social sphere.” Schafer prints these forms, which he sees as ‘modernist tropes’, onto window laminates which he uses to skin the facade of FOYER-LA, hiding the interior of the project space from the public view. The laminate mimics the ubiquitous corporate branding that frames our daily life and makes clear how corporate images, values, and politics have come to increasingly control and overwhelm the public sphere. Maybe it is the absurdity of the moment- sculptures made out of a ‘forever’ material, watercolors emerge from the raging fires of global capitalism, and logos stripped of signifiers- that promotes an assertiveness within the haze of our current environmental and cultural transformations.

Artists: Amy Barkow Leslie Brack David Schafer