Make Room is pleased to present group exhibition We Felt Such Strength That We Wanted to Be Gentle. The exhibition features works by ASMA, Becky Kolsrud, Peng Ke, Ilona Szwarc, Catalina Ouyang, Astra Huimeng Wang, and Xinyue Yan. These works convey facts about the artists’ inner emotions and psyche, as well as their responses to the external environment. For many of them, to make art is to whisper to themselves, a gentle motion that kindles a sense of strength and resilience.

The exhibition is on view at GalleryPlatform.LA from May 28 to June 3, 2020. 

  • Ilona Szwarc
    Ilona Szwarc, The remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, 2019
    Archival Pigment Print
    24 × 30 inches
    Edition of 3 + 2AP

    Ilona Szwarc

    Ilona Szwarc, who was born in Warsaw and spent her adolescence in a small town in Texas, plies the ambiguity of her own memories to explore shifts in time and body. Her photographs gesture towards a repressed wildness—a flash of teeth disturbs the too-quiet powder room; a soft mass of white hair glows amidst ornamental glass. In Szwarc’s work, the changes are both real and surreal; the memories true and false; the danger at once as removed as an old wives tale and as close as a stranger in the mirror.

  • Catalina Ouyang
     

    Catalina Ouyang

    “While making ‘risk assessment’, my thinking about fear and transformation expanded into an assessment of the conditions that produce those responses. I was thinking very loosely about moments of crisis and emergency, and the very visceral ways that the body and psyche respond in those situations and their aftermaths; as well as the particular spaces of learning in which these responses occur, or are trained to occur. ”


    —Catalina Ouyang, “Crisis as portal”, interview with Gabriel Cohen on AQNB.

    • Xinyue Yan, Hold on #3, 2020 Oil on canvas, 16 1/2 × 19 3/5 inches

      Xinyue Yan, Hold on #3, 2020
      Oil on canvas,
      16 1/2 × 19 3/5 inches

    • Peng Ke, Dolphin, Shenzhen, 2015 Archival Inkjet Print 42 × 36 inches Edition of 5 + 3 AP

      Peng Ke, Dolphin, Shenzhen, 2015
      Archival Inkjet Print
      42 × 36 inches
      Edition of 5 + 3 AP

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  • ASMA

    ASMA, The hand feeding the snake, 2019
    Felted steel wool, steel frame, chain
    29 1/2 × 23 inches

    ASMA

     

  • Astra Huimeng Wang, Ode to Orderly Joy, 2019

    10 photographs, video (26 minutes 53 seconds), artist’s documentation including initial research and selected sketches, a comprehensive written instruction for the delivery of the performance, Edition 4+1 AP

     

  • Astra Huimeng Wang, Ode to Orderly Joy, 2019
    10 photographs, video (26 minutes 53 seconds), artist’s documentation including initial research and selected sketches, a comprehensive written instruction for the delivery of the performance including a contract which will allow the performance to be reacted under artist’s guidance
    Edition of 4 and 1 artist’s proof

  • Becky Kolsrud

    Becky Kolsrud, As Above, So Below, 2020
    Oil on canvas
    66 × 174 inches (3 panels, 66 × 58 inches each)

    Becky Kolsrud

    The triptych As Above, So Below by Becky Kolsrud, has a circular composition with three vignettes sitting under an inferno horizon. In one panel, a depiction of a woman holds a disembodied male head; in another, a pink skull sits below a female head emerging from a lake—a memento mori of sorts. The third panel shows a bisected figure—posed like a collapsed marionette as well as the Black Dahlia murder victim, one of Los Angeles’ most iconic and surreal true crime stories. This work conflates the personal with a bricolage history of Western painting.