LOS ANGELES — Ithaca at Luna Anaïs Gallery, the first solo show by Amanda Maciel Antunes, is based on The Odyssey, the epic poem of wayfaring and the search for home. Talismanic and homespun, the work deals in myth-making, the ancient stories told and retold.
And in the same way that a story shifts with each retelling, many of the mixed media pieces reveal palimpsestuous layers: forms eclipsed and reworked but bearing traces of what came before. In several works using found faux leather, the slit fabric curls from the canvas like a torn sail, or sliced hide, to disclose a soft underside of pink. Another series, Songs of a Poet, exposes sediments of poetic text, an arrangement of erasures, and overlays on handmade paper. Many of the pieces’ titles — “I’m Ready to Talk,” “Speaking in Tongues,” “I Have to Tell You This” — suggest the importance of narrative in bridging the distance between here and there, past and present, the voyage and the destination.
The centerpiece of the show is a horned figure, packed with cotton, crouched on a crude raft made of palm tree branches and twine. The creature wears a robe embellished with Antunes’s poetry, each line stitched at the summit of Mount Wilson, which she would ceremonially climb each day during quarantine from her home in Sierra Madre.
With these scavenged materials — the branches and bits of gnarled cotton — Antunes, who is originally from Brazil, constructs a motherland. Such found materials are, after all, the wanderer’s tools: the scraps of place we find to create for ourselves a home, however temporary. Her repeated use of safety pins and thread — we always see the seams of things, how the objects have been painstakingly fastened together — only accentuates the fragility of home in a world in flux.
Amanda Maciel Antunes: Ithaca continues at Luna Anaïs Gallery (1989 Blake Avenue, Elysian Valley, Los Angeles) through October 28.
The Latest
A Well-Intentioned Poussin Show Almost Gets it Right
Poussin and the Dance is a valiant attempt to break into Poussin’s staunchly academic oeuvre and provide a relatable point of entry, highlighting the exciting elements of revelry and movement despite impenetrable and unemotional rendering.
An Anarchist Illustrator Looks to Radical Histories to Fight Fascism
Anarchist illustrator N.O. Bonzo produces decentralized media in a highly bureaucratic cultural landscape. Their illustrations, murals, and literature emerge in unexpected places, from the streets of Portland, Oregon, to the far ends of Reddit and Twitter, addressing relations of labor and identity in the workplace and on the streets. Growth and care are central themes…
Where are the directors taking the stage to acknowledge workers’ demands today?
There is a debate whether the memory of Little Syria should be seized upon to tell truthful and positive stories about Arabs in the US, or whether any conflation between its history and contemporary politics is inappropriate.
For Calderón Ruiz’s first exhibition, artists Esteban Ramón Pérez and Jaime Muñoz plumb the depths of Chicanx identity.
The profile includes works by Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani, Peter Paul Rubens, and a prehistoric Venus of Willendorf figurine.
These horrifying dolls definitely won’t murder you in your sleep.
Council often uses humor as a political tool to expose systems of power and inequality in a society in which even death carries a high price tag.
Leave a Reply