Opening: June 3, 2022 4-6pm

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our fifth solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist, Stanya Kahn. Forest for the Trees is a multi-disciplinary exhibition teeming with paintings, ceramic works, bronzes, animations and found materials from the natural world. Best known for her films and video works, which have been presented at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and the Wexner Center among many other institutions, Kahn made Forest for the Trees during the first two years of the pandemic.

Solo animals gaze out from vibrant landscapes painted in oil on linen and canvas. Portraits of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker, the tragically slain silver-back gorilla, Harambe, and a coyote who took up residence in Kahn’s yard join uncanny, imagined beings in fantastic landscapes, all of them seeming to inhabit spaces that are both literally and figuratively unreachable by people. Many of the paintings are framed with planks of old-growth redwood the artist pulled from the walls of her studio—a row of garages built in 1909. Kahn planed and sanded the wood herself and collaborated with the gallery’s framer to design custom deep-profile frames akin to window boxes. The upcycled frames also hold ceramic snakes, skulls, and other organisms, creating dioramic mise en scènes. Other ceramic and bronze figures rest on logs, including sections of a century-old incense cedar that died from drought in the artist’s yard. In addition to the figures, there are wheel-thrown forms and vessels also made of porcelain and other high-fire clay bodies, their shapes and carved surfaces inspired by both ancient pottery from around the world as well as that of the American Midwest in the early 20th century. As markers of history and human intervention, many of the vessels here are glazed to resemble artifacts, others are closed entirely, without utility. 
 
Two new digital animations made from photographs of the artist’s paintings depict mutated animals in inhospitable environments. 
 
Forest for the Trees offers respite from society, while implicating it and us. Working in proximity to personal and collective traumas, Kahn created alternate worlds in isolation, desperate for an elsewhere and inspired by the possibilities offered by fiery mass uprisings for freedom. With this show, Kahn draws out the long threads of distress and resilience present throughout her oeuvre, albeit in entirely new physical and material explorations. This new body of work flows from the trajectory of Kahn’s most recent film, No Go Backs (2020), a visceral and visually lush film shot on 16mm in the Eastern Sierras, in which teens escape unnamed manmade catastrophe, barely prepared, riding out of the city and into the wild. In both No Go Backs and Forest for the Trees, Kahn explores the natural world as a site of critical reflection; narrative and language are de-emphasized; a deepening of one’s relationship to the land and a retreat from humanity as we know it invite both disorientation and vision.

Stanya Kahn (b. 1968, San Francisco) is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in film and video with a practice that includes drawing, painting, sound and ceramics. Humor, pathos and the uncanny are central to a hybrid practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse.  In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands and of the body. Sometimes language falls away altogether. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; and the New Museum, New York, NY. In January 2023, a large selection of her film and video works will be presented at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. Two of her recent films, Stand in the Stream and Don’t Go Back to Sleep will be exhibited at Kaje in Brooklyn, NY beginning on June 11, 2022. Kahn’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art/NY, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.