Installation image credit: Jeff McLane

Opening Reception: September 17, 4 – 6PM

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our first exhibition with Boston-based artist Lavaughan Jenkins, “Weight of Things”, opening in the Greenhouse on September 17, 2022. In this series of new paintings created during the artist’s residencies at the Provincetown Art Center and Addison Gallery of American Art in 2021-22, Black women are at the center. Jenkins’ representations of women honor the roles that specific women have played in his life, as well as the outsized and unfairly weighty role that Black women play in bending the arc of history ever more toward justice. Anonymous, expressionless, as well as captivating, poised, and powerful, the women in these new paintings are icons of resilience and beauty; the focal point of the work and of the stories the artist most wants to tell.

In the background of each work, white hoods with large, dark eye-holes loom over these women, the points of their hoods breaking through the edge of the painting, fields of color within the tube-squeezed circles of their peepholes suggesting some undelivered access to the figure inside. In contrast to the dark implications of the hoods, Jenkins, who applies paint like cake frosting, in exuberant impasto, surrounds the women with references to pleasure and protection: colorful patterns drawn from contemporary runway shows; kneeling figures with their hands raised in a gesture of prayer or thanks; and protectors with large, white-gloved fists and outsized heads perched on Nike Air Jordans. The complex referentiality of these images brings together references that range from Philip Guston’s hood paintings and self-portraits from the 1970’s, to the influence of Black culture on fashion through both appropriation and the incredibly generative work of designers like Virgil Abloh, to the omnipresence of history and generational trauma – the weight of those things that are always lurking around, whether we can see them or not. In the paintings on paper, Jenkins has named the recurring kneeling figure “Nigel;” a stand-in for protestors of every color who marched with the words “I can’t breathe” on their masks. These figures are present in these works to fight the disease of white supremacy.

Guston has been playing an active role in Jenkins’ work since the two met in a dream in 2017. Over cigarettes, Guston suggested that the younger artist should think beyond the limiting edge of the painting surface, and soon after Jenkins began to paint in three dimensions. Here the three-dimensional paintings take on similar forms to the kneeling figures and protectors who appear in the paintings on paper, albeit more abstract. The three-dimensional kneeling figures have their torsos, arms, and heads brought together in a multi-colored mass resembling both praying hands and the hoods, their eyes made by squeezing circles directly from the tube of paint. This rich, associative re-interpretation of the hood as a mask; suggests the experience of putting on any mask, hiding one’s identity, or trying on a new one. The masked figure is imagined as free of the fear of being recognized and associated with their actions – free to either protest or commit violence. Ironically, they are held down by this disidentification, suggesting the weight of hiding who you are and your intentions, no matter the purpose.

Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976 Pensacola, FL is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor currently working in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2019 Jenkins was awarded the James and Audrey Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.