JJ Manford, Gabrielle Garland, Muzae Sesay: Chasing Phantoms

The Pit Los Angeles

May 14- June 25, 2022

CHECKLIST

The Pit is pleased to present Chasing Phantoms, a group exhibition featuring new paintings by Gabrielle Garland, Muzae Sesay, and JJ Manford. In this exhibition, the artists explore ideas of domesticity, space, and the significations projected onto material objects, investigating how the iconography of personal mythmaking manifests in our everyday lives. The exhibition will be on view from May 14-June 25, 2022 with an opening reception on May 14 from 4-7 pm. 

Brooklyn-based artist JJ Manford is known for his richly textured domestic interiors filled with stairways, doors left ajar, and pathways to the outside world, but are always devoid of people. In their place are textiles, animals, or artworks that ask viewers to speculate about the absent figures, which he holds out of the viewer’s reach. The three domestic scenes depicted in Chasing Phantoms offer imagined, voyeuristic glimpses into unidentified private spaces when no one else is around. Interior with JJ Manford Landscapes (2022), which incorporates imagined landscape paintings by Manford’s semi-autobiographical alter ego, testifies to the artist’s role as a conceptual puzzle master, linking objects to emotions and meanings. 

New York City-based painter Gabrielle Garland subjects the American single-family home to the strictures of portraiture, creating surreal, color-saturated, trembling paintings often imbued with anthropomorphic qualities. In the two paintings presented in Chasing Phantoms, empty driveways guide us to conventional suburban facades: using different styles of brushwork to project distinct personalities upon each house without leaving indications of what might lie inside. Lacking distinctive architectural features or geographical indicators, these houses could stand virtually anywhere, asking us to question the cultural promises of homeownership, while the banal, everyday nature of her subject matter evokes the precisionist lineage of early 20th-century American art. 

Muzae Sesay is an interdisciplinary Oakland-based artist known for his richly hued interiors and urban landscapes that play with and problematize conventional notions of perception, space, and memory. By deconstructing his surroundings and flattening them into two-dimensional geometric planes, he creates imagined alternative worlds that borrow from the conceptual vocabularies of West African ritual art as well as analytic Cubism. The two new works on display in Chasing Phantoms veer toward complete abstraction while their innate sense of balance, stature, and warm color palettes contain the gravity of totemic objects. 

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.