Dog Days

August 14 - September 25, 2021

The Pit Palm Springs

258 N. Palm Canyon Dr.

CHECKLIST

Featuring work by Chris Wolston, Anabel Juárez, Christopher Miles, Darren Romanelli, Candice Romanelli, Heather Day, Jennifer King, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Roger Herman, Maryam Yousif, Justine Hill, Bari Ziperstein, Katie Stout, Devin Troy Strother, Ben Noam, Tony Marsh

The Pit is pleased to announce the opening of Dog Days, a group exhibition at our Palm Springs gallery.  The exhibition features works by sixteen different artists working in ceramic, painting, and functional furniture.  There will be a public opening reception on Saturday, August 14 from 5-7pm.  Face coverings are encouraged.

August in Palm Springs is certainly the dog days of summer with temperatures hitting 120 degrees.  The exhibition takes inspiration from the low desert’s environment, as well as the city’s reputation as a haven for design.  The works chosen for this exhibition all carry on a playful, funky sense of expressionism and many of the works embody aspects of psychedelia associated with the desert and prevalent in the 1960’s and 70’s. With Dog Days, we wanted to work with artists that walk the line between fine art and design with their practices.

A series of wooden plinth’s have been installed in the gallery, taking over the majority of the space, displaying a number of ceramic artworks. Some are vessels in form while other works are pictorial or abstract sculptural forms. The works of artists Tony Marsh and Christopher Miles bring to mind the tradition of “fat lava” pushed to an extreme place.  Fat Lava was a moment in which thick glazes were used to create textures and flowing colorful surfaces often associated with West German ceramicists of the 50’s and 60’s. There is a breadth to the clay based works included in the show, with many experimenting with the capacities of the medium.

The wall-bound artworks in the exhibition by Justine Hill, Heather Day, and Nasim Hantehzadeh all bare a relationship to modernist abstract painters with contemporary twists.  Hantehzadeh’s curling, biomorphic compositions bring to mind the contorted environments of Wassily Kandisky injected with her personal archetypal bodily forms and psychedelic leaning aesthetics.  The stained, flowing compositions of Heather Day wander into psychedelia with the deep fluid surfaces and give a nod to the poured colorfield abstraction paintings of artists such as Morris Louis or Vivian Springford.  Justine Hill’s hard edged, abundantly patterned shaped canvas pushes the history of the Pattern and Decoration art movement, while also remaining in dialogue with brushy, gestural abstract works by painters such as Joan Mitchell.  

The works of Darren Romanelli and Candice Romanelli both center on repurposed memorabilia from the Grateful Dead, a subculture nearly credited for its influence on psychedelic graphic design.  Chis Wolston’s humorous yet intricately built and designed anthropomorphic wicker chair takes on human qualities as it gives the peace sign through the gallery’s front windows.  The twisting and folding “memory map” found on the surface of Ben Noam’s ceramic vessel creates a landscape depiction of the neighboring Joshua Tree community, however as it has been recreated from the artist’s memory the locations, distances, and environmental markers are inaccurate giving the piece a hallucinatory experience.  

The works included in Dog Days are playful, at times humorous, funky, and often found straddling the multiple histories of craft, design, and contemporary fine art. 

For more information email info@the-pit.la