Juggernaut: Christian Ruiz Berman, Michelle Blade, Tamara Gonzales, February James, Leena Similu

January 15 - February 26, 2022

The Pit Los Angeles

CHECKLIST

The Pit is pleased to present Juggernaut, a group exhibition featuring new works by Christian Ruiz Berman, Michelle Blade, Tamara Gonzales, February James, and Leena Similu. The artists in this exhibition assert their individual narratives and cultural identities through various mediums and techniques. Each with a unique story to tell, through those lenses they connect to the larger histories of humankind. The affirmation of identity and the search for one’s place in the universe remain central concepts in this exhibition.

Los Angeles based artist Michelle Blade paints narratives taken from her most intimate surroundings.  Through quotidian scenes, she paints the human condition drawing from the theories and visual vocabularies of Transcendentalism, Magical Realism and Romanticism. 

New York based artist Tamara Gonzales’ travels to Peru and her visionary experiences and friendships have become a key starting point for her tapestry works. This body of work was made in Pisac, Peru (where the artist first experienced Ayahuasca) in an Ayacucho style of weaving. For Gonzales, art is a form of healing. The rituals, ceremonies, and initiations which she has learned from cultures around the world informs how she perceives the world and her place in it. These experiences provide endless sources of inspiration. A textile work made in collaboration with Peruvian artisans is included in the show.

Similarly personal, February James makes portraits that respond to her memories and carry the emotional weight of black narratives embedded in personal and public histories. Growing up in Washington D.C., James began drawing and painting after her move to Los Angeles and a career as a make up artist. Her portraits are imbued with an ambiguity that allows the viewer to engage with the work and find their own narratives in the compositions.

Christian Ruiz Berman’s work stems from his involuntary removal from his homeland of Mexico and from much of his family at a young age. Now based in New York, Berman has become accustomed to centering his identity within the crossroads of memory, fact and fiction. His work draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation.

Los Angeles based artist Leena Similu’s ceramic-based sculptural work was born out of her own experience becoming a mother. In making her ceramic works during pregnancy, Similu kept thinking about her West African origins and the ancestors and culture that her son would inherit. Her ceramics mirror ideals of matriarchy and power, exploring her specific place in a long line of mothers before her.

As Berman so eloquently states, the artworks in this exhibition were “born from the struggle between the homogenizing power of technological globalization and the innate human desire to assert one's uniqueness. This series, called "necking," like a lot of my other work, is a study in hybridity, remix, entanglement, and the consideration of nature's interconnectedness and interdependence. The paintings combine erotic accoutrements with long necked water birds, and they draw inspiration from, among other sources, Japanese Shunga works, Indian miniature painting, Mexican aesthetics, Latin American design aesthetics, and 19th century wildlife illustration. The works are meant to convey the push and pull tensions and entanglements of sensuality, relationship, and life in general. The birds, being navigators of liminal spaces, and often migrants like myself, become symbols of possibility and flexibility, and of the ways that exploration is conducive to both evolution and erotic potential.”

For more information please email info@the-pit.la