WILY
Lauren Davis Fisher and Jory Rabinovitz
March 29 - June 16, 2019
3315 West Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90018
Shoot The Lobster is pleased to present WILY, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Lauren Davis Fisher and Jory Rabinovitz.
“Wily” is crafty, cunning, skilled and, perhaps at times, a bit deceitful. WILY is full of elaborate ideas, both realized and yet to be realized, and is blanketed in humor and sarcasm. WILY is the physical and theoretical overlaps that Lauren Davis Fisher and Jory Rabinovitz have in their practices, where objects, materials, and labor balance between the plausible and the sincere.
Fisher’s work is often site-responsive and challenges the boundaries and limitations of space, the role of the body within those spaces, and the performance that ensues. In both Hand on the Pipe and Conduit Body, cartoon shaped hands in white gloves clutch a pipe and hose mounted onto the gallery walls. They are hands in mid-gesture that transfix the potential of an incomplete action and imagined labor. Meticulously crafted out of paper pulp, plaster and paint, many of Fisher’s works resemble something readymade, overlooking the amount of energy actually involved in their production.
Rabinovitz uses similar strategies; these new sculptures are cunningly embedded in American history, money, and labor. Abe L. as Freddie Mac and
Abe L. as Fannie Mae, named after the mega mortgage buyer conservatorship’s “Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae,” are totemic-like sculptures, standing in giant tramp boxes. Other sculptures use materials with sinister histories such as tabby concrete, copper, and steel. The initial appearance of balance – having one version of each work in both blue and pink, or steel and copper – can actually underline an imbalance in subjective realities.
Together, Fisher and Rabinovitz ask us to pay closer attention to context, materials, and the slick ways that new meanings can be created.
—Ebony L. Haynes
Lauren Davis Fisher (b.1984, Cambridge, MA) Selected exhibitions and performances include "L.A Dreams II," CFHill, Stockholm, Sweden (2019); "Ten Again," Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2018); "Eckhaus Latta: Possessed, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2018); "Quiet Work in Session," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2017); "Reconstitution," LAX Art, Los Angeles, CA (2017); "Made in LA: A, the, though, only," Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); "Artist Theater Program," Performa 15, New York, NY (2015); and "Off the Clock (collaboration with Math Bass)," MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015). Fisher's works are in the permanent collection of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
Jory Rabinovitz (b.1983, Boulder, CO). Selected exhibitions include: “oikos love love love,” Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2018); “About a Work #8," Galleria Zero, Milan, Italy (2015); “Now Showing: Jory Rabinovitz," Sculpture Center, Queens, NY (2014); “Eighty Three,” Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2014); “Morning and Evening Asylum," Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany (2014); and “Culm," Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2013). Rabinovitz will have the first in a series of “ethical sculptures” on view on Governor’s Island, NY, spring/summer 2019.