The LA Narrative

Dallas Art Fair exhibitors 12.26, Anat Ebgi, and The Hole will exhibit paintings by three Angeleno artists.

Rosson Crow

Gracie Devito

Alec Egan with his paintings (from left): Fireplace and Mantle, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.; Sunset Mountain, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.; Light, oil and Flashe on canvas, 60 x 48 in.; and Sea, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.

Alec Egan’s Los Angeles studio.

Alec Egan at Anat Ebgi

Artist Alec Egan is an Angeleno, born and bred, but don’t look for LA-centric references in his work— it’s far broader than that, encompassing a universal resonance that’s untethered to specifics of time and place. As the sole artist presented by Anat Ebgi Gallery at this year’s Dallas Art Fair, Egan’s in an enviable position, albeit tempered by serious responsibility. But the 10 or more of his paintings that will be on view at the Anat Ebgi booth comprise an exciting introduction to Egan’s vision, and serve as an emblematic thumbnail of the seven-year-old gallery’s adventurous program.

Egan’s world is equal parts cacophonous color, repetitive, even combative, patterns, and a restless probing of memory, nostalgia, and identity. While his paintings are typically devoid of figures, there are echoes of people everywhere, ghostly reverberations of human life that populate the rooms depicted in his canvases. “Hopefully it adds to this push and pull with the viewer,” Egan says. “Is it your room? I want to imply the viewer, but also imply the presence of whoever this fictional character is, the absence of him in the paintings.” Nostalgia is a key piece of his aesthetic, and shards of childhood memory are a common element throughout Egan’s oeuvre. “My own definition of nostalgia would be some type of beautiful pain in looking back, a desirable pain…,” he continues. “It’s a very personalized thing—you could find something nostalgic that I never would.”

The backgrounds in his paintings are often wallpaper patterns, occasionally so pronounced that they compete with subject matter, challenging traditional notions of background and foreground. “It’s the linguistic nature of the paintings,” he says. “I do a lot of repetition of patterns, like a crocheted throw pillow against a flower wallpaper, with a flower-patterned lampshade, or actual flowers in the vase against the flower pattern. The patterns on the patterns—it becomes bizarre and kinda psychological. And it’s autobiographical in the sense that the inception of these patterns comes from a real place, similar to wallpaper patterns in my grandparents’ house, trying to construct my own identity.” Although Egan’s subjects can be quotidian, some of his paintings evoke the timeless boldness of Japanese masters like Hiroshige, Hokusai, even Takashi Murakami, heroically recalibrated through his graphic, surreal paint-by-number palette.

At the fair, expect a series of recent works that are intriguingly self-referential. Egan says that it’s a unifying approach he’s employed before, creating “detail” paintings from a central large-scale piece. “Conceptually what I’m interested in is this—there’s a ‘master’ painting which is usually an interior, a bedroom or some domestic space, that’s involved and complex,” he explains. “In this one there will be a fireplace that’s accidentally bare, windows, paintings on the wall, and then the other pieces in the show will be the details from that painting, extracted in the other paintings. So, it’s like examining the minutiae of the central painting, really getting into it, and sometimes that minutiae becomes abstract. Conceptually it’s kind of mining this ubiquitous, familiar nostalgia…”

Rosson Crow, States of Shock, 2018, acrylic, spray paint, photo transfer, oil, and enamel on canvas, 66 x 90 in. Image courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery.

Rosson Crow at The Hole

Big skies and open land, hallmarks of the American West, inspire contemporary artists as much today as they have for countless generations. Stirred by this regional geography, Rosson Crow immerses viewers in her expansive, life-sized desert landscapes, which pulsate with electric color. Within each painting, scattered detritus reflecting popular culture suggests a hidden narrative, waiting to be explored.

Thirteen years ago, Crow was named as one of 10 artists to watch in the Wall Street Journal article, The (23-year-) Old Masters. At that time, her work focused on empty interiors reminiscent of movie sets. “I’ve always loved film,” she confesses. Area audiences may remember her FOCUS exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2009, which featured these dramatic, nostalgia-tinged spaces. “So much of my work comes out of my love of history, especially American history,” she explains. Rather than stay in the past, however, Crow’s work constantly moves forward. The walls of the empty rooms in the earlier works have dissolved, stretching into the vastness of the Western landscape. Telltale clues of a life left behind have remained a constant in her work. For this current body, she states, “I got the idea of people living on the fringes of society.” And so, littered amid thickets of cacti, one finds the remnants of the modern-day hermits who may have lived there, the stories of their lives embedded within the debris.

Crow is literally plugged into history and contemporary culture while she works. “I’m totally addicted to Audible. I’ve made it a New Year’s resolution to ‘read’ 52 books this year,” she reveals, adding, “I started with All the President’s Men followed by Fear.” As someone obsessed with conspiracy theories, the current political climate offers her so much to absorb. It also adds relevance to her exploration of desert dwellers who live off the grid. And as her work investigates the world through a unique lens, she is also drawn to literary reexaminations. When we spoke, Crow had recently finished reading Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, with its re-imagined tale of the Greek goddess. Literature and film, she divulges, nurture her imagination the most. “I feel like I’m thinking less about other painters. They’re always in the back of my mind but I’ve veered more towards writers or filmmakers,” she says. Among her favorite authors is George Saunders, whose storytelling ability she particularly admires.

The filmmakers currently on Crow’s radar include Chloé Zhao, Yorgos Lanthimos, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Peter Greenaway. The ability to create the layered, nuanced worlds portrayed in their films is reflected in Crow’s practice. Using a range of media, including phototransfer, spray paint, acrylic, and oil paint, each of her canvases is built up over several layers. The effect is one of walking onto a carefully crafted film set. Creating this dimensionality is time consuming. It usually takes about a month to complete each painting.

Though Crow currently lives and works in Los Angeles, North Texans might be interested to know that she was born and raised in Dallas. She attended college on the East Coast where she earned her B.F.A and M.F.A. at New York University’s School of Visual Arts and Yale University, respectively. After a stint living in Europe, where her work has also been shown extensively, she relocated to the West Coast. “I love being in California with its wide-open desert spaces,” she emphasizes. This affection resonates in her work, with its massive scale and infinite depth. As a featured artist with the New York–based gallery The Hole, Crow looks forward to her paintings making their hometown debut at this year’s Dallas Art Fair.

Dallas-born filmmaker and artist Rosson Crow in her Los Angeles studio.

Los Angeles–based painter, sculptor, and performance artist Gracie DeVito in her studio with (from left): Gracie DeVito, The Maestro, 2018, oil on canvas, 51.75 x 58 in. and Autumn’s Child, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48.5 x 51.5 in.

Gracie DeVito, Slide Guitar, 2019, oil on canvas, 46.5 x 65.5 in. Courtesy of the artist and 12.26.

Gracie Devito at 12.26

A first-timer at this year’s Dallas Art Fair is Dallas’ hotly anticipated 12.26, a gallery opening fall 2019 in the Design District. Owned by sisters Hannah and Hilary Fagadau, 12.26’s program is oriented to emerging and mid-career artists, and for its inaugural visit to the fair the gallery will show three artists from its roster, including Los Angeles–based Gracie DeVito. While DeVito is primarily a painter, her practice also involves performance and sculpture, all interwoven facets of her artistic persona. Dallas Art Fair will mark the first time DeVito’s work has been shown in the city.

At the 12.26 booth, DeVito will exhibit two or three of her larger paintings as well as some medium-sized works, “things that kinda happen in the studio simultaneously,” as she puts it, while she’s painting bigger pieces. All of the works are recent, the larger paintings inspired by pieces she completed in November before the NADA Art Fair, where she was shown by Athens, Georgia–based gallery Tif Sigfrids. “When I finished that body of work it culminated in this one painting that felt very different to me,” DeVito says, “and I quickly laid down a lot of information on old canvases so that when I got back to the studio I’d be ready to get working on them. It’s exciting— it’s really new work which has gotten me into a mode of painting that feels really fresh and new and still uncertain to me.”

Some of the paintings headed to Dallas are oil and acrylic on canvas, although one is augmented with sand dating back to when DeVito was working en plein air on the beach. Her oil on cotton paintings have a curious DNA, as the artist explains: “The ones on cotton are all reused painting rags that I keep as I work. I wipe my brushes on them and I move them around the studio. Sometimes I’ll start a painting on them and then reuse them to rub paintings down, and I look at them and I think they’re going to be a painting, but they may not end up being a painting until months later.” The cotton works wind up in irregular, non-rectangular frames, built specifically to accommodate their proprietary dimensions. DeVito likens the results to sculptures on a wall. “Like a Joseph Cornell kind of box,” she adds with a laugh.

Another aspect of DeVito’s paintings is their blurring of the line between abstraction and figuration. For viewers it sometimes calls for a subtle reappraisal-in-real-time, as one’s perception begins to shift, recognize, and reassess accordingly. “It tends to happen with the linemaking and the drawing, where I’ll keep the brush moving rapidly and gradually build up in areas on the canvas, and then the actual fibers of the canvas will reveal things that I didn’t intend to be there,” she says. “They move back and forth always, and that’s something that I’m completely open to.”

Grab a preview of the forthcoming 12.26 at the 2019 Dallas Art Fair—Gracie DeVito, along with LA’s Johanna Jackson and New York–based painter Jackie Feng.

Gracie DeVito, Mezzo Grappa, 2017–2019, oil, acrylic, sand, on canvas, 52.5 x 58 in.

BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL AND STEVE CARTER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SERGIO GARCIA