Karma presents My American Dream: Metropolis of Angels, an exhibition of latest work by Keith Mayerson. Mayerson’s sprawling, non-linear narrative portray collection My American Dream (2000– ) weaves tons of of discrete photographs from his private life, widespread tradition, and the nationwide panorama right into a portrait of America as he sees it, filled with potentiality. Metropolis of Angels, Mayerson’s newest chapter within the collection, addresses his private nationwide imaginary, honing in on Los Angeles, the town the place he got here into his personal as an artist within the Nineteen Nineties and one which he has, since coming back from New York in 2016, as soon as once more come to name dwelling. The exhibition’s two rooms—the primary an homage to the figures who’re central to the artist’s California mythology, the second a meditation on the altering panorama of the American West—collectively comprise Mayerson’s tribute to the state’s utopian promise.
As Roberta Smith has written, every of Mayerson’s works “stands alone as a painted picture” whilst they’re “half of a bigger narrative.” Metropolis of Angels opens with a room of figurative oil-on-linen work, based mostly, as all of Mayerson’s representational works, on images. The primary depicts tennis legend Billie Jean King, who was born in Lengthy Seaside, holding up a trophy after successful Wimbledon in 1975, whereas the second reveals Jim Henson surrounded by Muppets. As a scholar in Brown College’s semiotics division within the late-Eighties, Mayerson realized concerning the signifying powers of pop-cultural and historic photographs; along with partaking in a postmodern deconstruction of their meanings, his work quantities to a honest attachment to the emancipation they’ll symbolize. In King, he sees a feminist icon, whereas within the Muppets, who reappear throughout his oeuvre as a cipher for queerness, he perceives a various solid of characters who’re celebrated for his or her deviation from the norm, right here represented by Henson’s personal human visage. Mickey, My Sister and Me (2023), based mostly on a photograph of Mayerson, age six, staring lovingly up at a costumed Mickey Mouse at Disney World in 1971 when it first opened (right here, the Florida website is a stand-in for its California counterpart, Disneyland), returns to his childhood imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles as a metropolis the place artistic people might construct alternate worlds; its orange-and-blue palette evokes the hazy filter of a Nineteen Seventies movie digicam. Cheech and Chong and Skateboarder (each 2023) faucet into the town’s ’70s counterculture, disseminated because it was all through the nation and past by way of magazines, posters, and movies that promised another bohemian ideology and infrequently homosocial life-style.
Mayerson’s Southern California landscapes vibrate with intense emotion on the fault line between abstraction and illustration. The son of a psychoanalyst, Mayerson is impressed by Surrealist and Modernist allegiances to the unconscious; in his abstractions of nature into visionary scenes, he attracts from Symbolism in addition to the work of Paul Cézanne, the Hudson River and Taos faculties, and different regional American panorama painters. Within the over-eight-foot-wide LA from a Aircraft (2023), he represents a metropolis, as vital theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in America, that’s “in love with its limitless horizontality.” Mayerson’s use of a way he calls “micro-management,” by which he paints every pixel of the unique {photograph} as if it had been an actual entity, lends the landscapes a hallucinatory high quality. Trying down on the town from above, the viewer is welcomed into its teeming material. In Sundown at Seal Rock, Laguna Seaside, California (2023), a testomony to Mayerson’s love for his husband, whom he first met within the small coastal metropolis, the sky is striated like a slice of agate, every swirling layer of ambiance a sky unto itself. With Joshua Tree (2024), the darker extremes of the Californian atmosphere are seen: one of many park’s legendary yucca lays on the desert flooring, an omen of the threats of local weather change. There may be hope for the longer term, nevertheless, on this work—newly sprouting yucca dot the horizon.
Metropolis of Desires concludes with work of well-known UFO sightings that assemble a science-fiction allegory for this very existential peril—environmental catastrophe—to our endurance as a species. Juxtaposed panoramically with Mayerson’s representations of nationwide parks, these alien historical past work suggest an alternate future for our planet by which a bunch of radical outsiders come to Earth to put it aside from local weather disaster. He renders The Phoenix Lights: Nonetheless from a video taken by Mike Krystone, 10 pm, March 13, 1997 (2024) as luminous yellow blocks standing out from a Klimt-like subject of purple and blue shapes that kind a luxurious mosaic by which panorama and sky morph, overlap, and dissolve into one another. In USS Roosevelt ‘Gimbal UFO’: Nonetheless from the Declassified Jan. 2015 Video (2023) and Battle of Los Angeles, February 24/25, 1942 (2024), Mayerson’s painterly brushstrokes fill skies and mountains with tons of of eyes channeled from the “noise” of the unique images, silently witnessing the arrival of chic cosmic phenomena. Scary a consideration of what’s going to come of Los Angeles and of America extra broadly, Mayerson sews collectively previous and current right into a visionary tapestry that insists the nation is worthy of redemption.