LOS ANGELES, CA.- Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles, is presenting Don’t Give Me Flowers a group exhibition of works by Delia Brown, Shana Lutker, Sarah Miska, Mattea Perrotta, Fay Ray, Fawn Rogers and Amanda Ross-Ho. The exhibition, curated by Nancy Meyer, examines the artists’ perspectives on status and female identity through symbols of beauty, value and privilege. Brought together in dialogue about the constructs in which we live, the exhibition postulates the tendencies towards objectification, social motives, and the balance between intrapersonal and interpersonal perceptions. Simultaneously personal and universal, Don’t Give Me Flowers relishes in the ambiguity and evolution of the human condition.
Inspired by 17th century vanitas still life paintings, Delia Brown is both artist and model in her recent series of self-portrait boudoir paintings. Having been absent from her work for over a decade, Brown’s tantalizing gaze is featured again in Lady of the Canyon. Nestled on a couch in the room of a cozy home, Brown is surrounded by random objects and trophies of achievement and invites the viewer to contemplate mortality and desirability while observing her vulnerable, naked body.
Complicating the origin of an image, Shana Lutker’s practice is rich with art historical references. Her interdisciplinary practice draws from the archives of psychoanalysis and surrealism. Playing with one of Man Ray’s most iconic works Venus, 1937, Lutker’s Anet-her is a tempera on paper sculpture based on a photograph of a reproduction of his work. Here, the essence of the Roman goddess of love and beauty is seized, captured, restrained, and fetishized in a permanent display of arrest.
Drawing from English horseback life and traditional equestrian painting, Sarah Miska’s practice examines the rituals of presentation and our preoccupation with how we are perceived by the outside world. With an astute attention to detail and formality, Miska has transformed fragments of the body, in this case the crests of a horse with carefully braided manes, into symbols of status, desire and control. She invites the viewer to contemplate our own fixation with adornment and performativity.
Mattea Perotta’s paintings deal with the balance between masculinity and femininity, the unconscious, desire, and the female body. In her recent exhibition My Letter to Picasso, the artist rewrites the cubist’s traditional mythology – that of his famous muses and aims to channel and interpret both the personal and shared experiences of trauma.
Fay Ray’s high-contrast, monochrome photomontages and metallic sculptures explore the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity. Conflating the worlds of worship and desire, her multi-dimensional works borrow from the symbolism and composition of traditional religious relics and the visual language of the occult.
Fawn Rogers addresses the idea of power as currency for nature and human interaction. Concerned with the paradox of the natural and unnatural worlds in which we live, her seductive paintings from her The World is Your Oyster series is at the core of the artist’s exploration of life and death, nature and industry, pleasure and pain, lust, opulence and the fragility of the future.
Amanda Ross-Ho’s practice originates in the archival impulse and attempts to develop intimate understanding of the transitory or ephemeral. She develops tender attachments to the idiosyncratic artifacts that populate commonplace encounters with material culture, media, and daily life and elevates them into speculative monuments and tableaux. Using oppositional strategies of forensics and theatre, she intimately dissects transient matter and reconciles it into enduring and outsized forms. For Don’t Give Me Flowers, Ross-Ho includes Untitled Crisis Actor, (hurts as much as you can imagine, although you do not have to be crying to feel this), one in a series of oversized translations of graphic symbols traditionally used to measure physical pain.
Delia Brown (b. 1969, Berkeley, CA) received her MFA from UCLA in 2000. She was last featured in Vanitas at Oxford House Projects, Los Angeles in March 2022. Other solo exhibitions include D’Amelio Terras and Tibor de Nagy, New York; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Gallery Hyundai, Seoul; and Il Capricorno, Venice, Italy among others. Her self-portraits were the focus of a solo exhibition at The John Michael Koehler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. Her work is Included in museums collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archives.
Shana Lutker (b. 1978, Northport, NY) is a Los Angeles-based artist. Solo exhibitions and performance include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Barbara Seiler Galerie. Lutker’s work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Performa 13, and many US and international venues including the SculptureCenter, Hauser & Wirth, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Orange County Museum of Art. She received her MFA from UCLA and BA from Brown University.
Sarah Miska (b. 1983, Sacramento, CA) received her BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2007 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2002); Hernando’s Hideaway, Miami; and griff’s, Milwaukee. Miska’s work has been featured in group shows at Below Grand, New York; Dread Lounge, Los Angeles; Super Dutchess, New York; and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, among others. She has an upcoming solo presentation at Friends Indeed, San Francisco in May 2022. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mattea Perrotta (b. 1990, Los Angeles, CA) Perrotta has a BFA from UC Berkeley and studied at the Santa Reparta School of Art in Florence. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at The Landing, Los Angeles; Lamb Arts, London; and MAMA Gallery in Madrid and Mexico City. She has appeared in group exhibitions in Istanbul, London, Melbourne, Lima, São Paolo, Mexico City, and Bogotá and attended residencies in Mallorca, London, Marrakech and Lisbon. She’s recently been featured in a solo show at Et al., San Francisco, CA in March 2022.
Fay Ray (b. 1978, Riverside, CA) received her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002, and her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. She has exhibited at galleries within the US and internationally, including Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2016 & 2018); Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (2016); Louis B James Gallery, New York (2016); JOAN, Los Angeles (2015); Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2011) and New York (2007), among others.
Fawn Rogers (b. Portland, OR) is a Los Angeles based artist. She’s had solo exhibitions at The Lodge and HATCH, Los Angeles; Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Select Art Fair, New York; and Dawit Yohannes/World Bank, Juba, South Sudan. Select group exhibitions include The Tenth Muse, Case Gallery, Los Angeles; Yes, Yes it is Burning Me, MYKONOS BIENNALE, Greece; SCENARIOS OF DESIRE II, Emergent Gallery, Veurne, Belgium; The Vision Board, Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, among others.
Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago, IL) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Ross-Ho has exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway (2019) Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2017); Vleeshal, Middleburg (2016); Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2015); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2014); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016), Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2011); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2010); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); among many other institutions.
Nancy Meyer is a Los Angeles based curator and art consultant. She has held positions at LAND and LACMA where she co-curated Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting (2014) and Kaz Oshiro: Chasing Ghosts (2013) and curatorial assistant on Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada, Pierre Huyghe and James Turrell: a Retrospective, among many others. At LAND, she oversaw the public installations of Jose Dávila: Sense of Place and Anna Sew Hoy: Psychic Body Grotto. Nancy has a M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of Arts, San Francisco, CA and a B.A. in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies from University of California, Berkeley, CA. She was a fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN in 2006.
