LOS ANGELES, CA.- Brooklyn-based Misha Kahn presents his solo exhibition Staged for the first time at Friedman Benda's Los Angeles gallery opening with a reception April 29th, and will continue to be on view until June 2nd, 2023.

Creatively, I have a kind of manic shopping energy: I like to try on new materials and processes. But rather than feeling inspired and sated by a new technique, I want more. Each option opens up new combinations. The results go from expansive to endless.

These past few years have been about accepting the way I work, learning to love my chaos rather than trying to escape it, ignoring friends’ thoughtful tips to limit a show to one or two more tailored series and instead welcoming you into my vortex.

Some pieces in the show are such an invitation; however, by limiting the result to a particular material, such as in the genius handwoven mohair of Stephens Tapestry, the resulting piece Swatching Space Time creates a complete bacchanal of media and imaginary digital weaving. Bits of string and crumpled paper mix with VR brushstrokes. A scanned piece of gum clings to a loose thread. This swatch—an expansive carpet by human standards—is but a tiny sample of infinite possibility.

Like all the works in the show, they are but a part of a much larger expanse.

I’m not sure why other people love crime fiction; I’m drawn to exploring all the various motives and red herrings to arrive, inevitably, at closure. When the mystery is solved, a good storyteller, having carefully tied a string through the entire story, picks up all the seemingly loose ends and brings them together.

After a decade with Friedman Benda, and a few previous outings in LA (such as at Dries Van Noten’s “Little House” in 2021), I’ve murdered quite a few things. (May the debate between what constitutes art of design rest in peace.) It felt like it was now time to take a string and carefully tie together all these creative explorations I’d left behind with the goal of hopefully arriving at some kind of conclusion—which is taking place, a little "too conveniently," in a house.

Friedman Benda’s new LA space provided the opportunity to show in a more domestic space, loosely suggesting how these disparate suspects might temporarily live together before something goes array. The works’ internal tensions come to light on their surfaces. In a table, Windswept, a seemingly effervescent form appears like a hydrophobic Lilly pad, with glass gems gathered on its metal surface.

By bringing together seemingly incompatible volumes and materials, the pieces display an imbalance — a friction of combinations such as, for example, embroidered moth wings hovering above a metal volume in a piece titled Ever Sessile Pupa.

Consider this show the fruits of my shopping—the calm before my next binge.

Misha Kahn was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1989 and graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 with a BFA in Furniture Design. Kahn is the subject of a forthcoming book, Casually Sauntering the Perimeter of Now: Misha Kahn, published by Apartamento in 2023. In 2022 Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany hosted his first institutional solo show titled Under the wobble Moon: Objects from the Capricious Age. Kahn’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of museums such as Corning Museum of Glass, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY. Kahn lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.