03.18.—04.24.2022
New Mythology
Steven Arnold, Mike Fernandez, Daniel Morowitz
Sublime Overview, 02:53 clip from ‘Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies’, 2019. More information here: https://stevenarnoldarchive.com/ .
Lauren Powell Projects is pleased to announce the second exhibition in the gallery, New Mythology, featuring Steven Arnold, Mike Fernandez, and Daniel Morowitz. Spanning more than 50 years, the works on view generate recombinant myths and universes lovingly assembled from shards of nature, culture, and the spirit.
Near the end of a life cut short by AIDS, Arnold mused on a sublime overview available to queer folks. If the horizon is a binary threshold, then queerness is an awareness of its curvature. Committed to collective action and relentless, visionary innovation, Arnold understood that “new mythology… new archetypes… new miracles… and new hope” must be constantly reinvented, especially by artists on the margins or who can otherwise see that the horizon is not a straight line.
The curved lens of the camera frames most of the representations produced in Los Angeles. From studio productions to headshots to male physique pictorials, the image factory churns. Fernandez plumbs these traditions and crafts restrained compositions that twist out of past lives into fecund hybrids. With Nymph Companion, colored photo gels and acrylic overlay a photo collage of a male model, Dominic, who is adorned with images of classical sculpture and theatrical masks. Slight misalignments of color and line highlight the dilating space and time between the layers.
Beyond optical hardware into the forests of plastic imagination, Morowitz paints figures and the scenes they romp around in. Elements of worked canvas are cut free and then pasted into an environment teeming with flesh and texture. Paper Tiger weaves stars, moons, shadows, bodies, snakes, and flower parts into a folded origami wrestle. As with Fernandez’s work, the disjunction between surface and image is rich, inviting wandering eyes.
These contemporary works hang alongside a selection of drawings and a large-format tableau photograph made by Arnold when he was about as old as Fernandez and Morowitz are now. The surreal and delicate drawings of fawns arising from a ground like androgynous apparitions were last exhibited in 1971 at Jehu/Upper Market Street Gallery in San Fransisco, CA, prefiguring the queer extraterresial aesthetics of David Bowie or Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The photograph, Connecting to the Infinite II, 1986, is a beautiful example of the confoundingly staged and pre-digital photographic installations Arnold conceived out of cut paper with actors and models in his Los Angeles studio. Organized under the sign of new mythologies, the works in this exhibition blend fact and fiction with fetish and fancy, considering what is inherited and how mutations can point towards a better present and different future.
A phone falls out of a pocket in a cruising ground at night.
The choice to not use a case has finally come to bite.
Screen shatters on rough stone amid bushes that groan.
Surfaces of touch and representation splinter…
unlocking new gestures to make contact or get home.
Seeing becomes blurrier and also more clear.
Bodies and light… the differences between the two disappear.
-Max Levin
Special thank you to Vishnu Dass for allowing the gallery to share Steven Arnold’s iconic work and story with our community along with a clip from his brilliant documentary, Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies, to Fahey/Klein gallery for loaning the large scale exhibition print, and to Max Levin for writing our press release. Please be sure to visit Steven Arnold’s solo exhibition open August 11 - September 24, 2022 at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.
Daniel Morowitz - Minotaur, 2022, 48 x 48 inches, acrylic and collage on canvas
Mike Fernandez.- The Untamed, 2022, 36 x 24 inches, Photo paper collage with acrylic, photo gel overlay. Model: Andrei.
Steven Arnold - Connecting to the Infinite II, 1985, vintage silver gelatin photograph - exhibition print, 36 x 36 inches
Daniel Morowitz - Paper Tiger, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
Mike Fernandez - Nymph Companion, 2022, photo paper collage with acrylic, photo gel overlay, model: Dominic.
Steven Arnold - Untitled Drawing, 1970, 18.5 x 23.5 inches, ink on paper.
Daniel Morowitz - Only Lovers Left, 2022, acrylic and collage on canvas, 30 x 40 inches
Mike Fernandez - Neo Deus, 2022, photo paper collage with acrylic, photo gel overlay, 14 x 11, model: Andrei