𝖂𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌
Aron John Dubois, Patricia Fernández, Sophy Hollington, Benjamin Styer, &
A History of Frogs
November 19, 2022 – January 14, 2023
Wintering celebrates the period after the harvest, the coming of autumn and winter, featuring works by Aron John Dubois, Patricia Fernández, Sophy Hollington, Benjamin Styer, and A History of Frogs. Taking inspiration from medieval manuscripts and devotional tools, the works in this exhibition encourage us to tune into the shifts in our work and lives that come with the changing of seasons, and to welcome the oncoming colder, leaner, and quieter months.
Contemplating the ways in which we are connected with our environment through our work, especially in rural areas, artists in this exhibition were prompted to reflect on the medieval convention of the Labours of the Months. Beginning around the thirteenth century, wealthy patrons would commission artists to produce illuminated calendars within books of hours, breviaries, and other manuscripts intended for prayer. These illuminated calendars frequently took the form of Labours of the Months, which featured illustrations of agricultural and domestic tasks performed during distinct times of the year by the peasants who worked on the patrons’ land and in their home. Astrological symbols, crops and animals, feasts and festivals, and other items of religious significance would feature in these illustrations, grounding the owner of these devotional texts in the belief that all things proceeded from God’s order and according to his will. These lavish illustrations have preserved a portrait of medieval life, and the ways in which labor, celebrations, and times of rest were organized by the changing of the seasons. They also preserve a record of the connection between the working class and their environment, depicting a life that was intimately tied to the seeds planted, crops grown, and animals tended.
In Wintering, several artists reflect on the cyclical nature of time, their works echoing the shape of the wheel, the clock, the astrological chart. Patricia Fernández’s Guide is one such work, a central circular form emblazoned with painted versions of her signature x-shaped carvings and planetary transits on a cochineal-dyed canvas. Fernández’s work is always an exploration of our relationship to cycles: of time, of the body, and of history. Her labor-intensive practices of hand-carving, collecting and dyeing with cochineal, painting and writing, all stem from a desire to re-perform the past to better understand the present.
Similarly, Sophy Hollington’s hand carved lino-cut prints confront the past by revisiting arcane and esoteric topics such as meteoric folklore, alchemical symbolism, tarot and cartomancy- bringing them into our time in a way that they become vibrant and tangible to the modern seeker. Her work Gnomic Seal bears the slogan: “Earth shall breed. Sun wears a hood. Frost shall freeze. Fire eat wood.” An elemental sigil for the winter season which Sophy has partially culled from The Exeter Book, the largest and oldest known manuscript of English Literature. The gnomic verses contained in The Exeter Book express meaningful sayings, often in rhyming verse to aid the memory. Her words whirl around the circular shape of the seal, reminding us that we are tethered to the cyclical nature of the seasons, brought close to the flame as the cold and dark conquer.
Benjamin Styer’s paintings also reference historic esoterica, hauntological illuminations, and gothic remembrances. Isle of B and Sleepwalking Stickerbook draw from medieval miniatures and manuscript marginalia, as if torn from a page of The Limbourg Brothers’ Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. With a colorful and psychedelic quality recalling the medieval revivalism of the 1970s; Styer’s works lean into the fantastical, reminding us that wintering can also mean taking time to rest, play, and dream.
Aron John Dubois debuts paintings on canvas for the first time in this exhibition, a development on his explorations of compositions resembling uncanny fusions of symbols or subjects akin to riddles or puzzles. The largest of his paintings, The Shadow’s Trundle, depicts the crone figure bracing against the winter wind, overlaid by a spiral form, the wheel of the season turning. The figure is flanked by a series of icons- a pear and a pomegranate, a bountiful harvest and a memento mori, a playful mask to indicate All Hallow’s Eve, and a fire to light the way. Tracing the disappearance and re-emergence of nature through the fall and winter seasons, Dubois explores the deep connection between the human psyche and the landscape we inhabit.
The only sculptural work in the exhibition, A History of Frogs’ Wintering Bell is a domestically-scaled functional work intended to be rung by visitors to the exhibition, its sound calling humans and animals inside from the winter weather. The couple and artist duo behind A History of Frogs, Chase Biado and Antonia Pinter, live and work in Los Angeles, but Antonia grew up on a small farm in Washington. This work was made to speak to her nostalgia for the changing seasons, and bridges a worldbuilding logic of design and functionality with an elven-folk aesthetic unique to their collaboration. Welcoming us in from the cold, the Wintering Bell is the centerpiece of the exhibition it is named for, holding the touch of all those who enter The Valley to celebrate the season. ·❆·
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Aron John Dubois (b.1989, Boulder, CO) is a painter and an internationally recognized tattoo artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With no formal arts education after high school, Dubois has honed his craft in tattooing, painting, ceramics, and other media by meticulous study and self-directed practice. His work predominantly addresses the enigma of nature, corporeality, and archetypal drama through a lens influenced by art brut, folk mysticism, anthropology, and the grotesque. Working primarily on paper media with layered watercolor, ink, and gouache, he creates earthly altar-like compositions decorated with a symbolic language born of his own mythology and spiritual inquiry.
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Patricia Fernández (b. 1980, Burgos, Spain; lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2010 and BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. Fernández has had solo exhibitions at Whistle, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021, 2018); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, (2021, 2016); Holiday Forever, Jackson Hole, WY (2020); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University, Bakersfield (2018); Museo de Arte Burgos, Spain (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and LA><ART (2014). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Obra, Malmö, Sweden (2017); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2017); Edward Cella Art Architecture, Los Angeles (2014); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Fernández is a recipient of the Otis College of Art and Design Faculty Development Grant (2021), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2019), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2017-18), Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowship (2015), France-Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2011). She has been a resident artist at Forest Island, Mammoth Lakes, CA (2018); Récollets, Paris (2016); D-Flat, México (2016); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy (2013).
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Sophy Hollington is an artist and illustrator currently based in Brighton, UK. Born in London in 1989, she studied illustration at Camberwell College of Art graduating in 2011. Most of her work is created using the lengthy process of lino-cutting. She draws on themes from meteoric folklore to alchemical symbolism and is interested in wrangling the most arcane notions to make them vibrant and tangible. She is also the creator of Autonomic Tarot, a collaboration with writer David Keenan, published by Rough Trade books in 2018. She has exhibited at Fisk Gallery, Portland (2019) and Somerset House, London (2022); and collaborated with clients such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Celine, Hermes, A24, WeTransfer, WIRED, Nike, Apple, It's Nice That, The Wall Street Journal, Penguin, Faber & Faber, Little Brown, Thames and Hudson and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.
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Ben Styer (b. 1990) received a BFA from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, but identifies as self-taught painter. The artist’s debut solo exhibition, Crystal Piano Rain, was presented in Los Angeles at the gallery Moskowitz Bayse in 2021. His work has most recently been included in group exhibitions at Fortnight Institute, Sperone Westwater, and Marvin Gardens in New York, and is included in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. He lives and works in Western Massachusetts.
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A History of Frogs is a collaborative project by artists Antonia Pinter and Chase Biado. Pinter and Biado call AHOF a “morphology,” as an experiment in form—destabilized through play-logic to find new relationships between peoples and objects. The object conceptualized as evolving and fluid, hologram and hybrid. AHOF’s varied output includes jewelry, clothing, tableware, furniture, sculpture and publishing. AHOF was started at the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020, and has shown at Marta Los Angeles, Frieze LA, Noon Projects, OPaf, Neutra VDL House, and BozoMag.