1501 South Alameda Street, Suite D , CA 90021 (213) 765 - 9976 www.lylyly.net

PRESS RELEASE

TOTEMISTS: Tina Braegger, Olivia Erlanger, Amy Granat, Nick Herman, Luchita Hurtado, Andrea Longacre- White, and Carlos Reyes, Organized by Marie Heilich

February 2 - March 9, 2019, Opening Saturday February 2, 5-8PM

As vehicles of orientation, totemic objects act as channels or mediums connecting the symbol to the symbolized. A universal phenomenon among early societies, totems have become an archetype for determining kinship and identity. As such, totems function as an essential axis necessary for social orientation and survival. As symbols of partial-inclusion / partial-exclusion, totems are caught up in series after series of semiotic accommodation and collapse.

Historically, totems have held a sacred connection between the unified signifier, seemingly pregnant with meaning, and the primordial kernel of the signified. However, when peeling back the layers of familiar symbols, mascots, or trademarks that traffic in significance, we find that they don’t hold some pre-existing fullness, already containing all of the meanings attributed to them. Rather, the totem is an empty place from which to see the other and identify the self, only retrospectively recognized through difference.

Drawing on the writing of Donna Haraway, TOTEMISTS explores her notion of “kin” to describe the complex intersections of human and nonhuman systems and the continued necessity to map these relationships. To restate Haraway’s sentiment, “to be a one at all, you must be a many.” This multi-species act of “becoming with” is necessarily interdependent in that our relations have no foundation to rest. In this way, totems continue to elicit strategies of ecological conservation, working against human-centric forced production and extraction of value from the natural world.

In a selection of works by seven contemporary artists, TOTEMISTS explores the performative, tautological, and inherently self-referential operation of contemporary totems that, despite our secular age refuse to disappear, implicating us all. By recognizing totem’s patriarchal and hierarchical legacy, the exhibition affirms the historic failure and continued relevance of totems as facilitators of coexistence and biodiversity.

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Tina Braegger has been writing fiction and making paintings that appropriate the amalgamated folklore of the marching Grateful Dead bear since 2012. The mascot’s amorphous identity has allowed the symbol to amass potentially infinite contexts for collective self-identification. From an anthropological perspective, Braegger mines the fertile icon by engaging the gaps and misinterpretations that such a full signifier produces. Currently teaching at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland, Braegger lives and works in Berlin and Zurich. She has held solo exhibitions with Weiss Falk, Basel; Shanaynay, Paris; Forde, Geneva; and Everest, Zurich. Her work

1501 South Alameda Street, Suite D Los Angeles, CA 90021 (213) 765 - 9976 www.lylyly.net has been included in select group exhibitions with Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Istituto Svizzero, Rome; der Tank, Basel; Swiss Institute, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel.

Olivia Erlanger choreographs ultramodern environments through installations, videos, and writing that show how advanced technologies engender subjectivity. Within TOTEMISTS, her arcane and nomadic merm-folk reappear after washing up in a Los Angeles laundromat in 2018. The genderless ocean beings’ non- compliance with machines forewarns a catastrophic ecological fate. Alongside curating exhibitions as a founding director of Grand Century in New York, Erlanger has held solo exhibitions with Mother Culture, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; AND NOW, Dallas; Mathew, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Balice Hertling, New York; and Seventeen Gallery, . Additionally she has participated in group exhibitions with Vilnius, Lithuania; 501(c)3 Foundation, Los Angeles; Brown University, Providence; CANADA, New York; Room East, New York; Ludlow 38, New York; Pilar Corrias, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museo di Capodimonte, Naples; and the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Erlanger recently published “Garage” with MIT press, a history of the unprogrammed garage space.

Amy Granat works unconventionally with film. Scratching the emulsion surface, breaking through celluloid, and using dirty chemicals, she builds layers of light and shadow in moving image work, photographs, and photograms. Her films range from the abstract, referencing her Structuralist predecessors, to those that obliquely allude to particular places, figures, or stories. Granat is a founder and director of the non-profit nomadic exhibition platform, Parapet / Real Humans. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum; Reserve Ames, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; The Kitchen, New York; New Museum, New York; Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; and The Green Gallery, Milwaukee. Her works are in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the , New York; Fond National d’Art Contemporain, France (FNAC); and Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

Nick Herman is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Taking the form of video, performance, collage, sculpture, publishing, and alternative printing and photography processes, his work explores the epistemological aesthetics of belief systems. Using long camera exposures and a green-screen suit, Herman documents the process of “playing” and animating his antenna-like sculptures in the studio, capturing this private ongoing activity in a suite of black and white photographs that are in turn manipulated through drawing and scratching. While the antennae are absent, the artist has recorded their cicada-like drone sounds in a series of sound works that emanate through the gallery space as aggregated overflow of information and evidence of residual desire. Herman has had recent solo exhibitions at Grice Bench Gallery, Los Angeles; Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles; and LAXART, Los Angeles. Herman has participated in group exhibitions at 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Public Fiction, Los Angeles; and SculptureCenter, New York. He is the publisher of ANTEPROJECTS, an artist imprint in the collections of major libraries and museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bibliotheque Kandinsky Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Grunwald Center at UCLA, Los Angeles.

Luchita Hurtado is a painter living and working in Santa Monica, . A selection of works on paper highlights the artist’s mystic connection with animals and the natural world. Largely under-recognized over her career, Hurtado’s lifetime of work reemerged in 2016 prompting a newfound public recognition. After

1501 South Alameda Street, Suite D Los Angeles, CA 90021 (213) 765 - 9976 www.lylyly.net keeping her paintings private for most of her career, Hurtado began to exhibit her work more publicly in the 1970s with a group show at the Long Beach Museum of Art and a solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles. Since her work’s reemergence, Hurtado has been included in exhibitions with the Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica; Park View, Los Angeles; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the ’s 2018 Made in LA biennial. Hurtado has upcoming solo exhibitions with Hauser & Wirth, New York and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London.

Andrea Longacre-White is a Los Angeles-based artist. Recently working primarily with objects, her sculptures correspond with notions of submission, domination, and connection in human and non-human relationships. Exploring different forms of bonds, her objects feel out the affecting double bind that limits joy to correspond with the amount of suffering that precedes it. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions with Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art; Wall Street Gallery, New York; and Rental Gallery, New York. Longacre-White has participated in select group exhibitions with The Finley Gallery, Los Angeles; LAXART, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; the Swiss Institute, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Brand New Gallery, Milan; A Palazzo, Brescia; Marlborough Gallery, New York; Higher Pictures, New York; and Foxy Production, New York. Longacre- White lives and works in Los Angeles.

Carlos Reyes uses time and space to translate the essence of objects through shifting contexts. With elliptical logic, his work and exhibitions play the anti-hero as they progress backwards. In the exhibition, silhouettes of charm necklaces - for instance, a cross, a smiley face, a Star of David, a pot leaf - are recorded on their sun- bleached velvet displays, forever atoning their original sentiment. Reyes has held solo exhibitions with Bodega, New York; Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Arcadia Missa, London; Night Club Gallery, ; Rear Window, Harlem; Cordova Gallery, Vienna; and Tomorrow Gallery, Toronto. He has contributed to select group exhibitions with Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague; The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; Hessel Museum of Art Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson; Société, Berlin; Luxembourg and Dayan, New York; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Praz Delavallade, Paris; What Pipeline, Detroit; Grand Century, New York; Bed Stuy Love Affair, Brooklyn; and Croy Nielsen, Berlin. Reyes was recently the subject of a solo booth with Bodega for Art Basel’s Positions.

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TOTEMISTS is on view at 1501 South Alameda Street, Suite D, Los Angeles, CA 90021 from February 2 to March 9, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11AM-6PM. An opening reception will be held Saturday, February 2 from 5-8PM. For additional information please contact [email protected].