6 Mark A. Rodriguez, Pushon , 2 0 1 9 . A

remixes, injecting dread or joy into you’d never before laid eyes on Rodriguez’s Williams’s words as he describes his career turned-wood table legs and tchotchkes, designing thousands of public buildings and you’d still catch a whiff of that carrion residences across the American continent familiarity which the work preys upon. It’s as segregation still reigned in the United the bummer and bounty of the thrift store. States. The parable-like excerpts speak to The swap-meet anxiety dream: patinated the power of adaptation and imagination — Americana set askew. soul, in short — the very characteristics Among the new stuff, we find a collection that made Williams a brilliant architect, of storybook window shutters painted equally known for overcoming challenging mint green (Will call cabin 1, 2019) — topographies and for designing spaces in fourteen in all — which, according to the which his clients could truly revel. “Some press release, are reproductions of an architects like designing only the exterior original pair salvaged from San Francisco’s of buildings because that’s what everyone Winterland Ballroom by a “historian and sees. I like designing both” — Williams’s Grateful Dead fanatic.” A legendary venue words offer a fitting description of in the annals of rock music, Winterland Cokes’s inward approach to filmmaking, (shuttered in 1978 and demolished in 1985) with most of its content invisible to the is where Frampton came alive and where the eye yet decisively present to the acute Band danced their last waltz, but somehow spectator. the photos of the arena that that come up in Meanwhile, Aretha’s voice emerges an image search show no sign of Rodriguez’s from speakers blending with Thom Yorke’s shutters. Which of course doesn’t have to distorted vocals, highlighting the acoustics mean that his story is apocryphal, just of a house designed for entertaining, whose that it doesn’t matter if it is or not when architect also designed Frank Sinatra’s. we’re talking about replicas of relics of Fade to Black (1990), the earliest work fairytale window treatments. in the show, chronologically samples the Next up: the Pushons. The press release opening credits of Hollywood movies to does not address the name, and I didn’t 32 1/2 in. in. 1/2 32 × illustrate the vacuity of the portrayal of ask. Apparently, though, there is a breed black people in their narratives as well as of dog so known — a portmanteau of Pug and their absence from casts and crews. “Della’s Bichon Frise. Like the flowers, these are House” examines what it means and looks freestanding cutout figures made of painted like to be more than those pervasive images, wood. Blank in the back — as a sign should reviving the ubiquitous forms of footnotes, be — they have fronts in streaky, washy, remixes, samples, eulogies, mottled blues: running down through curving honors, fan art, and film forms, these might have a littoral or credits to translate even celestial bearing but for those the look and feel of faces — saccharine, giggling, and interiority, starting profoundly creepy faces. These with Cokes’s choice of might be the ghosts of an old the show’s title and colloquialism, sinister and ending when you step banal. out of Williams’s design. 7 LEWIS HAMMOND ”The Keep” 6 MARK A. RODRIGUEZ Arcadia Missa, London Paul Soto / Park by Alex Bennett View, Los Angeles by Eli Diner Used as the final shelter, the keep — a fortified tower popular It seems appropriate to castles of the Middle Ages that Mark A. — performs a last-ditch attempt Rodriguez’s new at sanctuary. That this should show should be not exist in the center of a castle , 2019. Acrylic and oil-based enamel on wood. 94 1/2 1/2 94 wood. on enamel oil-based and Acrylic 2019. , altogether new. I braces against the possibility know I’ve seen those of impending destruction. The flowers before, keep had another historical usage: Pushon simpering six-foot to incarcerate prisoners. A space folk-art confections reflective or representative as now playing bouncer refuge, yet structurally binding or at the gallery door. imprisoning, coalesces in Lewis Hammond’s Same with the framed paintings. mailers for dubious- Given late capitalism’s looking life insurance reterritorialization of everyday life, policies, printed on the “outside” reads as antiquated. cardboard and carved Hammond’s vignettes reckon with such up into puzzles. claustrophobic contexts: the insinuation Mark A. Rodriguez, Courtesy of the artist and Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles. But even you hadn’t of the segregated, disenfranchised caught these at the individual into a totalizing whole. Drawing 6 old Park View, even if from his own experience and black history, .

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