“I Am Not This Body” at Tyler Park Presents

In Silver Lake, Tyler Park Presents has invited curators Juliana Paciulli and Evan Whale to organize its summer group show. Both photographers (Whale is represented by the gallery) he two drew inspiration from a text written by the late artist Barbara Ess. Whale studied with Ess as a student at Bard College, and the exhibition is a sentimental remembrance of the influential teacher and artist. 

“I AM NOT THIS BODY. But I am. Aching and full of longing,” Ess’ text begins. “I am something that cannot be photographed, cannot be named, defined, translated.” The curation picks up on the theme of bodies being broken down and reassembled. Daniel Gordon’s “Blue Face II” is a photographic collage: bits of pixelated imagery are hodge-podged with ripped paper to create a Frankensteined face, one eye of which is made by a shadow being cast by an unseen object behind the camera. Several other photographers featured—Andrea Chung, Tommy Kha, Evan Whale, Jessica Wimley—pick up this technique of ripped, torn, or cut picture making. The sole figurative work, by Young Joon Kwak, is isolated to a small side gallery where her “Lying Hermaphroditus,” a body cast from the back half of a figure that leans delicately against the wall, is the show’s punctum. The sculpture is both a body and a husk-like shell—a fractured stand-in for the vulnerability of the human form.

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Photo: “I Am Not This Body” at Tyler Park Presents. Image courtesy of the Artist(s) and Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles.