Ochi Gallery is pleased to present Mythopoeia in Three Acts, a group exhibition on view from October 24^th to December 19^th 2020. Through varied explorations of the materiality, Aryana Minai, Claudia Parducci and Anna Elise Johnson’s practices contextualize everyday artifacts and experiences, abstract the phenomenology of the built environment, and engage in revisionist myth and monument making.

Rendering her paintings through collage, paint, plaster and sanding, Minai reveals the delicate edges where her memories transmute into layered surfaces, reminiscent of bodily architectures that are simultaneously sites of nostalgia, erasure and imagination. Parducci’s bronze cast ropes, some protruding from the walls, others slung over mounted worn wooden sawhorse handles– familiar objects cast in unfamiliar arrangements–linger as if to suggest an accident, an incomplete task, a morbid joke that the viewer isn’t quite in on. By casting the desert floor, or working with ash from an extinguished fire, Johnson creates earth-toned palates that tell stories of remnants–the works gesture towards the impossibility of creating an experiential index of the Anthropocene, of capturing an ephemeral lived moment within the limitlessness of nature.

Aryana Minai engages with the memory of site with a focus on the built environment. Reflecting upon Islamic and vernacular architecture of her childhood in Iran, she crafts monoprints of geometric patterns on handmade paper. Her designs are guided by an organizational logic of modular flexibility, rather than rigid systemization. Forms migrate across the surfaces of supports, occasionally slipping out of sequence, past the edges, or atop one another. While utilizing bricks to emboss these permutations, the works themselves also become architectural. They extend from the walls and the ceiling to structure the movements of viewers’ bodies. Through the use of resin, several works function like translucent windows that simultaneously demarcate and bridge two spaces. Minai ultimately envisions architecture as a living entity that continually sheds and acquires memories as bodies pass through its spaces. Minai moved with her family to Tehran when she was five months old. The family returned to Southern California when Minai was fifteen and she subsequently earned a BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (2016) and an MFA from Yale (2020). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Perrotin, New York; Arvia, Los Angeles, Ed Varie, New York and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

LA based artist Claudia Parducci’s work spans a multi-disciplinary practice that includes drawing, painting, and sculpture. Since receiving her MFA from CalArts in 2006 Parducci’s work has been shown in Los Angeles, nationally and internationally, exhibiting most recently at Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne, Germany and the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California. Parducci’s work comes out of an interest in histories of destruction and reconstruction. While her earlier work focused on the impact of human conflict and natural disasters, her most recent work shifts toward the nature of the cycle itself–the idea that we are always somewhere in the process of building and tearing down. She explores survival strategies, including the labour and fantasy that go into re-imagining a future after destruction. Beginning with the line as a foundation, Parducci develops her sculptures out of the line drawings. Labor intensive methods such as hand-knitting and dying, highlight time, labor and craft, particularly those associated with the feminine, and hint at the possibility of a society designed by women.

Anna Elise Johnson received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2012 and her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005, with a major in painting and a minor in art history. She was born in Starnberg, Germany, and grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After completing her BFA, Johnson worked in the arts in Baltimore and Denver and as an assistant to her father, who is also an artist. Afterwards she lived in Berlin, Germany for years and worked as an artist assistant for Julie Mehretu. After completing her MFA at the University of Chicago, Anna Elise was a fellow at the Core Program in Houston, TX. She now lives and paints in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions across the United States as well as internationally in Germany, England, Delhi, and Slovenia.

Pauli Ochi