Ochi Projects is pleased to present Ring Down the Curtain, a group exhibition featuring new and recent works by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Oona Brangam-Snell, Trulee Hall, Isabel Yellin, Sarah Zapata, and Bari Ziperstein. The exhibition will be on view from May 22 through June 19, 2021 with an opening reception on Saturday, May 22 from 1 to 5 pm.

Ring Down the Curtain is an idiom borrowed from theater that marks the end of a performance. After more than a year of isolation and lockdowns, digital surrogates and Zoom fatigue, this group exhibition signals a return to embodied optimism by offering works that embrace materiality and empiricism.

Ring Down the Curtain includes artists working to parse the complexities of gender, sexuality, identity, and power through a dedication to labor, design, and craft. A carefully considered intersection of ceramic, textile, paint, video, and installation engages sensory perception, creating somatic markers that challenge histories of cultural performativity, particularly as they apply to women. Each artist expresses their unique interests in the relationship between tactility and the significance of elicited bodily experience.

Born in New York, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman is an artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Bermúdez-Silverman mines her own family lineage and image archive to convey the complexities of identification, in particular the role and interplay of religion, race, ethnicity, and nationality. She earned her BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2015, studied at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London, and was awarded her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include the University of Texas in Austin, TX; Project Row Houses in Houston, TX; Murmurs and the California African American Museum, both located in Los Angeles.

Oona Brangam-Snell (b. 1989) is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI and works as a senior designer for the textile firm Maharam. Brangam-Snell’s work seeks to highlight the enduring power of traditional symbols and their role in contemporary iconography, in an era where fabric design has been defined by digitization and industrial manufacturing. Influenced as much by histories of painting as by craft, her figurative tableaux combine characters from myth, folklore, and her own imagination.

Trulee Hall (b. 1976) received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1999 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2006. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Hall’s richly textured practice spans video, painting, sculpture, sound, dance, and immersive installation, routinely employing diverse technical skills gleaned from her experiences in various creative and entertainment industries. She began working in performance and video as an adolescent and developed a complex practice involving immersive sets, elaborate costumes, puppetry, claymation, and CGI. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations integrate with and inform facets of her videos and soundtracks in an overarching practice. Hall’s choreographed videos of non-narrative, surreal, philosophical, and symbolic systems employ a fiercely playful sense of humor, a patient appreciation for the mundane, and a love of the absurd.

Isabel Yellin (b. 1987) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014. Her combinative works aim to articulate the subconscious. Simultaneously sensory and sensitive, Yellin’s sculptures are corporeally suggestive of both the guttural and the alien. Recent exhibitions include Show Me As I Want To Be Seen at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2019); Cuddle Puddle (solo) at Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2018); and Velvet Concrete (solo) at M. Le Blanc Gallery, Chicago, IL (2018). Yellin recently curated a two-part exhibition of LA-based women sculptors titled Your Presence is Encouraged, as well as PSYCHOSOMATIC, opening next month at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.

Sarah Zapata makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Using meditative, mechanical means, Zapata’s sculptures and installations deal with the multiple facets of her complex identities: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as an evangelical Christian, a first generation American of Latin American descent, a contemporary artist inspired by ancient civilizations, and an artist challenging the history of craft as “women’s work” within the realm of art. Recent institutional exhibitions include Museo MATE in Lima, Peru; Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans; the New Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Art and Design, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art all located in New York; Boston University in Massachusetts; and LAXART in Los Angeles. Zapata’s work is currently on view in the groundbreaking exhibition Latinx Abstract at BRIC House in Brooklyn, NY.

Bari Ziperstein is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Working in mixed media sculpture, Ziperstein’s primary focus is ceramics. Her plural and fluid practice includes discrete objects, large-scale installation, site-specific public sculpture, and her line of functional ceramics, BZippy & Co. Materially experimental but conceptual at its core, Ziperstein’s practice engages ideas of consumerism, propaganda, and the built environment. Her objects and sculptural tableaux reflect an interest in the political dimensions of capitalist economies and challenge the construction of desire and aspiration in contemporary American culture through a historical lens.

CHECKLIST OF WORKS 

Pauli Ochi