Laeh Glenn: The Doldrums with a special project by Apogee Graphics

Sep 19 - Oct 24, 2020
  • "Well, if you can't laugh or think, what can you do?"
    Asked Milo.
    "Anything as long as it's nothing, and everything as long as it isn't anything," explained another.

    - Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

  • Altman Siegel is pleased to present The Doldrums, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Laeh Glenn. Sailors are cautioned to avoid the windless waters of the doldrums but in Norton Juster’s 1961 novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, young Milo finds meaning in his journey into boredom. Laeh Glenn’s exhibition The Doldrums is an exploration of suspended time, flatness, and the potential of melancholia.

  • Unequivocally shaped by tone, Glenn’s paintings are long-resonating in that they often hit deep frequencies of distance, absence, mediation, nostalgia, and absurdity. Drawing from and manipulating imagery sourced online, Glenn’s paintings reference the monotony of everyday reality while reveling in the bliss of escape into fantasy. Like the magical quality of sleepiness which reminds us of human frailty under the weight of the day while creating a mystical twilight space between consciousness and illusion; Glenn’s paintings create an elusive and subtly lingering mood.

  • Glenn's practice explores the conflation of historical and contemporary precedents in painting and the way in which we often experience images today, through their digital representations online. Her paintings address the digital life of an image; how repetition and sharing affect quality and context and how a physical painting can speak to the altered and damaged images that surround us. Although her source material is diverse, Glenn’s paintings are uniformly characterized by a flattened application of paint. Her perfectly articulated edges and matte surfaces are executed in refined and controlled color palettes. She often returns to the same image multiple times, with each subsequent painting shifting slightly in tonality, texture or scale. These subtle shifts mimic the effect of an image’s digital experience as it travels from screen to screen. A signature recurring display methodology is a border of raw canvas surrounding the painting and a handmade wooden frame, reinforcing the object quality of Glenn’s paintings in contrast to their digital inspirations.

  • Glenn invited Apogee Graphics, a design and publishing company started by artists Laura Owens and Asha Schechter to present a...

    Glenn invited Apogee Graphics, a design and publishing company started by artists Laura Owens and Asha Schechter to present a project alongside the exhibition. Run out of an office in The Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Apogee produces books, posters, and objects in conjunction with writers and artists. Their exhibition features new graphic posters highlighting a diverse group of topics from a long past lecture by scholar Alexander Zevin, an antique obituary or an endangered fruit. Alongside this installation are highlights from their design work from the past 3 years. Among these is the newly released MUM, a Laeh Glenn monograph, designed and conceived by Apogee Graphics and co-published with RITE Editions. Consisting of a private conversation between Schechter and Owens in August 2020, their ruminations unfold alongside photographs describing her work and process.

  • Asha Schechter: So then it raises this question of what remains of an image once it's translated like that. What...


    Asha Schechter: So then it raises this question of what remains of an image once it's translated like that. What happens in that translation process from jpeg to painting? If you're extracting elements and flattening and making them 2D, is the painting haunted by the original image? Does it retain any of the affect? Or is it generating some new sort of feeling?

     
    Laura Owens: I feel like the source image is a non-important starting point, like a red herring, and what's more important is the non-legibility of the image. [It is very interesting the idea you bring up-that there is no locatable "source" as image culture churns references together like hamburger meat.]
     
    A: That's the thing I come back to a lot. We're both bringing our own interests to this-you're thinking about textiles, and I'm thinking about image categories and how she takes the reference from an image that's often functional, or diagrammatic, or instructional, or cartoony, or photographic, and translates it into this image that no longer has any functionality. It doesn't do any of the jobs it might've originally done.
     
    L: So much of it is about moving away from nameability, but just enough to leave it behind. Just enough that it's not in eyesight, you can't see the reference in the painting. You have to project it.
    • Laeh Glenn The Doldrums, 2020 Oil on canvas, painted frame 66 1/2 x 55 in 168.9 x 139.7 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      The Doldrums, 2020
      Oil on canvas, painted frame
      66 1/2 x 55 in
      168.9 x 139.7 cm
    • Laeh Glenn Grid, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 66 1/2 x 55 in 168.9 x 139.7 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      Grid, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      66 1/2 x 55 in
      168.9 x 139.7 cm
    • Laeh Glenn 8, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 66 1/2 x 55 in 168.9 x 139.7 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      8, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      66 1/2 x 55 in
      168.9 x 139.7 cm
  • The Phantom Tollbooth (clip)

    Directed by Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow, & Dave Monahan, MGM Animation/Visual Arts, 1970.
    • Laeh Glenn Map, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 66 1/2 x 55 in 168.9 x 139.7 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      Map, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      66 1/2 x 55 in
      168.9 x 139.7 cm
    • Laeh Glenn Apocalypse, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 43 1/2 x 35 1/2 in 110.5 x 90.2 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      Apocalypse, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      43 1/2 x 35 1/2 in
      110.5 x 90.2 cm
  • L: Well, I guess if your question is do I think that her process does something to the material, this...

    L: Well, I guess if your question is do I think that her process does something to the material, this feeling of being painting, or your perception of it, definitely I think we're sensitive as human beings to pick up on how her handling and decisions become very nuanced and subtle. There are slight shifts in matte-ness, or certain colors that are mysteriously there only from one angle. It's very mysterious, the build-up, the sheen, and the intensity of the saturation. That can only happen with layering and density.

    • Laeh Glenn One fish two fish, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 43 1/4 x 35 1/2 in 109.9 x 90.2 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      One fish two fish, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      43 1/4 x 35 1/2 in
      109.9 x 90.2 cm
  • L: The paintings were more filmic than films. I felt like I was the director of my viewing of them,...

    L: The paintings were more filmic than films. I felt like I was the director of my viewing of them, and there was so much there to be seen. I felt like they were the earliest structuralist films. Because they're on, they're alive. When you move to the side of a photograph, you don't see something different, you're not seeing something different. You're just seeing something from the side. But for some reason with paint, with the way that it's made, and the way light reflects off of it, you do see something different. You do see a different material reality. The colors change, or the light hits it on that side. Especially in darker paintings, you'll see all kinds of things. I was looking at Gericault's The Raft of Medusa, and it says to me, "Oh, do you want to see what's in the water? Well, walk up close and look what's in the water." Because the water is black, pretty much, or brown. And then you're looking at it going, "Oh." And this feeling that your interpretation, it's not like VR or AR or whatever, where yeah, it's going to get crazy and there's shit in the water. But this is more like you get to relate to it and build a story. What if that is a person's arm in the water, what if it's just a fish? You get to build a story in a way that's gentle and kind to the viewer. Usually, that is.

  • A: It's an interesting question. I've had a conversation with a few people about this idea recently, how when you...

    A: It's an interesting question. I've had a conversation with a few people about this idea recently, how when you think about paintings of the past they told stories about the moment in which they were made, but it would seem insane to make a giant James Ensor-syle painting about the line of cars waiting to get a Covid test at Dodger Stadium. It just wouldn't make sense. I'd been thinking about this and was talking with Laeh about this a little bit. How do you make paintings about the moment that you're living in if they're not illustrative or narrative? And it makes me think about this question you're talking about, about going deeper into things. Because I think that there is a tone to a lot of Laeh's work, and this general feeling that is melancholic or elegiac or has a sense of loss to it. I wonder about that. How much has to be there to produce that kind of tone, or to produce that feeling? The thing you're describing of looking into the details, or getting this sense of difference from moving around the painting. I think in the end you're right that that is the difference when you look at Laeh's paintings versus if they were prints or something, they wouldn't have that ability to change or transform as you move around them. What I'm trying to figure out is, is it that slight ability to change or transform that gives it that emotional register that is just different than any other material form?

  • L: Or maybe in the next hundred years, we'll learn that molecules are implanted by the emotions of the people...

    L: Or maybe in the next hundred years, we'll learn that molecules are implanted by the emotions of the people touching them and there's some kind of residue that you left there that can't be left by a photograph because it's not emotionally embedded with somebody's touch.

     

    A: That's been my most hippy-dippy belief about art, despite a lot of my engagement with art being intellectual, that when someone spends a lot of time with something, you can tell somehow. There's a transfer of energy that happens to that object.

     

    L: I definitely think that is true, but it would be very hard to prove it with the tools we have.

    • Laeh Glenn Webster, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 66 1/2 x 55 in 168.9 x 139.7 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      Webster, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      66 1/2 x 55 in
      168.9 x 139.7 cm
    • Laeh Glenn Wack, 2020 Oil on canvas, painted frame 21 1/4 x 17 1/4 in 54 x 43.8 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      Wack, 2020
      Oil on canvas, painted frame
      21 1/4 x 17 1/4 in
      54 x 43.8 cm
    • Laeh Glenn Knots, 2020 Oil on canvas, wood frame 21 1/4 x 17 1/4 in 54 x 43.8 cm
      Laeh Glenn
      Knots, 2020
      Oil on canvas, wood frame
      21 1/4 x 17 1/4 in
      54 x 43.8 cm
    • Laeh Glenn Bench, 2020 Walnut 17 1/2 x 22 x 15 in 44.5 x 55.9 x 38.1 cm Edition of 2
      Laeh Glenn
      Bench, 2020
      Walnut
      17 1/2 x 22 x 15 in
      44.5 x 55.9 x 38.1 cm
      Edition of 2
    • Laeh Glenn Bench, 2020 Maple 17 1/2 x 22 x 15 in 44.5 x 55.9 x 38.1 cm Edition of 5
      Laeh Glenn
      Bench, 2020
      Maple
      17 1/2 x 22 x 15 in
      44.5 x 55.9 x 38.1 cm
      Edition of 5
  • 100% of the proceeds from Parable of the Sower benefit The Black School.

  • LAEH GLENN Artist’s Book, MUM Co-published by Apogee Graphics and RITE Editions In collaboration with Altman Siegel Fall 2020 Designed... LAEH GLENN Artist’s Book, MUM Co-published by Apogee Graphics and RITE Editions In collaboration with Altman Siegel Fall 2020 Designed... LAEH GLENN Artist’s Book, MUM Co-published by Apogee Graphics and RITE Editions In collaboration with Altman Siegel Fall 2020 Designed... LAEH GLENN Artist’s Book, MUM Co-published by Apogee Graphics and RITE Editions In collaboration with Altman Siegel Fall 2020 Designed... LAEH GLENN Artist’s Book, MUM Co-published by Apogee Graphics and RITE Editions In collaboration with Altman Siegel Fall 2020 Designed...

    LAEH GLENN

    Artist’s Book, MUM

    Co-published by Apogee Graphics and RITE Editions
    In collaboration with Altman Siegel
    Fall 2020
    Designed by Apogee Graphics
    Digital printing
    47 pages
    Softbound. Perfect Bind.
    6 x 9.5”
    Edition of 200
    Price: $ 30.00

  • Laeh Glenn lives and works in Sebastopol, CA. She received her B.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2008 and her M.F.A. from UCLA in 2012. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions including "Nothing will be as before", Tanya Leighton, Berlin; "Fine Barrens", Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; "Painting in the Network", Cessman Center for Visual Arts, University of Louisville, KY; "Architecture of Life", Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; "Background/ Foreground", Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; "Face to Face: A Selection of International Emerging Artists from the Ernesto Esposito Collection", Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy; "Call and Response", Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY; "Another Cats Show", 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA; "Green Circle, Black Diamond", Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA.

  • FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT ALTMAN SIEGEL AT (415) 576-9300 OR INFO@ALTMANSIEGEL.COM.