Ring Down the Curtain

Group show featuring Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Oona Brangam-Snell, Trulee Hall, Isabel Yellin, Sarah Zapata, and Bari Ziperstein

Ochi Projects, Los Angeles

May 22 — June 19, 2021

Ring Down the Curtain is a sensual and excitingly tactile group show currently on view at Ochi Projects. While walking around the gallery space one experiences a heightened awareness  of their body in relation to the pieces on display. The show acts both as a celebration and a  grand finale—the name of the show is borrowed from a theatrical term used to signal the end of a production by ‘ringing down the curtains’. Thus the phrase in today’s context is a marker of the hopeful end of a static, cooped-up chapter (due to the Covid-19 lockdown), and the beginning of an exhilaratingly physical one. A through line shared by all pieces is an inherent dichotomy between allure and mystery.

To expand upon the theatrical metaphor, the pieces range in mediums to “challenge histories of cultural performativity, particularly as they apply to women,” (as stated in the press release).  The show includes six female artists: Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Oona Brangam-Snell, Trulee Hall, Isabel Yellin, Sarah Zapata, and Bari Ziperstein. Each artist is a master craftswoman to her respective medium, and the interplay between them all serve to remind us why we go to galleries to look at art: because of the rush you get when you share physical space with it.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman offers us a sugar rush with her sculptural Peephole series (1, 2, 3, 4), 2021, of miniature windows cast in sugar and resin which act as containers of narrative events. Intimate in size, there are voyeuristic images of conflict or unlikely juxtapositions imbedded within the sugar ‘glass.’ Both unsettling and precious, each piece feels like a little universe of unknown mystery. Comparatively Trulee Hall’s black-box installation, Oral Shapes, 2021, offers us a chance to be immersed in her visionary world. Her installation includes a video of a female dancer-cum-animation existing within Hall’s phantasmagoric universe of seductive shapes and symbols. The viewer is also in the universe, as the shapes from the video are also suspended and gently revolving in the comfortably dark room. 

Isabel Yellin’s pieces are distinct yet share a similar color palette of greens and light yellows. Systemic II, 2021, is a painting of limb shapes, sometimes looking like arms or legs, sometimes looking like intestines—all interwoven within and around each other. Contaminated, 2020, takes these wiggly tubule shapes and extends them out of the painting through the use of stuffed nylon which mimic similar the shapes painted on the surface. The wiggly shapes are metaphorically echoed in Oona Brangam-Snell’s Snakes and Ladders, 2021— a contemporary tapestry with hand embroidered elements. From afar it looks like a piece of writing paper with a posted note stuck to it, yet as you approach it the marks that look like doodles are revealed as exquisitely woven embroidery. 

Bari Ziperstein’s stoneware and glaze pieces Architectural Elements, 2021, and Plaid Canyon, 2021 riff off of traditional ceramic-language, yet offer surprises with their scale and playful patterning. Both pieces are timeless vessels of organic shapes, yet the colored patterning indicates them as modern. Sarah Zapata’s Vessel Color Phenomena, 2017, is made from colorful coiled fiber. Sitting on the ground, one can’t help but peer into its depths. In times of mourning or social protest (2 gargoyles), 2021, is two separate woven pieces stacked and suspended in the corner of the room. The two shapes mirror each other like a Rorschach blot; they are beautiful, but how to read them? Butterflies pinned to the wall? Or a poltergeist haunting the corner of the room?