For Immediate Release:
Face Guts is pleased to announce Thrutopia, a group exhibition co-curated by Niki Ford and Jovi Schnell.

In our minds, Thrutopia serves as a third space, a transformative current vibrating between deep fantasy and utter despair. Perhaps we really do need to touch both to root and reorient in our ever-unfolding present!

In this spirit, we've curated an exhibition that gathers 9 artists who speak in semi-abstract tools of visioning, narrative and meditative process—their works embrace the transportive powers of color, text, communion with plants/nature, collage, humor, absurdity, intuition and hybridized form.

Through a delirium of pinball logic, this collection of 34 works*, which span painting, sculpture, textile/garment and works on paper, plants seed in the cracks of the here and now. Collectively, they offer a vivid and eccentric field of vision—nuanced (and sometimes confusing) investigations that exist in continuity with deep play and the renewals of adaptation.

These artists forge devotional relations with their subjects without direct or clear connections between action and outcomes, in service to the capacity of imagination. They haunt this shared frequency with different levels of refinement and distortion.

Participating artists: assume vivid astro focus, Niki Ford, Cliff Hengst, Serban Ionescu, Stefan Meier, Dena Novak, Vanessa Santos, Jovi Schnell & Ray Thomander.

*A main selection of works will be available to view in the gallery and other works may be viewed in a separate viewing area, by appointment.

For more information please email info@faceguts.com.
Hi-Resolution Images for Press can be downloaded here.

The concept of Thrutopia, originally popularized by Dr. Rupert Read, is a call to imagine and build a path through—not just out of—our climate and societal crises. It also reminds us to engage imagination in order to access greater forms of personal agency and collective care.

Curatorial Statement:

As artist-curators, Ford and Schnell locate themselves in the stream, indulging in their like-minded tastes, choosing playmates with whom they feel a distinct resonance:

The works of assume vivid astro focus, Jovi Schnell and Vanessa Santos (aka Ancient Pocket) brim with morphologies of their own poetic making. Their works reflect on the generative powers of nature, calling forward its transformational forces. Whether packaged with a pun, myth, totem, tree, or bloom, their works travel within a comic mysticism, signaling us to where potential lies within the order of things. The cardboard paintings of avaf reveal allegorically fluid compositional arrangements, articulating the rhythmic and liberating aspects of presence with appreciable depth of color and energy. Schnell's vividly collaged paintings resemble frolicksome, age-of-anthropocene game boards. Her cut-and-paste oracles guide one, with child-like wanderlust, through mind-bending landscapes and futures untold. In Santos' laborious colored pencil drawings, ancestral communications, animism and dream medicine spiral in the blueprints of their Mexica-futurist rituals.

Cliff Hengst, Dena Novak and Niki Ford make provocative objects that flirt with the absurd—grounded in reverence, humor and a funky, shapeshifting boogie-woogie. Hengst's hand-painted signage wiggles its humanity throughout compressions, soft gradients and forged fusion, lending a Duchamp-meets-Sister Corita quality to the letters themselves. Novak's gooey, tassel-topped impasto and swooping swirls of oil paint, reminiscent of frosting, linger on domestic hallucination—giving way to the messy filigree of her color-crusted ceramics. Ford's obsessive, animated, hand-rolled, finger-poked clay patterns and intuitive works on paper combine and re-combine detail, in a pigmented fugue, making sacred confusion of familiar and imaginary objects.

Ray Thomander, Stefan Meier and Serban Ionescu collage on multiple planes: Theirs is a smooth, sharp, shiny, scumbled, denim doodled, powder-coated kind of play. Materials are cut out, punched through, twisted, patted, air brushed, scribbled and jigsawed. Thomander's sophisticated tactile literacy reorders reality; economically sculpted pretzels hijack low-relief narratives—as if to jolt one from a trance—while a punchy tomato-apple hybrid activates the exchange between childhood and adulthood. In wildly aesthetic pop rituals, Meier, much like the Rider-Waite Magician, commands the interplay of secular and spiritual symbols—even transforming a pair of white jeans into an esoteric form of prayer. Ionescu's crayon colored metal assemblages invite one to peer through the frame. They wittily merge and contort shapes and absences, the work imbued with a "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" kind of is-ness.

Collectively, these works breadcrumb the viewer towards closer reflections of their own making, shifting mysteriously between the mythopoetic and the concrete.

About Niki Ford and Jovi Schnell:

This exhibition marks the first curatorial collaboration between these two Los Angeles-based artists. As they are known for ceramic sculpture, works on paper, collage paintings and public murals/mosaic, they bring a multifaceted sensibility and nuanced feeling tone to the process, with a shared desire to reflect how we make meaning and move through the present moment.

About Face Guts:

Face Guts (est. 2017) is Artist Tim Biskup's gallery, project space and open studio in the Verdugo Village neighborhood of Los Angeles.

For further press information please email info@faceguts.com.