LOS ANGELES
Plant-Based
Aug 6 - 28, 2022
organized by Ricardo Harris-Fuentes, Vanessa Chow, and Alisa Ochoa
Opening Reception: Saturday, Aug 27th 7-10pm
Earthly Delights Book Launch:
Sunday, August 7, 2022 12 pm
[Purchase a copy here]
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is thrilled to present Plant-Based a group exhibition that explores the radical proposition that plants are highly intelligent, sentient beings, with sophisticated healing capabilities that may even have been sent to earth to terraform the planet via interstellar spores. Inspiration for the exhibition comes from the theories and ideas presented by Terence McKenna, Clemens Arvay, and Indigenous Shamanic traditions from around the world. The exhibition explores themes such as Shamanism, psychedelia, mycology, herbalism, extra-terrestrials, the healing qualities of plants and subtle energy fields that are found in forests and other plant-rich habitats.
For the exhibition Adrienne Adar brings live plants into the space through her interactive sound installations, and presents the glamor and individuality of award- winning plants in her Forma photography series. Nick Brown and Jen Hitchings depict highly charged energetic and mystical landscapes that invoke fields of energy and our connection to the cosmos. Mathew Tom approaches plant and fruit imagery from a meditative perspective, drawing on South-East Asian visual languages. Jenny Kendler and Dani Tull explore the space between plant life and other biological kingdoms, including mycelial networks and insects that feed, connect, and co- create the environment with plants. Cathy Lu’s fruit sculptures are reminiscent of alien life forms from Hollywood, referencing the often alienating experiences that people from immigrant communities and mixed heritage backgrounds face as they cross the globe like exotic fruit species. Armando Cortes and Travis Wyche offer subversive and problematizing responses to the Plant-Based theme. Cortes draws on Mexican healing traditions with his potions and poison bottles, playing with the fine line between a healing tool and something that kills, a risk that is amplified when one notices the functional similarity between the bottles and Molotov cocktails. In addition to minting his piece as a limited edition NFT, Wyche presents a digital print that isa visual index of a series of conversations with Ricardo Harris-Fuentes in which he expressed significant skepticism to the themes and theories in Plant-Based.
Finally as an important co-germination to the exhibition, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles will host the launch of Earthly Delights edited by Chanelle Adams and Danielle Wu, an exquisite literary offering that touches on the very soul of the exhibition. Artist Adrienne Adar will also offer a workshop that promises to further engage visitors on a somatic level and perhaps reshape one’s perspective on the plants that surround and support us.
Adrienne Adar is a sound artist and photographer based in Los Angeles who has shown extensively both nationally and internationally. Adar received her BA at Brandeis University (2003), MFA from NYU/International Center of Photography (2006) and studied at the Slade School of Art, London (2002). She creates interactive work, often incorporating living plants and technology in site-specific installations in addition to photographic and sculptural pieces. Her work engages in a critique of the patriarchal history of Earth Works while concurrently manifesting her personal beliefs and political urgency of the current environmental crisis. Adar’s most recent solo exhibition was a multi-seasonal, interactive exhibition at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in 2019. Her work has been written about in such publications as New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR, Another Magazine, amongst others. Selected grants and honors include the Ralph M Parsons Curatorial Fellowship (2010), The Warhol Foundation (2015), The National Endowment for the Arts (2018), and the Brooklyn Arts Council (2018). Her work is featured in several private collections in addition to the permanent collections of LACMA and the Nevada Museum of Art.
@adrienneadar
Nick Brown is a Los Angeles based artist and curator. Born in England, Brown currently resides in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums nationwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2002), The Drawing Center, New York (2002), PS 122 in New York (2005), the Torrance Art Museum (2014 & 2015) and The Rema Hort Mann Foundation benefit auction (2018). He has received grants from the California Institute of Contemporary Art, the Vermont Studio Center, where he also was awarded a residency, and from Artadia in New York. Curatorial projects include Werewolf, an exhibition at Charlie James Gallery (February 2016). Brown was awarded the Emerging Curators Award from LACE, Los Angeles in January 2017 and has an exhibition slated for 2023 at Angel’s Gate, Los Angeles.
@leantostudio
Armando Guadalupe Cortés (MFA Yale School of Art 2021, BA UCLA 2012) was born in Urequío, Michoacán, México and raised in Wilmington, California. Growing up in two worlds, sharply contrasted yet running parallel, leads Cortés to a fantastical take on the quotidian. Within the everyday of the rural and the industrial lie subtleties that inform his work, that build stories, propagate myth, and create room for histories- magical and otherwise. Through sculpture, installation, and performance, Cortés seeks to propel and make believable narratives often overlooked. This propagation of story takes the form of myth building. This myth-making challenges concepts of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, Cortés seeks to upend notions of myth and lore as fiction.
@armandogcortes
Jen Hitchings (1988, New Jersey) is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received her BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College in 2011. She has attended residencies at DNA (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johson, VT), Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan), and Highly Authorized (Ellenville, NY). Solo presentations of her work have taken place at Taymour Grahne (online) in 2022, One River School (Englewood, NJ) in 2019, MEN Gallery (New York, NY) and PROTO (Hoboken, NJ) in 2018, and Ideal Glass (New York, NY) in 2017 which was accompanied by a 16 x 30’ outdoor mural. In 2021, she completed two large-scale outdoor murals at The Wassaic Project. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Cindy Rucker, Pierogi, Ideal Glass (New York, NY), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), and Newark International Liberty Airport (Newark, NJ). She was a recipient of the Queens Council on the Arts’ New Works Grant in 2018. Previously, Hitchings co-directed Transmitter and Associated Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and is the founder of Studio Associate, an artist-focused consulting agency and resource platform.
@jenjonesjones
Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist, wild forager and environmental activist based in Chicago and various forests. Over the last 15 years, her work on climate change and biodiversity loss has been shown at Storm King Art Center, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the MSU Broad Museum, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Albright-Knox, the Eden Project, UK and the MCA Chicago, and is in the collections including the Dom Museum Vienna, Yale and Brown Universities and the The Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment. She is a founding member of Artists Commit, an artist-led effort to raise climate-consciousness in the art world, and sits on the Fundraising Committee for 350.org. Since 2014, she has been the first Artist-in-Residence with environmental non-profit NRDC. In 2023 and 2024 she will debut public projects at Hayward Gallery, London and Governors Island, NYC
@jennykendler.
Cathy Lu (b. Miami, FL) is a ceramics based artist that manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct the assumptions we have about Chinese identity and cultural authenticity. By creating ceramic based sculptures and installations, she explores what it means to be both Asian and American, while not being entirely accepted as either. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her BA & BFA from Tufts University. She has participated in artist in residence programs at Root Division, Bemis Center for the Arts, Recology SF, and the Archie Bray Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at Johansson Projects, Aggregate Space, Jessica Silverman Gallery and the Chinese Culture Center SF. She was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow. She currently teaches at California College of the Arts and Mills College.
@_cathylu_
Mathew Tom (b.1984) is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist. He has been developing a world where he combines elements from Asian traditional painting and European classical painting to create his own utopia called “Society of Friends”. Figures and animals are part of a larger mythology within his works that is in pursuit of the idyllic community he desires. In a world where everyone is in such perpetual bliss, even tigers have transcended their animal instincts and have joined the society as well. Deeply interested in the power of images, Tom ponders the supernatural abilities a painting can express and if these images can transcend geographic and cultural borders and exist independently from their original context.
@mathew_tom
Dani Tull is a Los Angeles-based artist. He received his MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally; selected solo exhibitions include Blum and Poe, The Pit, Kim Light Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Fredericks & Freiser, Torch Gallery in Amsterdam, Wewerka in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include On Stellar Rays (NY) Jacob Lewis Gallery (NY) and LAM Gallery (LA). His work has been written about in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, I.D. Magazine, Art Review, Wallpaper magazine and Frieze amongst others. During his career, Dani has collaborated with a variety of internationally recognized artists such as Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon. As an accomplished musician and composer, he has recorded and performed with a great variety of musicians. Recent musical projects include solo performances for SASSAS, West Of Rome and LAFMS. Permanent collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty, The Laguna Art Museum and The Peter Norton Family Collection.
@Dani_Tull
The works of Travis Wyche range from intricate collages, operatic music notations, choreography, artist books, multimedia sculptures, and overwhelming installations. His recent experiments present diagrammatic digital drawings as artifacts documenting complex conversations on topics ranging from the semiotic deconstruction of single words to wildly divergent networks of diverse and entangled concepts. He currently lives and works off-grid in a piñon and juniper arid desert forest and frequently dreams of swimming in clouds of pine pollen.
Chanelle Adams is a writer and Fulbright scholar currently based in Lausanne. She performs site-specific ghost tours in gardens and parks in Marseille, Vancouver, and Cape Town. She regularly translates for Paris-based magazine The Funambulist. Her work has been published twice by The Drift and she has a forthcoming project on camphor trees.
Danielle Wu is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her reviews can be found in Art in America, Artforum, and The Offing. In 2019, she curated “Ghost in the Ghost” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York, with Anne Anlin Cheng. She is currently working on an exhibition of a collection by Godzilla artist Arlan Huang.
photos by Gemma Lopez