ArtCenter DTLA presents (Parentheses), a street-view window exhibition by BRD (Bridget Rosalia Driessen) and Hannah Kim Varamini (founders of Love’s Remedies, an artist-run initiative and the inaugural ArtCenter DTLA Residency Project 2020).

For the closing projects of their 2020-21 residency at ArtCenter DTLA, BRD (Bridget Rosalia Driessen) and Hannah Kim Varamini depart from their subordinate roles in Love’s Remedies and present entangled works of their own. Harnessing the conceptual and physical space of ArtCenter DTLA after a year and half of supporting other artists through the Love’s Remedies framework, each artist uses their parenthetical and subjective position as a point of departure for a final gesture.

Please note: Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, exhibitions in ArtCenter's galleries are currently unavailable for visits by the public.

Works List

In the window facade, Varamini presents two projects that utilize paper as indexical imprint and spatial environment. The first is a large-scale ink painting on washi titled Three Mountains depicts three culturally significant, mythological mountains in North Korea, accessed via Google Earth: Mount Paektu, Mount Myohyang, and Mount Kumgang.

The project Atoll (Idiorrhythmic) arranges hundreds of cast objects of stones, twigs, tacks, and other tools. These skins or shadows of domestic and organic marginalia take the shape of labyrinthine forms that one would happen upon. The objects invoke a type of space which Roland Barthes described as idiorrhythmic – a negotiation of solitude and contact with others. From the installation emanates the sound of snapping shrimp, whose increasing volume in our oceans warn of climate change. These incidental artifacts of nature and culture become witness to shifting ecologies and the interconnectedness of all things.

Installed in the main gallery, BRD’s work, Capriccio is a simultaneously empty and overflowing field; using the interior columns and walls as painting surfaces in combination with a series of tiny frames inset into the columns to nest images that are barely legible. A rotating trompe l’oeil color scheme adorns the central columns, while their (and other) column capitals are painted black, red, and green in a layout linked to American-style roulette. The images are similarly arranged according to this game of chance, and their numbers are linked to The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, a descriptive list written by Georges Polti in 1895, and subsequently used by a variety of writers and storytellers in order to structure narrative. The images themselves, however, are not aligned with the titles except by random selection.

Image content consists of personal iconography and archival material spanning text, photograph, drawing and painting. Elements include an enigmatic constellation of animals fighting, children’s drawings, floor plans and schematics, riddles, recursive references to other Love’s Remedies artists and projects, playful nods to artists both contemporary and historical, and, finally, the choice of BRD’s artistic work operating as ground in the figure-ground relationship both between her and Varamini within the physical site, as well as within the project of Love’s Remedies itself.