Rena Small

is pleased to invite you to her exhibition featuring Paintings, Photographs w/Text, Artists’Hands into the 21st Century book, and ”A Memorial Passage from Artists’ Hands Grid Continuum”

RENA SMALL: IN MEDIA RES
 
Rena Small has engaged in a wide variety of artistic practice over her five-decade career. Thematically, Small has addressed some of our era’s most pressing problems; witness her early meditations on the AIDS plague symbolized in "The Moon is Black" or the critique of racism in her "Race Card" painting. These she pictorializes through a system – an informal painted and photographed language-art -- of personal metaphor whose poetic gestures may be intimate and lyrical but are not at all formally or narratively obscure. Indeed, their legibility to Small’s audience is a key factor in her work. Hers is a warm conceptualism, its message sometimes harsh but its visual means invariably tender.
 
Small’s notable reputation as a photographer has been established through her long-ongoing series of artists’ hands, most recently displayed as “Artists’ Hands Grid Continuum.” Focusing on those body parts that define and personify an artist’s identity, the series has maintained its documentary impulse for much of Small’s  career, often expanding upon the basic format (to include more than one set of hands, for instance, or objects, or indicative gestures) but never abandoning it. At this juncture the sequence boasts 248 components (and rising), each showing an artist’s hands at rest or in mid-gesture. In this manner Small has compiled a veritable library of hands. In her recent "Memorial Passage from Artists' Hands Grid Continuum" she selects from that library to represent all the hand-subjects who have died since the project began in 1984 – a meditation on mortality, of course, but also on continuity. 
 
The focus on hands connects directly with Small’s past performance experience with magic. References in various media and formats to card tricks and sleight-of-hand occur throughout her oeuvre – not only as light-hearted relief to the tragic subjects she addresses elsewhere, but as an invitation to her audience to accept that they do not, and perhaps cannot, see things for what they really are. Fool-the-eye craft challenges simple perception; the art of Rena Small, in all its forms and formats, questions perception that much further.
 
Los Angeles, August 2024

- Peter Frank