Willa Nasatir at Gaylord Apartments

A stereotype about Willa Nasatir’s native Los Angeles is that it is a city obsessed with surfaces. Still the artist’s works are a joyful training in the examine of a surface’s depths—its layers, transparencies, reflections, films—challenging the eye to decode sort via sundry smears and shimmers. The sextet of parts on view here—three acrylic-on-canvas paintings and a trio of photos printed on Plexi—visually rhyme with one particular an additional, partly by a shared fascination with the manifold veneers they depict, stack, and obfuscate.

The portray Slice (all works 2022), attributes the catawampus wheel of an automobile, which is also a halved lemon. Warm and neat colors spill about one a different, and sure varieties drip so closely that they evoke 1960s psychedelia. A look at Kiss #2 could initial remind a single of a biology textbook’s cross-sectional illustrations of human organs richly layered with tissues and cells until finally the eye rests on the unmistakable outline of . . . a garden chair. Go in deeper and you can start to see the eponymous osculation, even though it is tough to, um, “make out” by way of all the partly overlapping coats of semitranslucent paint.

The pictures depict reflective forms (jars, shards of pottery, a deadbolt lock) set upon or lodged into reflective surfaces (mirrors? Mylar?) picturing glass and sky. Whilst each picture has at its centre a unique and absurd object (a pair of pareidolically stacked electric powered sockets, a shell jammed into a keyhole) what captures one’s consideration is not always the cardinal matter, but the surfeit of surfaces all all-around.

In a location with much too few clouds like LA, color is always somehow muted, blasted by the sun. All the get the job done in Nasatir’s clearly show at Gaylord Flats (a mild-filled space on the top rated ground of a mostly household creating at the edge of Koreatown) seems sunlight bleached. This high quality phone calls to thoughts the dual meanings of the word publicity, both equally in terms of vulnerability and the photographic course of action that reveals imagery via chemical compounds and light—nothing superficial about that.

— hannah baer