American Gothic - Night Gallery
JPW3 and GRANT LEVY-LUCERO
American Gothic
NIGHT GALLERY
JUNE 22 - AUGUST 31, 2024
A-Passion-Project has written about Grant Levy-Lucero before when a solo piece of his was in a wonderful group exhibition. Here in American Gothic at Night Gallery he again shares the stage, this time with JPW3.
I’d say here he outshines his scene partner, though it would be rare that he wouldn't. JPW3's work is fine, with some excellent paintings; the green glyph works in the first room and some others that are not of particular interest to this reviewer. One may look to the gallery text to try and find meaning to the show. It is a beautiful piece of writing by Ross Simonini, which would have us believe the show is all about desire wrapped up in beautifully highfalutin words but to me the show is simply enjoyable because of its engagement with nostalgic imagination.
Grant Levy-Lucero has taken the cookie jar as his form for this show. An interesting choice given his long focus on the open vessel. These find themselves at first glance to appear as statuettes to pop forms of that particularly American imagination. There is a witch and wizard. There is Casper the Ghost and the Cookie Monster himself. There is even Randy’s Donuts’ doughnut, once just an icon to Angelenos though it has now opened outpost across the United States and abroad.
They are unafraid of being fun, a refreshing counterpoint to much of the art world’s reliance on heavy topics to force a seriousness around the work. We can all picture the satirical art world figure whose pompousness is only matched by the complete lack of awareness they have. A fictional character who is to often real. One I am sure I and many others have taken on for ourselves to often.
I of course have already spoiled the secret, removed the lid so to speak, of these statues being cookie jars, which hold in themselves not sweet treats but nostalgia. In a literal sense, a visitor does not get to unlid a jar and pull a cookie out but the smile they evoke are just the same. In the push to modernize much of the homemade nature of the home was loss. Both the jars and the cookies have been replaced by mass manufactured uniformity for we have even lost much of the manufactured fun of a cookie monster cookie jar. On view here the jars, whose forms are rooted in Grant's handwork, reject that loss. They state that we still live in a world where joy comes from the handcrafted and that which we love, weather that is the magic of a wizard or the magic of a mountain of poker chips.
It can be dangerous for a body of work to find itself looking at nostalgia. Often artists find themselves romanticizing a time period that is exclusionary or problematic but Grant falls into none of those traps. The works reach back not to a time, but a feeling of hominess. One that hopefully many viewers can recognize. One that makes them, as it did me go home and bake some cookies to share with my wife, putting the extra in one of those mass manufactured glass jars wishing instead that it was a Levy-Lucero's You Reap What You Sow, 2024.