SHADOW TRACER Carmen Argote, Naotaka Hiro, Hanna Hur, Jutta Koether, Joshua AM Ross, and Maja Ruznic
WORKS ON PAPER December 9, 2022–April 2, 2023
This exhibition delves specifically into the inherent experimental spirit of drawing. Using fantasy and the subconscious as a point of departure, Shadow Tracer: Works on Paper considers the ways artists express their interior worlds. Placing recent works by Carmen Argote, Naotaka Hiro, Hanna Hur, Jutta Koether, Joshua AM Ross, and Maja Ruznic in dialogue, this show explores how these artists employ the medium of drawing to navigate this theme. These pieces contemplate the intrinsic performative element of drawing, a medium that has the ability to conjure worlds beyond our own with the very physical tools within our own realms. The act of drawing is akin to creating architectural or written plans, which also suggests a kind of potential, giving life to dreams. Naotaka Hiro’s abstract drawings document performances made with his body: faint folds and holes on his pages demarcate the spaces where he inserts his body into the paper in the studio, mapping his movement in relation to the page and tracing his contorted frame in search of his own limitations. Using his body as a material, Hiro’s work references the early Japanese performance movement Gutai of the 1950s–1960s and Los Angeles conceptual art of the 1990s–2000s. Hiro also presents a selection of daily sketches that resemble a storyboard when seen together, using drawing as a daily act that alludes to the artist’s dual role as director and performer in his broader practice. Hanna Hur’s intricate geometric grid drawings take on an almost ritualistic aura. These painstakingly rendered colored pencil picture planes are studies in repetition, flattened portals into their own infinite cosmos. Influenced by her religious upbringing and subsequent, evolving relationship with belief, many of Hur’s pieces draw the eye to centrally-located, symbolically charged characters, figures she sees as muses, spirits, or even shamans. These floating silhouettes beckon the viewer into her phantasmic field of vision. Jutta Koether’s red and purple ink drawings on tracing paper from her eVEryTHinG WilL ChaNGe series superimpose two narratives atop each other, conjuring canonical imagery from classical European painting to uncanny combinations of oversize figures towering in outdoor fields. The artist’s objective is to remix, where she plucks motifs from contemporary politics, positioning these beside historical or religious figures in
allegorical landscapes. Koether collapses time in these dreamscapes, culling from the past even as these works put forth questions about the social and cultural backdrop of the present. Maja Ruznic’s gouaches are imbued with the aesthetic experience of longing or melancholia. The artist is interested in depicting the grace or the sense of the numinous that is found in darkness, which is connected in part to her childhood experience as a refugee of the Bosnian War. Her frontal figures appear as spectral memories, composites rendered in abstracted blocks of color that exude a private symbolism intertwined with a publicly painful past. Her images may be fabricated memories of family members she never met, or portraits of characters she regards as witnesses. Ruznic’s psychologically complex tableaux deftly blur memory with mythology, drawing viewers into a series of works that deal at once in dreams and nightmares. Carmen Argote’s multimedia practice uses psychoanalysis and psychic healing as a guiding principle to create works that address her desire for protection and comfort. Argote uses drawing and collage in combination with more sculptural elements to investigate her notion of the multiple selves hidden within. Her work asks the viewer to negotiate internal questions of vulnerability. The artist invokes the contemplative and the spiritual, marking moments both metaphorical and speculative. Joshua AM Ross’s drawings depict bodies in ecstatic movement, fragmented limbs stepping into or out of colored pencil dreamscapes. The artist plays with apertures and occlusions, constructing vantage points into and boundaries around bright illusory spaces. His figures are headless, hinting at bodies underneath draped panels in a fantastical, even Afrofuturist world. In such a way, he depicts familiar yet fictional forms.
Checklist
Hanna Hur, Spiral , 2021 Colored pencil on paper 11 ½ × 11 in (29.2 × 27.9 cm) Private collection. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles
Carmen Argote, Spinning Dog , 2020 Graphite on paper 50 × 37 in (127 × 94 cm) Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City Carmen Argote, Two Paintings Projecting , 2022 Oil on linen, oil on canvas, bath towels, artist’s clothing, museum wax, red Egyptian paste, paper, graphite, cold wax, rooster leg ties 36 × 21 × 16 in (91 × 53 × 41 cm) Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Cellar) , 2022 Acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper 32 × 42 in (81.3 × 106.7 cm) Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Ear Moon) , 2022 Acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper 32 × 42 in (81.3 × 106.7 cm) Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Magic Mountain) , 2022 Acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper 32 × 42 in (81.3 × 106.7 cm) Courtesy the artist and Bortolami
Hanna Hur, Muse V , 2021 Colored pencil on paper 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
Collection of Keith Couser, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles Hanna Hur, God’s Eye V , 2021 Colored pencil on paper 11 × 11 1/2 in (27.9 × 29.2 cm) Collection of Madeline Warren & Michael Everett. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles
Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 12 × 9 in (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 12 × 9 in (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 12 × 9 in (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 9 × 12 in (22.9 × 30.5 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 9 × 12 in (22.9 × 30.5 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 9 × 12 in (22.9 × 30.5 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 9 × 12 in (22.9 × 30.5 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR Joshua AM Ross, Entrance , 2021 Colored pencil and graphite 58 × 13 in (147.3 × 33 cm) Courtesy the artist
Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Muddle) , 2022 Acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper 32 × 42 in (81.3 × 106.7 cm) Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Pathways) , 2022 Acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper 32 × 42 in (81.3 × 106.7 cm) Courtesy the artist and Bortolami
21 Small Drawings: Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Hotel Drawing) , 2012–2021 Acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper Dimensions variable Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Hanna Hur, Red Ecstatic ii , 2022 Colored pencil on paper 19 ½ x 16 ½ in (49.5 × 41.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles Hanna Hur, sun ii , 2022 Colored pencil on paper 18 × 22 in (45.7 × 55.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles
Joshua AM Ross, little foot , 2021 Colored pencil and graphite 58 × 13 in (147.3 × 33 cm) Courtesy the artist Joshua AM Ross, #2 Openin g, 2021 Colored pencil and graphite 58 × 13 in (147.3 × 33 cm) Courtesy the artist Joshua AM Ross, Red Act 2 , 2021 Colored pencil and graphite 20 × 16 in (50.8 × 40.6 cm) Courtesy the artist Joshua AM Ross, Red Act 1 , 2021 Colored pencil and graphite 30 1/2 × 14 in (77.5 × 35.6 cm) Courtesy the artist
Maja Ruznic, Sometimes a Wild God , 2022 Gouache on paper
27 1/2 × 26 1/2 in (69.9 × 67.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma
Maja Ruznic, Untitled, 2022 Gouache on paper 11 7/8 × 8 3/8 in (30.2 × 21.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma Maja Ruznic, Untitled, 2022 Gouache on paper 11 7/8 × 8 3/8 in (30.2 × 21.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma Maja Ruznic, Untitled, 2022 Gouache on paper 10 1/4 × 8 1/8 in (26 × 20.7 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma Maja Ruznic, Untitled, 2022 Gouache on paper 11 5/8 × 7 5/8 in (29.5 × 19.4 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma Maja Ruznic, Untitled, 2022 Gouache on paper 11 × 4 5/8 in (27.9 × 11.8 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma Maja Ruznic, Untitled, 2022 Gouache on paper 11 3/4 × 8 3/8 in (29.9 × 21.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma
Hanna Hur, sun ii, 2022 Colored pencil on paper, 18 × 22 in (45.7 × 55.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles
Maja Ruznic, Sometimes a Wild God (detail), 2022 Gouache on paper
27 1⁄2 × 26 1⁄2 in (69.9 × 67.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Karma
Jutta Koether, Untitled, 2022 Ink on tracing paper 9 × 12 in (22.9 × 30.5 cm) Courtesy the artist and LGDR
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Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is a thriving and globally engaged non-collecting contemporary art museum. Following the 2014 opening of the museum’s facility designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, the AAM enjoys increased attendance, renewed civic interaction, and international media attention. In July 2017, the AAM was one of ten institutions to receive the United States’ National Medal for Museum and Library Services for its educational outreach to rural communities in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and its fostering of learning partnerships with civic and cultural partners within a 100-mile radius of the museum’s Aspen location.
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Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan.
Shadow Tracer: Works on Paper is curated by Simone Krug, AAM Assistant Curator.
Special thank you to Monica Majoli, Giles Round, Nicola Lees, Kate Marra, and Molly Schaeffer for their insight on this exhibition and to the team Eric Angus, Sam Hopple, Monica Adame Davis, Lucas Quigley, Tim Mutrie, Susan Martin, Courtney Kenny, Rodney Hill, Alberto Vila, and J Carter. AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.
Cover: Hanna Hur , Spiral, 2021 Colored pencil on paper 11 1/ 2 × 11 in (29.2 × 27.9 cm). Private collection Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery Los Angeles
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