CONK !
June 24 - July 22, 2023
Augusta Kokas and Shay Myerson
In classic cartoons, when a character falls in love, giant hearts stretch out of their eyes and beat back and forth, like fiery comets flying and retracting through space. When an anvil falls from the sky and hits someone square on the head, a halo of stars circle and dance around them— a twinkling lasso that comes to represent modulating in and out of consciousness. This ‘circling birdie’ trope, along with other visual onomatopoeic expressions cast a unique line between the felt, the seen and the conjured.
Conk! explores this realm of entanglement, where folktales, textiles, and scenes from everyday life splinter off into a prismatic confetti of fantastical regalia. Suspended sculptural garments by Augusta Kokas and painted cut-outs by Shay Myerson demarcate the collapse of a human- animal narrative. Conk! reveals itself as a trading of portals. Here, there are dress buttons fashioned from collected rabbit fur, depictions of ancient mosquitos, a skirt of swords and flowers, red-eyed mountain goats and a blue sunset. Inversions and plot twists abound within emblems that connote intersecting vignettes, emphasizing a diaristic approach to handling material, form and their mnemonic potential. In this way, Conk! too, is a love letter. A love letter to the vistas of Los Angeles, to the sensations of summer, to people, to critters and the winding journeys that lead us to and away from home.
Augusta Kokas is a Los Angeles based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores folklore, magic and animism. In listening to her materials and letting them guide her along a winding path, Kokas creates sculptural garments, performance and drawings that evoke a world revolving around the power of love, lore and the earth.
Shay Myerson is a Los Angeles and Philadelphia based artist working across sculpture, painting and video. Her work offers new dialogue between the ecological, the material and the ethereal by investigating the psychodrama of objects and animals.
This is their first time exhibiting together.
