Anthropologist and a visual artist Susan Ossman blurs the line between ethnography and art.

LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES, April 5, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Susan Ossman’s solo exhibition “In the Wash” opens April 9, 2022 at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles with a reception from 10am to 5pm at Los Angeles Art Association’s Gallery 825, located at 825 N La Cienaga Blvd. As an anthropologist and a visual artist, Ossman blurs the lines between ethnography and art. Her training in both fields has enabled her to create works that merge disciplines to give us an insightful and astute look at the connection of our senses with work, time and value.

“In the Wash” depicts laundry drying in the open air, stretched across multiple canvases like sheets strung on a clothesline— informed by movement of a breeze and the generations of unnamed women whose hands pinned freshly washed linens to the lines. The exhibition folds us into a journey through time with old ways surrendering to new just as the color palette and paint application progresses from one piece to the next.

“Christo’s Laundry” uses classical oil painting techniques to evoke the gentle swaying of cloth on a still spring day. Visible brush strokes shape the wind-twisted folds of “Winter Wash”. “Caught in the Sheets” turns laundry into an exuberant field of summer color. These diverse styles and palettes encourage reflection on the interplay of style and signature in an artist’s work and identity.

A video accompaniment to the exhibition shows Ossman at work in her studio then follows how her the paintings inspired over 100 artists and scholars to collaborate in “On the Line,” a program of exhibitions, performances and participatory artworks in Riverside, California from 2012 through 2016.

The three paintings in the exhibition were produced in the context of art/anthropological research on laundry lines. Along with other artworks, they instigated a series of collaborative art-making that brought visual and performing artists and scholars together for a series of exhibition/performances in a gallery, a mall, public libraries, parks and open fields from 2013-16. Ossman writes about the project in her book Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fields, A Memoir of Anthropology and Art (Routledge2021).

Susan Ossman is an artist, anthropologist and writer. She studied art and history at UC Berkeley. An interest in colonialism and notions of the avant-garde led her to Paris and on to Morocco where she studied the relationship between media images and politics, then made beauty salons in Casablanca, Paris and Cairo sites for exploring globalization. In the 2000’s she began traveling the world to listen to the stories of people who had lived in multiple countries, leading to the creation of The Moving Matters Travelling Workshop, a global collective that develops on-site programs on migration internationally. She came to Southern California in 2007 to teach anthropology and global studies at of the University of California, Riverside. Ossman’s art has been exhibited and performed in the USA, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Spain, England and Tunisia
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Current projects include a study of ecology, addiction and the human condition that focuses on the poppy flower, and “Scattered Subjects”, which explores notions of “the subject” in art, literature and social thought in the context of the COVID 19 pandemic by mingling on-site and digital media. susanossman.com

Gallery 825 is the exhibition arm of the Los Angeles Art Association. Purchased in 1958, the gallery, which is located in the heart of Los Angeles at 825 North La Cienega Boulevard and provides LAAA artists with a professional venue in which to show their work

Shoebox Arts
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Kristine Schomaker