Becca Mann: Protea

François Ghebaly is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Becca Mann’s first exhibition with the gallery. Imbued with a powerful sense of place, the paintings that make up Protea weave together memory and fiction in an exploration of the solarized heat and darkness of Los Angeles. Together they create an impression of the city as a palimpsest written and overwritten in foliage, flowers, and dissipating light.

Drawing source material from personal photos and botanical documentation of the flora of Southern California, these paintings are charged with the inherent language of photography: memory and interrupted chronology. At the same time, the works employ an array of painterly techniques, finely tuned color relationships, and subject-obscuring strategies to complicate the matter of representation. 

Working in a dialectical progression from painting to painting, the resulting body of work is bound together as a series of doubles and opposites. A zigzagging line of association moves through the work, linking sun-bleached aridity with balmy noir. Ambiguous images present mise en scène without narrative, while botanical forms proliferate, tracing the ebbs and flows of human life in Southern California. The recurrence of the flower, a nod to historic vanitas, combines with the evocations of the photographic to permeate the exhibition with a sense of ephemerality and flux.

Becca Mann (b. 1980, Los Angeles, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds degrees in visual art and visual critical studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Loudhailer, Los Angeles; and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. Her work has also recently been exhibited at 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Basilica Hudson, Hudson, New York; Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland; LAXART, Los Angeles; and the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. Mann’s work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Artillery, and Art ltd., among other publications.