L.A.’s Commonwealth and Council brought in the tag team of sculptors Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi Oren Pinhassi Follow for the sixth iteration of its tribute to the women’s wrestling league Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (now the subject of a popular Netflix series). The featured works, which the artists selected in consultation with one another, center bodies of all sizes and sorts. In Pinhassi’s work, this can be quite irreverent, like a sculptural walker outfitted with an awning and a glory hole. Kwak takes a more direct approach, such as a work featuring a nude female torso seated on a Herman Miller chair, or a riff on Constantin Brancusi featuring spiky protrusions cast from the insides of fleshlights. “Oren’s work is about sites where private activities come out in public,” said gallery director Irina Gusin, “while Young Joon is reacting to these narratives from art history that use women’s bodies as passive vessels.”
Read MoreYoung Joon Kwak creates sculptures, performances, and videos for display in a gallery setting, in addition to performing with their dance/noise band Xina Xurner, which they founded in Chicago in 2011 for the “queer/femme weirdos and noise freaks” outside of commercial art galleries. At Xina Xurner shows, after moving to Los Angeles, Kwak found a community of amazing queer, trans, people of color, womxn, and mutant artists and performers who inspired them to start Mutant Salon, a platform for collaborative performances and installations through which Kwak collaborates with their community to collectively imagine new futures that celebrate their survival, resistance, healing, and transformation.
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