LOS ANGELES — Perhaps one of artists’ greatest desires is to make the invisible visible, to express the ineffable yet deeply felt realities of existence in an infinitely layered and fluctuating world. As more and more to come, currently on view at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, brings together four artists who rise to this challenge. Working in several mediums and tackling a variety of subjects, the common point of the artists lies in their refusal to make easily classifiable works, opting instead for a collective sense of complexity.
A classically trained oil painter from China, artist Yike Zhang has recently turned to textiles. In “Wang Zhu” (2023), hung near the entrance to the gallery, the artist pays homage to his grandmother, whose work bears the name. Zhang delicately weaves multiple layers of fabric into a shape that looks almost like a scroll, combining Chinese text with different types of images, including a stitched version of a family portrait. Another artist working with memory, Maddy Inez Leeser is also inspired by her grandmother. The artist based her beautifully glazed vessels, “Memory Jug #5” and “Memory Jug #7” (both 2022), on her grandmother’s spirit jars, which she collects as a way to symbolically preserve space for family history.
Family returns in the work of Liz Hernández, who often draws on her Mexican heritage in her practice. For the exhibition, curator Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle has chosen pieces by the artist Talisman series, in which Hernández created a mythical archive of his family’s spiritual and cultural practices. In “Luz y progreso en tu camino” (2020), which loosely translates to “light and progress on your way”, the artist displayed the titular phrase above a distorted mirror – showing how practices and the philosophies of a family both stay with family members and change throughout their lives.
On walks through their Oakland neighborhood, artist Tracy Ren took photographs of outdoor altars they encountered, which became the starting point for “Threshold #3” and “Threshold #2” (all two in 2022). Ren encased these images of altars in meticulously crafted clay frames and added his own designs to create the works, essentially creating shrines of shrines. Although not directly related to the artist’s personal history, like many other works in the exhibition, these pieces make visible the ways in which cultural tradition and spiritual practices can be transmitted within communities outside the family unit.
In its entirety, More and more to come emphasizes the precariousness and relentlessness of time – the way it both preserves and forgets. The various nods to diasporic life and to family stories and traditions passed down from generation to generation freeze in an installation that suggests the fragmentation inherent in an archive: between the different moments captured in a family’s photo album find thousands of unregistered events. The strength of the exhibition lies not in the artists capturing particular stories, which the objects do not, but in honoring the all-too-human desire to represent them in the first place.
More and more to come continues at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles (The Bendix Building,
1206 Maple Avenue, 5th Floor, #523, Fashion District, Los Angeles) through June 25. The exhibition was curated by Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle.
