LOS ANGELES — Jon Pylypchuk is haunted by ghosts. I have love for you, the artist’s current exhibition at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at the ArtCenter College of Design, is anchored in a dime-store campfire framed by furry trees and a chorus of pillowcase ghosts. hanging above. Tapestries made from scrap rugs hang on the walls, each depicting a wide-eyed alien figure surrounded by apparitions fashioned from athletic socks. Bronze castings of paper bags with eye holes offer a simple and refined take on her rambling DIY style, an attempt to immortalize the ephemeral and the fleeting.
Mortality has long been a constant theme in Pylypchuk’s work, but this latest presentation deals with specific losses and loves in his life; namely, his relationship with his wife and the death of his close friend Tony Fernandez in 2020. In addition to visual art, Pylypchuk has composed a handful of painfully serious lo-fi pop songs over the past year, which he performed with a small group seated around the campfire when the ArtCenter opened and will resume when it closes in August. He has struggled with the death of his friend for the past three years and channeled this grief into other recent showsbut the songwriting process, something he hasn’t done in three decades, provided a sort of catharsis, lightening the weight of that loss slightly.
“I think I’m going to remove the ghosts after this,” he said Hyperallergic shortly before the show opened last month. “There have been a lot of ghosts lately.”
Throughout his career, Pylypchuk’s work revolved around the mortality, the abjection, the losers, the lonely, the fragility and strangeness of life, portraying it all with a mixture of humor and sadness, pathos and pathos, as noted by Chris Kraus, writer in ArtCenter residency, in an essay accompanying the show. Using spray foam, light bulbs and an assortment of everyday objects and detritus, his constructions exude personality and character far beyond their economy of means. “Never mind the media, the people of Pylypchuk, that’s us: heavy bundles of feelings and flesh, making our way through the world on pencil-thin legs that somehow , support us,” Kraus wrote.
As much as “the people of Pylypchuk are us,” they are also him, self-portraits of sad slackers who mix tender intimacy with cartoonish slapstick, material curiosity and bodily revulsion. Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, he had no intention of becoming an artist. He played in bands in the mid-1990s before realizing he “wasn’t very good at it”. He studied economics and then English at the University of Manitoba, ending up on academic probation after nearly failing. His friend, artist Paul Cherwick, suggested that Pylypchuk join him in art school.
“How difficult art can be, right? thought Pylypchuk at the time. “I had no art background, so I didn’t know there was anything to it. There were no rules,” he recalls. “It was very freeing… not knowing that I’m doing everything wrong.” With music he dreamed of becoming a rock star, but with the visual arts he “just didn’t think anyone would care”.
In art school, he met the Royal Art Lodge, a group of Canadian artists, including Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber, who valued camaraderie, collaboration, and an irreverent, dark approach to creating art. Far from the world’s artistic centers, they reveled in their provincial and outsider status.
After graduating in 1997, he entered the MFA program at UCLA, where he found a group of kindred spirits in the emerging art scene based around a group of young galleries in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. He first met Tony Fernandez, who performed songs under the moniker Mr. Banjo at Joel Mesler’s Dianne Preuss Gallery, in 1999. He wanted to put together a full band,” Pylypchuk recalls. He joined on bass and they played several times a week at Hop Louie, a now-defunct legendary Chinatown watering hole that was an early version of Angeleno from Cedar Tavern in New York.
Around the same time, he had his first exhibition with Chinatown’s flagship gallery, China Art Objects, with whom he continued to exhibit until they decamped to Mérida, Mexico in 2015, after which Pylypchuk was picked up in Los Angeles by Nino Mier. Three months before his graduation exhibition in 2001, the artist staged his first personal exhibition at the Petzel Gallery in New York. Although he had exhibitions in museums in Detroit, Münster and Montreal, I have love for you is his first institutional solo exhibition in Los Angeles, suggesting his insider/outsider status. (He had a two-part solo museum exhibition at the Blaffer Gallery in Houston and Ausstellungshalle zeitgenossische Kunst Münster in Germany in 2009.)
Alongside his career in the visual arts, he continued to make music with Fernandez, notably in KISK, a Kiss cover band supposedly from Russia who performed in full Kiss face painting. Fernandez died suddenly in July 2020 after suffering a heart attack at his home. He had texted Pylypchuk earlier in the day to tell him he was feeling sick and thought he might have COVID.
“He said ‘I love you’ and I said ‘I love you too,'” Pylypchuk recalled. “And that was the last communication we had… He went to bed and then I got a call a little later that he was dead.
Pylypchuk is no stranger to death. Her father fled Ukraine at the age of 15 after watching his parents die in the Holodomor famine. “He never liked talking about it, but there was a constant theme of ‘I’m going to die any minute,'” the artist said. His parents were older when he was born, and since his mother was the youngest in his family, his siblings began to die when Pylypchuk was a child.
“The thing is how do you deal with this heaviness? You can’t live your life constantly weighed down by it. So you have to find coping mechanisms, and for me that was always humor,” Pylypchuk said.
Her work may stem from her own experience of loss, but it has greater resonance. “For me, this exhibition is timely,” said Julie Joyce, director of ArtCenter Galleries. Hyperallergic. “We are all in mourning. The wounds of the many losses we have suffered during the pandemic are still fresh. They are also largely unstable and unrequited, as even the way we mourn has changed. Right now we all need a little more understanding, a little more humor, a little more love.
As the show opened, Pylypchuk and his comrades sang plaintive songs while sitting in front of a fake glowing fire as ghosts swayed above, tinged blue in the black light. With the final number, the makeshift scene turned into a puppet show, as a ghost with long, lithe, striped legs began an awkwardly exuberant dance of death, and the trees wobbled awkwardly from side to side. ‘other.
“If it’s my last day with you, I want to tell you how much I love you,” Pylypchuk sang, “And if the sun goes down, the moon will shine, with all my love for you.”
