GALLERY PEEPING: BEST OF LOS ANGELES SPRING 2019

Willie Stewart, Everything Counts (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.

New Haven-based artist Willie Stewart makes his Los Angeles solo debut with In Between Days, which features mixed media works resembling enlarged VHS tapes alongside a nine-minute video. The VHS tape compositions may seem like assemblages of found ephemera at first glance, but are in fact composed of meticulously drawn, painted and printed layers—each tied to a complex network of references that include art history, punk music, and various representations of sentimentality. Their meaning is revealed by the artist’s self-directed short film, which is comprised of four uncanny parts interspersed with views of a cosmic void. With cryptic words that flash before the screen, Stewart exposes the manner in which we imbue images with arbitrary meaning and nostalgia.