Chelsea Culprit Amygdala in Repose

Morán Morán is pleased to present Chelsea Culprit’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles, titled Amygdala in Repose, which features nine large-scale paintings and a series of new sculptures. Through a vigorous handling of medium, color, and material complexity, all the works on canvas explore the role of visual-cognitive processes and mechanisms of the mind’s eye – the collective and individual construction of meaning, myth-making, and language. Two sinuous steel pipe sculptures occupy the gallery’s floor space, referencing fitness or stripper dance poles, laying languid and detached from their straight floor-to-ceiling connection. They are unhinged, free of expectations, moving at will as liberated lines. The relationship between the paintings and the sculptures is one of discursive language, as both bodies of work contain symbols that escape their references. With this exhibition, Culprit’s quasi-mannerist imagery continues an exploration of gender, ecology, labor, and desire, but does so while playing with degrees of legibility, genre, and cognition, sidestepping exactitudes to create positions of intuitive listening and seeking.

Culprit’s work entangles representations of the body’s capacity for work, play, display, expression, the performed authenticity of identity, and the intractability of freedom and personal bondage. Moving freely between the pictorial imagery of folk art and the materiality of the real world, Culprit’s works are composed of feelings as much as descriptions. Working variously with painting, neon light, sculptural assemblage, and installation, her work uses a composite approach to translate the ideologies of female identity which are used to define the gender binary.

Chelsea Culprit (b. 1984 in Paducah, KY) lives and works in Mexico City and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Susuro Sibilas, Galería Revolver, Buenos Aires Argentina (2021); Malas Madres, Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); Fear of Seduction, Queer Thoughts at Maureen Paley, London, UK (2019); DMing Purgatory, Queer Thoughts, New York, NY (2018); Fishnets, Uma Certa Falta de Coerencia, Porto, Portugal (2017); Right to Remain Elegant, Galeria La Esperanza at Barba Azul, Mexico City, Mexico (2017). Culprit’s work featured in recent group exhibitions at TANK Shanghai (2020); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2020); Museo Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland (2019); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2018).