Featured Art
Over the Influence Los Angeles is pleased to debut four LA-based artists for Excuse the Interruption, a group exhibition coinciding with FRIEZE Los Angeles.
For this group exhibition, each painter; Lauren Wy, Jean Nagai, Brittany Fanning and Zes employ different formal elements of interruption as a machination for abstraction.
ARTISTS
Lauren Wy investigates the desiring body and psyche as fractal narrative and residue of process and color. Her work engages painting practice with Auto-theory frameworks. She builds stories from fragments found in both real and digital space; focusing on the use of esoteric media to speak of the digitally assisted body/landscape axis as it evolves in the present future climate and political crisis. Lauren’s work centers the femme, the animal and landscape as subject; treating them all with themes of ennui and bacchanal chaos. Wy received her MFA from Northwestern University in 2020. Prior to 2018, Wy’s work and life originated in the underground music scene in South Florida and Chicago where she performed as a singer in a band and producer of animated music videos.
“Zes” is a self-taught artist that lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions have included “Beneath The Surface” in 2019 at Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, curated by Takashi Murakami. His practice embodies an ongoing journey of translating the expansiveness of urbanity and tensions of personal discovery to the intimate boundaries of the canvas. in ethnographically-diverse Mid City, Los Angeles, his childhood was more defined by cultural integration and neighborly embrace than is generally perceived of Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s, an era defined by intra-community racism and violence.
Born in Florida among alligators and mosquitos, Brittany Fanning eventually escaped to Dahlonega, Georgia, a small Hallmark-style town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She studied painting at the University of North Georgia where she was heavily influenced by Appalachian artists, their depictions of nature and painterly figurative works.
Jean Nagai is an artist and has spent the last few years in New Mexico and California. He received a BA from The Evergreen State College in ’04 and his work has been shown mostly along the West coast. By engaging in a meditative process by which the sum of many individual dots accumulate to form a larger synergic whole, Jean’s work both creates and explores a spiritual microcosm and macrocosm that shifts between the physical, digital and political landscape.
