黑料不打烊

Lyles & King is pleased to present Twist to strengthen, a two-person exhibition by Sarah Miska and Carla Edwards.

The exhibition features paintings by Miska alongside fabric wall works and rope floor sculptures by Edwards. Connecting their practices is a fastidious approach to materials and an impulse to deliver incisive cultural critique. The show's title Twist to strengthen,* can be read as a command or an action, referring to aspects of physical labor that are at times depicted or imbued within their works. Across Miska and Edwards' work, there is a quietly foreboding sensibility, an interplay between domination and wildness, as well as a shared, distinctly American, visual lexicon.

Miska's closely cropped paintings display the adornments and material traces of equestrian life. Using acrylic, she creates a study in edges and textures: meticulously painting a horse's finely groomed haunches, where its coat meets leather saddle - nature constrained - alongside the contour of a rider's body in shiny boot and silk jodhpur as seen in Training. Miska briefly rode horses in her youth - only to quit due to the prohibitive expense - so tied up in this subject may be her own sense of yearning, striving, or lost possibility. She varies the scale of her canvases from intimate to larger-than-life, and shifts our gaze from a ribbon-festooned mane to an imposing horse's ass, which conjures a range of emotional tenor: from girlish devotion to perversely funny. In one painting she presents a cowboy's crotch, readied with a holstered knife, chaps, and lasso. In another, a horse's velvety muzzle appears fitted with a leather bridle and steel bit. Both works seem to fetishize the labor and beauty of the equestrian, plus their tools of precision and control.

The crimson ribbons that punctuate Miska's paintings, such as the one pictured in Weaving Plait, offer symbolic resonance within her otherwise earthy palette of browns and blues. A red ribbon among equestrians indicates that the horse kicks - it's a warning flag to other riders: proceed around this horse with caution. For Miska, it's another assertion of our human desire to gain command over nature. And rather than presenting us with a full-on bucking American mustang, she focuses keenly on the detail of the ribbon braided into the tail, controlling our ability to see the whole picture and thus anticipate potential danger or attack.

Edwards uses materials to create symbolic stand-ins for public feeling. Using bleach and dye, she alters store-bought, nylon U.S. flags, deconstructs and assembles them anew. Edwards allows her process to be guided by an improvisatory and intuitive sense of color - violets, indigos, and ochres come together and agitate our familiarity with the seemingly sacred red, white and blue. Engaged in this practice since 2009, Edwards makes each flag in response to what she describes as a low hum within the political moment or culture. A particular event or season might compel her to tear through the flag's center or push her palette into a deeper range of blues. These points of intervention create multiple ambivalences. Sewing the stripes into new yet uniform combines that may sag, drape, or hang low to the ground, she adjusts the flag's presentation in subtle, embodied shifts informed by Minimalist painting as well as the shifting mood of the moment. Multi-colored stripes and slits bring to mind Frank Stella, Joseph Albers, Lucio Fontana, while her attenuated approach, merging craft and concept, dialogues with Theaster Gates' fire hose works.