by David M. Roth
After decades of dissing the place, I’ve come to love LA for all the reasons I used to hate it. And, so, it seems, has Nellie King Solomon, an SF native who moved there in 2019 for the same reasons many artists do: for greater opportunity, access to film-industry technology, warmer waves on which to surf and, most of all, the ability to revel, as Joan Didion once did, in LA’s perplexing contradictions: its glorification and degradation of nature, its architectural non sequiturs, its uneasy mash-ups of dissimilar cultures, its celluloid fantasies, its clogged freeways and its seemingly nonchalant obliviousness. All of this Solomon acknowledges and embraces — uneasily.
If that stance doesn’t square with your memory of her work, well, that is because we’ve seen too little of it. Her last significant SF solo exhibition, in 2010 at Brian Gross, conjured imaginary geological events made with self-invented tools, which the artist used to drag (or imprint) paint and various “non-art” substances (rust, silicon, soda ash, brass filings) across huge sheets of mylar. The results she described as “toxic color fields, beautiful pictures of terrible things,” comparable in impact to David Maisel’s aerial photos of polluted mining sites.
Her current exhibition, Oblivion Seekers: Scraping Heaven, affords a broader view. Organized by Lorna Meyers, a prominent Bay Area arts patron, it encompasses work made between 1999 and the present. It draws connections between her earliest process experiments and more topical works of recent vintage. It reflects, among many things, her training in architecture (at Cooper Union), dance (she performed with the SF Ballet), auto racing (taught to her by her father), and, most significantly, the influence of her mother, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, 95, the famed creator of “Supergraphics” with whom she showed with last year at Marin MOCA. Several pieces from that exhibition (including drawings for a customized Ford Econoline Van) resurface here, accompanied by older and newer works that depart significantly from the acid-colored, geomorphic “flow” paintings for which the younger Solomon, 52, is best known.
Some of the most engaging work in this exhibition depicts her reactions to her adopted hometown. Art Blitz LA – New Narrative Series (2014), a 7 x 7-foot mural on mylar, reads as a tour through the city’s past; it’s populated by what look to be stencilled images of long-gone theme parks and logos of art galleries – framed at the edges by a collection of artists’ shoes. The only identifiable ones belong to Philip Guston. I suspect their presence is less about footwear than Guston’s decision to leave abstract painting for figurative work, a move that nearly ruined his career. Solomon cites similar pressures, and on that basis, we can read her juxtaposition of Guston’s gutbucket comic sensibility against emblems of LA glitz as a coded protest against the same forces that threatened to derail Guston.
Other responses to LA appear in a suite of brilliantly conceived ink-on-mylar drawings made between 2019 and 2024. One, titled True Religion (2024), shows the nose of an airliner jutting out from a tangle of freeways topped by a ring of orbiting planets. Oblivion Seeker: Escape (2024), shows an airplane pointed skyward in a vertigo-inducing perspective that situates viewers on the fuselage looking down. It depicts the intersection of freeways extruded from the tail of another aircraft exiting the frame, a vehicle Solomon calls an “angel.” Its function, the artist says, is to deliver travelers into simulated realms where natural wilderness is in short supply. First Mountain Lion to Cross Where the 405 Meets the 10 (2019), for example, shows a cluster of freeway arteries pinning the cat’s head to the foreground, a grim reminder of civilization’s encroachments.
The throughline connecting these activities is Solomon’s devotion to the old architectural adage, “truth to materials.” In grad school at CCA during the late 1990s, she began mixing liquids and stamping them onto mylar with custom-made dowels that left finger- and thumbprint-shaped marks on the surface. She later added custom-made glass slabs with knobs attached, enabling her to spread pigment across large expanses. Geyser (1999), a work made with paint-dipped dowels, shows a cascade of dark, evanescent bubble shapes. A companion piece, Rubber Chicken 2 (2000), made using larger dowels, carries imprints that call
to mind pawprints of fleeing animals. More striking still is a group of nine (1 x 3-foot) mylar strips on which Solomon conducted tests, mixing different paint-based compounds and allowing gravity to take hold. In one, she even went so far as to attach plastic google eyes and a rendering of Mickey Mouse. While none of these works were intended to be viewed as stand-alone compositions, the effects, displayed en masse, form a catalog of eye-catching examples of what Peter Frank some years back called “Flow Painting.”
To be accurate, Solomon never fully adhered to that credo. Whatever effects she devised, she refined and formalized to suit her needs. The strongest, purest example, Zipper UUUUU 1-6 (2021), occupies 18 linear feet of wall space with a series of repeating U shapes spread across several pieces of mylar, flecked here and there with shallow build-ups of grey and orange paint. The obvious influence is that of her mother, whose clean, architecturally scaled graphic designs have been ubiquitous since the 1960s. The influence of her father, an architect and race car driver, Solomon illustrates by pretending to wield an imaginary squeegee, an act she compares to piloting a race car through hairpin curves, periodically easing up to allow the tool to “chatter,” forming pale lines like those you’d see if you dragged a squeegee across a
window with too little water. So what at first appears to be a concatenation of graphic motifs turns out to be a record of well-rehearsed body movements. Similar moves, albeit on a vastly smaller scale, form Unraveled Diptych 6 and 7 (2022), where the dominant shapes resemble a meandering river split in two, top-to-bottom, with a crusty surface, like that of an evaporated salt pond.
If these disparate efforts make it difficult to slot Solomon’s output into convenient art-historical categories, that is because her work spans several such categories. It reflects a penchant for building an ever-expanding library of motifs and techniques from which she can borrow to form whatever comes next.
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Nellie King Solomon: “Oblivion Seekers: Scraping Heaven” @ Fourth Wall Gallery through May 25, 2024.
About the author: David M. Roth is the editor, publisher, and founder of Squarecylinder, where, since 2009, he has published over 400 reviews of Bay Area exhibitions. He was previously a contributor to Artweek and Art Ltd. and senior editor for art and culture at the Sacramento News & Review.