Sidecar is pleased to present There is Feeling, a group exhibition featuring work by Sydney Acosta, Adrian Culverson, Catherine Fairbanks, Christopher Paul Jordan, Hea-Mi Kim, Kristy Luck, Roni Shneior, and Tran Truong. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Eve Fowler and Artist Curated Projects (ACP).

The exhibition’s title is lifted from the text of an original artwork created by Fowler which reads: in the evening there is feeling. This signage was installed at the original Night Gallery location in LA’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood, which had gallery hours between 10PM and 2AM from 2010 to 2013. The phrase suggests the diffusion of emotions and sensations between people and twilit landscapes.

Fowler took these lines from Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s 1914 collection of modernist prose poems. Stein used experimental language to present everyday life as unfamiliar and uncanny. In Stein’s original poem, she writes, “In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling,” marking a subtle distinction between meaning and feeling as sources of understanding. The works assembled in the exhibition emphasize the latter: an emotive evening logic or sensibility.

The landscape itself emerges as a distinct character amid the canvases on view. In a painting by Roni Shneior, the figure and landscape blend together with surreal humor. Two vertical slabs—which could be cloud formations, towering buttes, or tall buildings that arise from purple mist—sport sculptural noses that protrude from the canvas. Within a sewn sculptural work by Adrian Culverson, bulbous forms rest atop a square frame warp, distorting a nature scene from a textile pattern. The repeated, graphic image bursts into three-dimensional space.

In Catherine Fairbanks’s paintings, barely distinguishable figures recline against the horizon. They generate a ghostly landscape and fold into its topography. This composition obscures distance and scale, defamiliarizing the divide between the body and the natural world. Kristy Luck and Hea-Mi Kim further this degree of abstraction, painting landscapes from overlapping, biomorphic shapes and layers of color and shadow. 

Sydney Acosta and Tran Truong, on the other hand, include symbols of the urban streetscape. Cars, traffic lights, and window frames appear throughout their paintings, which remain resolutely subjective and idiosyncratic. In Christopher Paul Jordan’s work, domestic scenes and familial figures that evoke decades-old photo albums are inverted, collaged, and remixed on un-stretched screen and mesh materials. In keeping with the spirit of Stein’s original text, these paintings convey the surprises that can emerge from close observation of one’s mundane surroundings. Such moments of recognition or disassociation give texture to daily life.

“In feeling there is recognition,” Stein writes in Tender Buttons. The works throughout the exhibition elicit this intuitive identification instead of asking for analytical interpretation or offering one clear, apprehended meaning. They provide a frisson of unexpected intimacy, like a stranger passing on the street in the fading evening light.

—Logan Lockner