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The Valley of the Moon @ Francois Ghebaly

2021

The Valley of the Moon

@ Francois Ghebaly Los Angeles - May 15-June 19, 2021

In the Valley of the Moon the water rolls off the ocean and rushes up the slopes as a dense vapor. It idles in thick white masses at the crest. Looking up at the ridge these clouds feel grown from the earth. Night by night the moon approaches this huddled mist, leaps forward, and finds itself a double in the fog. Duplicated, it hovers and shines there for hours on end.


Rindon Johnson’s The Valley of the Moon, his first solo exhibition with François Ghebaly, arises from this landscape of lunar doubling. Through a wide range of mediums and working styles, the exhibition presents a view into Johnson’s exploration of material history, economies of value, and the porosity of being human.

The exhibition opens with a trio of dyed leather sculptures, part of an ongoing series that uses furniture grade cowhide, a byproduct from industrial beef production. Johnson smeared the skins with polyurethane, indigo, coffee, salt and woodstain, then left them outside under the elements for over a year, where they gathered flows of rust, oak leaves, and the raining ash of a California fire season. These works build on Johnson’s notion of the byproduct as a broader historical and conceptual condition. Whereas furniture leather is a byproduct of industrial animal processing, and Vaseline a byproduct of petroleum refining, Johnson proposes that American Blackness itself is a byproduct of another capitalist megaindustry: the transatlantic slave trade. The series poses a number of questions—what overlapping systems have conspired to allow us to come into being? To come into thinking? How do we reckon with and reconceptualize our place in a broader ecology of exploitations and freedoms?


On another level, Johnson’s handling of cowhides speaks to a recognition of animal agency, questioning the ethics and sustainability of our industrial meat practices. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a virtual reality film picks up on this attunement to animal life. May the moon meet us apart, may the sun meet us together is a virtual reality film rendered in real time. The work is part of the artist’s ongoing Nere Gar series which began with 2019’s Meat Growers: A Love Story, a speculative fiction wherein a new understanding of plant and animal sentience has spread through American society, leading to fraught new debates: to what extent do we take into account the wishes of our food?Among the scientific breakthroughs of this alternate era is a newly engineered species of marine dwelling animals, the Bists, who float peacefully through the water, filtering and feeding on the microplastics that suffuse the planet. May the moon depicts a gathering of these telepathic chimeras. A calm, twinkling soundtrack, composed by Anthony Green and Elizabeth Baker, plays as we consider the convening of these aquatic others, our transhuman evolutionary offspring.

The exhibition also features a number of collaborative works, created in partnership with Los Angeles based artist Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik. The pair cast oak burls—tree growths that indicate physical stress or infection—in bronze and white plaster, further evoking skin in a triangulation between plant tissue, human flesh, and the white gallery walls. A monitor in a gallery hallway beams in an arched sculpture from a thicket of trees in Northern California. Last, hanging over the exhibition is a disc of blown glass and glowing neon, a celestial double for the electrified landscape of Los Angeles, far from the Valley of the Moon.

The wind, birds retreating in a field, they the feathers and then a great thumping or buzzing like someone is calling, mining by sea, by land, like how you can believe you’re a good man when you’re a bad one and that you’re a bad man when you’re a good one. Or like how a stomach can tense in the dark.
The wind, birds retreating in a field, they the feathers and then a great thumping or buzzing like someone is calling, mining by sea, by land, like how you can believe you’re a good man when you’re a bad one and that you’re a bad man when you’re a good one. Or like how a stomach can tense in the dark.
This is the one about how piss can always be cleaned out of carpets.
This is the one about how piss can always be cleaned out of carpets.
The justice of it pleases, mocking the meat you feed on, like if they came, what would you do? Grab a bat, a pitch fork, and hold it and wonder what to do? You are my own and in keeping the monster from my eye there is no composition in the mews.
The justice of it pleases, mocking the meat you feed on, like if they came, what would you do? Grab a bat, a pitch fork, and hold it and wonder what to do? You are my own and in keeping the monster from my eye there is no composition in the mews.
A view of the river, my rock in the glade, Bigger, relatively, and still, until, I pull my lover open like a zipper, I drag a trowel through them, I lick the paint off my own stick, I have a cold back and wet ankles, Later, a slow moon laboring over the hillside. Furniture leather, polyurethane, coconut oil, crayon
A view of the river, my rock in the glade, Bigger, relatively, and still, until, I pull my lover open like a zipper, I drag a trowel through them, I lick the paint off my own stick, I have a cold back and wet ankles, Later, a slow moon laboring over the hillside. Furniture leather, polyurethane, coconut oil, crayon
Later, a slow moon laboring over the hillside, Later, the fog reflects the moon, Later, my blood is sucked and I itch, Will we will we ever find home, the car calls us in the distance, To walk the stairs, to take off my shoes, to stand, Wringing hands, scratching grass blades on toe nails, You are starting to see things we could never see before like, You have been born, Or how I waited a whole year for September, A piece of fruit, A source of fire, An edge, An excuse on a small scrap of paper, The woods in my mouth, It is so hot today like yesterday and the day before. Leather, Crayon
Later, a slow moon laboring over the hillside, Later, the fog reflects the moon, Later, my blood is sucked and I itch, Will we will we ever find home, the car calls us in the distance, To walk the stairs, to take off my shoes, to stand, Wringing hands, scratching grass blades on toe nails, You are starting to see things we could never see before like, You have been born, Or how I waited a whole year for September, A piece of fruit, A source of fire, An edge, An excuse on a small scrap of paper, The woods in my mouth, It is so hot today like yesterday and the day before. Leather, Crayon
Collaboration w/ Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik Yoked, panting, unkempt, and handled! Bronze
Collaboration w/ Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik Yoked, panting, unkempt, and handled! Bronze
Colaboration w/ Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik Distinguishing among them, an aurora; looking at it through binoculars at days end – a different planet. Areola, behind and in front and then behind again, unintelligible to the nearby human. Areola, a hole, a constant. There’s enough information in [the sound] that, in theory, they could tell each other apart. Like the other day, a blue jay flew into my house looking for food... and then forgot how to get out. It caused a terrifying ruckus flapping around and banging its head into the glass, trying to escape. I grabbed a towel, threw it over the bird, then brought it back outside again. Blown glass, neon, steel hardware
Colaboration w/ Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik Distinguishing among them, an aurora; looking at it through binoculars at days end – a different planet. Areola, behind and in front and then behind again, unintelligible to the nearby human. Areola, a hole, a constant. There’s enough information in [the sound] that, in theory, they could tell each other apart. Like the other day, a blue jay flew into my house looking for food... and then forgot how to get out. It caused a terrifying ruckus flapping around and banging its head into the glass, trying to escape. I grabbed a towel, threw it over the bird, then brought it back outside again. Blown glass, neon, steel hardware
Collaboration w/ Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik To be whole is to be part, true voyage is return. (Six May, Twenty Twenty-One, …) 2021 - ongoing. HD single channel video,
Collaboration w/ Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik To be whole is to be part, true voyage is return. (Six May, Twenty Twenty-One, …) 2021 - ongoing. HD single channel video,

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