Phase Gallery is pleased to present Intimate Things, an installation of new works by UC Irvine Alumni: Katherine Aungier, Andy Bennett, Hiroshi Clark, Tarik Garrett, Rahel Levine, Doris Rivera and Gosia Wojas. Balancing in between what is close, personal, private, informal, unspoken and dear is where we find ourselves most intimate. Intimate Things is a gentle meditation on those unfolding moments and the objects that fill their void. This show brings together work which contemplates the everyday with its ascending and descending arch of actions, moments which can break us apart and then always gesture us forward.

Katherine Aungier’s compositions often start with found materials, taken for their strange resonance. Multi-layered images open up a space for humor in the artwork as well as sculptural space inside of a flat plane. The painting Gridley’s Flour Sack depicts an empty sack that was repeatedly auctioned in 1864, raising the contemporary equivalent of $4,331,000 which provided aid to wounded American Civil War soldiers.

Andy Bennett’s work explores the blurring of subject and object, human and nonhuman, and living and nonliving. His objects engage with, through forms of commercial technology, speculative animation of inanimate things destined to outlive us. Bennett’s artwork addresses a shared human/non-human desire to persevere, and navigates the strange confrontations which can result from said desires.

Hiroshi Clark presents photographic works of crushed energy drink cans captured against the familiar darkness of rough asphalt meditating on the urban space and the everyday material that double as forces of resistance against the quotidian. Part autobiographical, these quiet and tacit images unpack moments from the past manifesting into the future their worth as precious objects. 

Tarik Garrett's current work centers on the voyage and shipwreck of the frigate Médusé, marooned off the coast of present-day Mauritania on route to take control over the Saint-Louis colony in Senegal. Epoxied clothing sculptures hang in line amplifying the absence of the human body and its productive power transfigured into the commodity form. This work sets out to navigate the tensions between race and class and the contradiction and alignments between a historical event of the 19th century and the events of our present as people from the former colonies now seek refuge in the metropole. 

Rahel Levine's sculptures and text works build intimate architectures out of private and personal narratives that leak through their containment. The objects, constructed out of ephemeral and solid materials such as performance, repurposed plastic shopping bags and augmented windows at once play with, reveal and complicate the interior spaces of our lives, breaking down the supposed meaning of shame, exposure, containment, leakage, private and public.

Doris Rivera uses sculpture and installation inscribed with ambivalence, mutability, and self-reflexivity to rearticulate the encounter with edifices of colonial power and authority. Utilizing an economy of objects that are quasi-religious, hyperbolic, and idiosyncratic, she interrogates issues of envy, surveillance, complicity, and resistance and proposes modes in which western religious dogma and historical narrative can be alienated from the lens of truth and fact. 

Gosia Wojas' ongoing project with artificial intelligence in female sex dolls probes at the entanglement of agency with systems of power in sex and tech industries. Steel and silicone work plays on constructed schemas, modes of replication, simulation, substitution and mimesis to reveal anxieties of the contemporary apparatus where the history of industrialization, notions of a body and dislocated intimacies are compressed into singular objects.

In 2022, Katherine Aungier obtained an MFA from the University of California Irvine, with a focus in Critical Theory and Visual Studies from the School of Humanities. Aungier received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and is its 2022 Traveling Fellowship recipient. She is currently  going between the Uclet islands in Canada and Portland, Oregon. 

Andy Bennett is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Bennett holds an MFA from University of California, Irvine, and holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design. Bennett co-founded the curatorial project Roger’s Office, which operated in Los Angeles from 2017-2019.

Hiroshi Clark is an artist and educator from Los Angeles, California. He holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from Art Center College of Design. He earned an MFA from the University of California Irvine in 2022. 

Tarik Garrett was born 1990, lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Rahel Levine is an artist from Scotland, currently based in Los Angeles, they work across sculpture, text, and image. Levine received a BA in Sculpture from The Glasgow School of Art and an MFA from The University of California, Irvine. They have shown in the USA and Europe with exhibitions at CCA Glasgow, Rond-Point Projects, Marseille, The Royal Standard, Liverpool etc. Levine has been an artist in residence at international institutions such as The Banff Center, Canada, Triangle, France and Home Workspace, Lebanon.

Doris Rivera lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a BFA in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach and an MFA in Art from the University of California, Irvine. 

Gosia Wojas is a Polish artist based in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a BFA in Fine Art from California Institute of the Arts, and an MFA in Art from University of California, Irvine with a Critical Theory emphasis from UCI’s School of Humanities. Between the years of 2011-21 Wojas organized talks, screenings, exhibitions and performances, independently and as The Absent Museum and Projekt Papier, at venues in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Gdańsk.

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