The Yearlings by Kira Maria
Installation Views: Kira Maria Shewfelt, The Yearlings, Make Room Los Angeles © Kira Maria Shewfelt Courtesy the artist and Make Room LA
Presented by Make Room, The Yearlings by Kira Maria Shewfelt is a solo exhibition devoted to moments of becoming. The exhibition opened on April 20 and will conclude on May 24, 2024. In each painting, figures of lovers and children, horses and butterflies alike, convene, sharing touch or experience in scenes the artist describes as moments of “high transference and action”— and so, touch is a relational reminder, a promise that we are bound together, interconnected through our relationships, with potential for becoming more.
Installation Views: Kira Maria Shewfelt, The Yearlings, Make Room Los Angeles © Kira Maria Shewfelt Courtesy the artist and Make Room LA
Kira Maria’s paintings dispense with artifice and caring too much about the wrong things. Intimacy is a holding, an embrace, a kiss, a touch, but it is also the incremental appearance and shedding of expectations— there is permission to be observed as we really are and to want for more. Intimacy, care, and affection verge close to the goals of art, a meditation on what intuitively moves us. Intimacy is truthful— it is the personal made sublime, an ode to transformative experiences.
Installation Views: Kira Maria Shewfelt, The Yearlings, Make Room Los Angeles © Kira Maria Shewfelt Courtesy the artist and Make Room LA
Gestures and marks are applied so honestly that parts of paintings are rendered nearly translucent. Thin washes of oil paint dapple across a worked and cared for surface and the effect of accumulated layering creates new spaces of depth and richness. Made bold and tender, swiftly with action as with repose, these canvases carry marks of an extended process, holding intuitive making as dearly as the finish.
The artist’s scenes of nature allude to the efforts of 19th century Romanticism, expanding themes of the individual’s relationship with awe and grandeur to encompass the personal and domestic. Amid paintings of home, portraits of friends and lovers, and natural wonders, we experience splendor through color and gestural impressions. These artworks assign significance to the sensual, affective, and deeply connected, a testament to holding close spectacular moments, wherever we may find them.
Installation Views: Kira Maria Shewfelt, The Yearlings, Make Room Los Angeles © Kira Maria Shewfelt Courtesy the artist and Make Room LA
Drawing imagery from an expansive archive, the artist’s references span cultural figures like the female matador Conchita Cintrón to autobiographical experiences, such as trips to Lake Tota in Colombia and horseback rides in December at the Michoacán butterfly sanctuary in Mexico. Dashes of color layered atop an image of lovers kissing call to mind visible supernovas, which Kira Maria has expressed as fascination with “the idea that stars are born and also die in moments of particulate friction”. For the artist, the personal can be a microcosm for the universal and understanding infinity can be as easy or challenging as knowing ourselves and relating to one another. Each point of contact imagines a shared reality. Romantic hues imbue the natural world with perceptual wonder. The corporeal body is flexible, elastic, strong, and tender. If color, light, the body, and touch are all mutable, so are the edges of the memory, dream, or images depicted. Sometimes in life, the more you wish for something, the more it becomes true, and so, with layered accumulations and veils of romantic color, the artist’s painterly incantations form visual continuities, conjuring the possibility of a synchronized, intimate, and dream-like world. The subconscious, now conscious, is the threshold where our dreams and reality collide and the artist effortlessly lets these boundaries blur. Each image is on the cusp of becoming. I encourage you, the viewer, to look long and longingly at Kira Maria’s paintings, not just at the surface, but at what glows in deep, romantic hues, shining from underneath. -Candice C. Chu Artist, writer, and contributing art editor —
© Kira Maria Shewfelt Courtesy the artist and Make Room LA
About the Artist:
Kira Maria Shewfelt (b. 1990, Los Angeles, CA) received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from New York University, her M.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California, and B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Solo exhibitions include the forthcoming The Yearlings, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA (2024). Group exhibitions include Unseen Orchestra, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Piano, Piano, Et Al Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2023); The Angels, Baik Art Gallery & The Noblesse Collection, Seoul, Korea (2023); Untitled, Make Room Gallery, Art 021, Shanghai, China (2023); Untitled, Make Room Gallery, Art SG, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore (2023); LA Dreams 2: Light Touch, CFHILL, Stockholm, Sweden (2022); Flower Shop, Smoke the Moon, Santa Fe, NM (2022); Telescoping, False Cast Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2022); A Body is a Home, Hyperspace, Culver City, CA (2022); Hot Tropic, La Loma Projects, Eagle Rock, CA (2021); Peripheral Reverie, Penske Projects, Montecito, CA (2020); So Far, La Loma Projects, Eagle Rock, CA (2020); In Excess, Jacob’s West, Spring Break, Art Show, Los Angeles, CA (2020).
Established in 2018, Make Room Los Angeles is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Emilia Yin. The newly relocated 4,500-square-foot gallery is situated in the heart of Hollywood and includes multiple exhibition spaces, an outdoor courtyard, and a garden. The gallery’s dynamic program champions emerging artists, many of them female, with a particular emphasis on artists of the Asian diasporas. In both its physical gallery – which features solo and group exhibitions – and its ambitious off-site projects with international collaborators, Make Room supports its artists’ visionary projects and the development of new bodies of work. Since its opening, Make Room and its programming has been featured extensively in leading arts and news publications, including Artforum, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, the Los Angeles Times, Office Magazine, Ocula Magazine, the Observer, Purple Diary, and the Financial Times, among others. In 2022, Emilia Yin was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30, highlighted as a new force in the contemporary art world.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Make Room Los Angeles website here. The gallery can also be found on Facebook and Instagram.
