La Luz de Jesus Gallery is proud to present
Bodywork
Amanda Banker
Matthew T. Perry
Ruby Roselani Roth
Jesse Zuo
March 1 – March 31, 2024
Reception: Friday, March 1st, 7pm – 11pm
Ruby Roselani Roth
Ruby Roth’s work is defined by the female form. After over a decade of focus on her best-selling children’s books, Roth has explored the deep end of the feminine spectrum and its archetypes. Her personal work often features solitary women navigating inner and outer wildernesses. In vast emptiness, surrounded by hints of nature, or in quiet communion with the moon, her wild women and “girl gods” find their way through physical and spiritual dimensions of darkness and light, bondage and freedom, apocalypse and utopia, life and death—transmuting either nourishing or toxic forces into usable means. Roth’s signature style of distortion combines both sharp edges and soft voluminous shapes, reflecting the dualities that both she and her subjects embody. Her new book, Boss Inside: A Reclamation of the Feminine is an illustrated memoir available now. Roth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Matthew T. Perry
Destruction is a key part of Matthew Perry’s practice as both a narrative tool and freeing personal mechanism. To him, it keeps the paint alive, moving and never too precious. The paint is built up into an image, disintegrating into its base elements, molecules intermingling again, creating a new abstract form.
Using an amalgam of oil painting techniques, Perry creates mysteries through a distorted lens of mid-century America. A collision of nostalgic past and theoretical future, creating artifacts and snapshots of a hypothetical apocalypse.
“Things fall apart. At any moment we could fade away and disappear; strike a pose and look cool at the brink of ruin. That apocalypse which we are always at the brink of; that never comes? The end is nigh.”
Matthew T. Perry
Jesse Zuo
Embracing an attractive, yet raw side of femininity, Jesse Zuo exhibits women experiencing fluctuating states of body image and loneliness. Zuo utilizes sensual and archetypal high-chromatic color palettes that allows us to understand these experiences as if we are reading her own journal entries.
Amanda Banker
Amanda Banker paints scenes of feminist narratives using satire, sexuality and visual polarities. As a self-taught artist, Banker looks to “re-animate” characters directed at feminist concepts.
These nudes explore brazen female sexuality, and the limitations western culture places on it. These characters are nestled among realistic surroundings reminiscent of Dutch still life paintings, resulting in a stark dichotomy between nude and environment.
Within this dichotomy, she includes sketchy animated characters. These imps embody chaos, vice and inherent hedonism, which are akin to various aspects of the human psyche. They exert an
implicit force on the main character and, in a sense, liberate them from sexual taboos.