Love’s Remedies’ micro-residency with artists Carolina Hicks and Hanieh Khatibi suddenly pivoted upon the onset of COVID-19. In March, amidst shifting policies and governmental orders, the offering of studio and communal space accordingly transfigured: intentional and ongoing conversations about daily conditions, temporality, labor and everyday minutiae carved a space of intimacy, dependency, and rambling activation. We learned to find the monumental in the small: what happens if we consider conversation as sculpture? What if soup were a design practice? We wrote a speculative syllabus and gave each other soft assignments. We mailed letters, seeds, and masks to each other. We exchanged food, flowers, books, and rituals at a doorstep.

In May, national grief erupted following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other fatal cases of police brutality, shifting our attention and interactions once more. These senseless and unjust deaths, compounded by the pressures and equalities exposed by the pandemic, the subsequent activation of the public’s agency, and the continued mobilization toward racial justice compels a specific acknowledgement: as non-Black artists, we are implicated in perpetuating inequity through our structural and personal relations. Our commitment to the ongoing work of cultural change alongside more direct actions takes on renewed import. How do we enact an expansive understanding of redress and counter systemic racism as an ongoing component of our lives and contributions to visual culture? We each have a lifetime of work and unlearning to do. 

We offer the effects of this compounded and communal processing from March–June 2020 in the exhibition The body draws what the mouth cannot say, presented in the windows of ArtCenter DTLA in conjunction with the UP ALL NIGHT series.

At its core, drawing is a form of transmission: from one to another, from internal to external – a bodily manifestation that brings form to Being. This exhibition presents an unresolved site, evidence of increasingly porous boundaries.

Carolina Hicks offers a time-based meditation on the relationship between bodies, somatic gesture, and psychic action. Hanieh Khatibi presents drawing as a praxis, investigating ways of seeing across temporal collapse. Hannah Kim Varamini considers her relation to landscape, identity and virtuality through a series of hand-drawn mountain sites in Korea, apprehended via Google Earth. As a gestural ground and foreground, BRD shares fragmented tracings that propose limited comprehension and the burden of inheritance as spaces of possibility. Hicks additionally presents her precarious sculpture and Khatibi enacts perpetual walking through a performance within ArtCenter DTLA’s closed-down space.

Love’s Remedies focuses on building community through attention as material and supporting non-hierarchical interactions based on the premise of “nesting” into an institution. Through a relational network of artists, Love’s Remedies invites others to create exhibitions, participate in micro-residencies, and present experimental programming.  As part of a year-long residency, they inhabit various sites in the historic Old Bank District building, activating interstitial spaces and bringing attention to diverse rhythms and ways of working artistically. Love’s Remedies is the inaugural artist-in-residence at ArtCenter College of Design’s downtown Los Angeles location.  

The body draws what the mouth cannot say can be visited 24/7 at ArtCenter DTLA.
114 W 4th St, Los Angeles, CA 90013

WORKS LIST

Artist bioS

BRD

BRD is an artist currently based in Los Angeles. Love’s Remedies and other collaborative projects hold her attention alongside a material practice focused on painting, written gesture, and the printed word. Some areas of interest include sense- and value-making systems; instances of irreconcilable difference; the domestic and private sphere; intimate bonds of duty and desire; games and child’s play, among others. She has a dual BA and BS from DePaul University and MFA from CalArts.

http://www.brd-art.com
Instagram: @brd_art

Carolina Hicks 

Carolina Hicks is a second-generation Colombian artist and writer born and raised in Los Angeles. What began as zine-making practice in 2011, spilled into her current nexus of illustration, design, self-publishing, painting, sculpture, video, animation, sound, performance, and engagement. The work is in response to the overwhelming, grief-stricken enmeshment between and amongst the ecological, socio-political, cultural, mental, and identity crises occurring on Earth (from deeply private to planetary in scale).​

Her research background (and divergence from) social anthropology informs the consistent impulse to connect seemingly disparate fibers of Being. A hybrid of ad hoc studio experiments and pedagogical leanings, implementing DIY + punk methodologies, she slips and swims between messy pools of low and high brow, ecology, mental health, critical theory, new media, and visual culture + media studies. She has participated in residencies at Otis College of Art and Design, CalArts, Malmö University, and most recently with the Los Angeles based project Love’s Remedies through ArtCenter DTLA. She holds a BA in Anthropology from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts.

http://www.carolinahicks.com
Instagram: @sbtl_clng

Hanieh Khatibi 

Hanieh Khatibi (b. Tehran, Iran 1985) works across a variety of media including performance installation, video and photography. Her practice explores notions of precariousness and uncertainty in conditional beings or self-made situations. Alongside a concern with the body, she seeks to investigate the ongoing, ever-changing relationship of mankind to that which we call nature. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2019 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Hannah Kim Varamini

Hannah Kim Varamini is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Los Angeles, born in Washington, D.C. to first-generation Korean immigrants. Manifesting primarily in drawings, video, and installations, her work explores the nature of memory, translation, and power between individual and institutional bodies. She spent time in Namibia on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2008, which propelled an ongoing interest in postcolonial discourse. She helped found the initiative Love’s Remedies, which supports collaborative actions between artists, curators, and cultural producers in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, The Box Gallery, Fuller Theological Seminary, Santa Cruz Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the National Art Gallery of Namibia. She received her BFA from Cornell University and MFA from CalArts.

http://www.hannahvaramini.com
Instagram: @hannahvara