Stealth bombers, wind farms, controlled burns, and cemeteries: These are some things that 83-year-old self-taught artist Jessie Homer French finds beautiful. She said this matter-of-factly before the opening event of her solo exhibition at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, and is surprised to hear that not everyone would describe them that way. “Surely, other people find stealth bombers beautiful, and fire? Fire’s absolutely beautiful.”
Abstraction, for Firelei Báez, is like a map legend, a system designed to help the viewer navigate the worlds she envisions. Her works, heavy with drips, splatters, and lively explosions of color, emerge from what she refers to as “the mirage,” the place where the colonial narratives that tangle fact and fiction begin to unravel.
