released May 7, 2021

About Worklight:

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Charles Long’s second solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Gallery, and thirteenth with the gallery, on view April 10 through May 28, 2021.  
 
In WORKLIGHT, a title obtained from a scrap of plastic the artist found while crossing an intersection on his daily bike ride to the studio, Charles Long presents a new body of assemblage works playing with the openness of consciousness (light) against the seeming limits of physical material (work). This dichotomy unfolds Long’s relationship with the processes of time, the flow between inner and outer experience, and the building up and breaking down of realities.
 
With production commencing at the start of quarantine, Long’s studio quietude allowed for a detox of mind and an organic accrual of new forms and practices. The path between his home and studio acted as an art supply store of the uncanny, paralleling the dreamlike corridor inwards amid accumulating seclusion. The seventeen sculptures that comprise this year-long investigation reveal individual forms that act as fossils or accretions of lost time. These chimerical bodies move from geological to mechanical, erotic to the mundane, mineral to animal, and architectural to cosmological. Some appear milky and melted, only to burst open with crystalline precision. Others are chaotic and formless, gathering into something insistently specific, only to collapse again into the unnamable, left to be perceived as a fraction of a moment caught between two eternities.
 
WORKLIGHT is laid out in nearly chronological order to its making.  In the front gallery space, a wall-mounted sculpture, The Oracle, 2020, grew out of scavenged, disinterred detritus, commingled with fragments of strange quarantine dreams.  The white, shell-like surface submerges the origins and identities of its parts, as layer upon layer of white plaster fuses with diverse forms into one illusive body, creating a cohesive but coalescent artifact. This initial way of engaging material and time became the method for the works that followed. Like The Oracle, these enigmatic forms each present their riddle, one whose answer lies with the beholder.
 
Hung throughout the space are metaphorical work-lights: mounted beacons, camera-like and observational, created with plaster, dumpster treasure, parts of older sculptures, plant material, and unique pieces of venetian glassware the artist inherited from his grandmother. Six of these work-lights function as speakers whose vibrations create an ambient pathway through the space.  Long partnered with the studio of experimental trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell to create an aural landscape for the sculptures to inhabit. The 30-minute composition featuring Hassell, Rick Cox and Luke Schwartz embodies Hassell’s “Fourth World'' sound, as both primitive and futurist. Hassell’s work has been influential to Long’s practice since his art school days in Philadelphia.
 
In the main gallery, visitors are met with large installations that transform the space with light, movement, and Long’s own subjective memories. On the back wall, Azazel (after Rogier van der Weyden’s Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John, c. 1460), 2021, references a historical painting that Long would visit recurrently in his formative years exploring the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  New figuration replaces the religious subjects of the diptych with what Long refers to as monads. Monads have been a consistent and important motif in Long’s oeuvre and can be found throughout the exhibition.
 
For the five works employing reflected light, Long combines the optical with the sculptural as fields of mirrored, crystalline growths sprout and redirect light into organized patterns appearing on proximate surfaces. Each of these sculptures has a unique identity, ruptured by chaotic transfiguration. These eruptions appear unsystematic, though they are faithfully precise to their purpose, as they angle their refraction to form cogent glyphs. Crafted by a process of merging the individual letters of a specific word into one symbol, these glyphs of light form what are historically known as sigils, where the maker maintains a state of mind where what would have been wished-for is known to already exist.  In WRKLT: make, 2021, the sigil for the word ‘make’ appears upon the surface of a totem where the myriad light fragments can be seen as either assembling or in the process of disintegrating. Extending into the final, darkened gallery, the sculpture creating the sigil for ‘believe’ can be spun by the viewer so that the sigil disintegrates and scatters throughout the room, becoming stars on the ceiling.  When the five reflective works are imagined all together, they form this sentence: ‘make believe our exile’s chosen,’ an advocation of the imagination as a pathway to find illumination in darkness.
 
Born in 1958 in Long Branch, New Jersey, Long currently lives and works in California. In 1981, he received a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art while also participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program that year, and later earned an MFA from Yale University in New Haven in 1988. He currently teaches as a professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside.
 
Throughout the past two decades, Long’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide, most recently Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in 2018, curated by Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale. His most important solo presentations include CATALIN at The Contemporary Austin in Texas (2014), Fountainhead, a public commission in Dallas, Texas organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center (2013), Pet Sounds at Madison Square Park in New York City (2012), Seeing Green, a solo project in conjunction with All of this and nothing: The 6th Hammer Invitational at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2011), 100 Pounds of Clay at The Orange County Museum of Art in California (2010), and More Like a Dream Than a Scheme at David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Rhode Island, which traveled to SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico (2005).
 
His work was featured twice in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1997, 2008), and has also been included in notable group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SculptureCenter in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall in Sweden, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among other museums.
 
His work is represented in important public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

About Jon Hassell:

COMPOSER/TRUMPETER Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western.

After composition studies and university degrees in the USA, he went to Europe to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Several years later, he returned to New York where his first recordings were made with minimalist masters La Monte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he met the Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath, and embarked on a lifelong quest to transmute his teacher's Kirana vocal mastery into a new trumpet sound and style.

In the last two decades, he has recorded fourteen highly influential, category-defying solo albums which have, over the years, become so widely appropriated that many of their innovations have become woven anonymously into the texture of contemporary music high and low.

While the liner notes for his 1983 record Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism describe a technology-tradition balance resulting in a "'coffee-colored' classical music of the future," it was innovators in the field of pop such as Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel who—after collaborations with Hassell—steered the Fourth World idea into the avant-pop sphere where it has since evolved into myriad forms of "electronica," "new age," and "world music."

Notable concert appearances have included The Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Serious Fun at Lincoln Center, La Foret Museum in Tokyo, the Berlin Jazz Festival, the Paris Biennale, a Japan tour with Farafina, a traditional group of drummers and dancers from Burkina Faso and a spectacular appearance with eight Moroccan tribal groups at Expo 92 in Seville to celebrate Moroccan Independence Day. A European tour in November 1997 included sold-out performances at L'Opera de Nice and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.
Theatrical scores include Sulla Strada, created for the Venice Biennale, and Zangezi, directed by Peter Sellars. He has collaborated on presentations by fashion avant-gardists Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo and for choreographic works by Merce Cunningham and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. The Kronos Quartet commissioned and recorded his "Pano da Costa." In 1996 the Netherlands Dance Theater commissioned Lurch—a major, evening-length piece choreographed by Australian dance maverick Gideon Obarzanek to the music of Hassell, arranged and remixed for performance by two onstage DJs. Jon both appeared in and composed the score to the Wim Wenders film The Million Dollar Hotel, in collaboration with Bono, Daniel Lanois, and Brian Eno.

The current visibility of the "e-jazz" phenomenon ("electronic jazz," integrating collage techniques of hip-hop) has brought renewed appreciation of Hassell's earlier catalog, especially the 1993 recording Dressing for Pleasure. This, along with the release of Fascinoma has inspired a new generation of European trumpet players: Erik Truffaz, Paolo Fresu, and Nils Petter Molvaer, who all acknowledge the depth of his influence on their music. A special tribute concert at the 25th anniversary of the Montreal Jazz Festival in July 2004 featured Hassell in "remix" mode with DJ Stratum, Paolo Fresu, Erik Truffaz and guests Tunisian vocalist Dhafer Youssef and Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset.

In April 2002 Jon Hassell led a group consisting of Senegalese world music superstar Baaba Maal, top DJ/Producer Howie B, and Miles Davis keyboardist John Beasley in a world premiere of new music at London's Barbican Centre. Recent Montreal, Milan and Paris concerts (with special guests Paolo Fresu and Dhafer Youssef) by Hassell's new group become the raw material for magical transformation in his eagerly awaited 2005 release, Maarifa Street/Magic Realism 2—a record which merges the spontaneity of live concerts with the detailing of a studio recording in yet another piece of musical alchemy in the same universe with the first "Magic Realism" record of 1983.

Other Activity includes Jon Hassell's theme for the Emmy Award-winning ABC television drama series The Practice, chosen by TV Guide as one of the fifty greatest themes in television history. Solo appearances on records reveal an amazing range of artists, from the new Buenos Hermanos of Ibrahim Ferrer (Cuban superstar of Buena Vista Social Club) to Ani DiFranco's Revelling, to k.d. lang and Manhattan Transfer, a remix with Björk and producer Guy Sigsworth's new group, Frou Frou. Film scores and performances include The Million Dollar Hotel, Wild Side, Owning Mahowny, Primary Colors, The End of Violence, Angel Eyes, and Love and Death in Long Island.

In the past few years he has been acknowledged as a key influence on a new wave of artists including Oneohtrix Point Never, Huerco S and Visible Cloaks. In 2017 his music was celebrated with a compilation album on Optimo Music, Miracle Steps: Music From The Fourth World 1983-2017. In 2018 he released his first album in 9 years, the widely acclaimed Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One). Earlier this year, his classic debut album, 1977’s Vernal Equinox, was remastered from the original tapes and re-released, with an inner sleeve essay from Brian Eno about the impact the album has had on him, and he released the second album of new material in the pentimento series, Seeing Through Sound.