Becoming Reyah

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 8 | 2023 |Archival pigment print 28.75 x 36 inches unframed; 30.75 x 37 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5 (4 available)
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 3 | 2023 |Archival pigment print | 28.75 x 36 inches unframed; 30.75 x 37 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3 (2 avaiable)
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 1| 2023 |Archival pigment print | 36 x 24 inches unframed; 37 x 25 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 2| 2023 |Archival pigment print | 36 x 24 inches unframed; 37 x 25 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 7| 2023 |Archival pigment print | 36 x 24 inches unframed; 37 x 25 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 6| 2023 |Archival pigment print | 36 x 24 inches unframed; 37 x 25 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5 (4 available)
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 5| 2023 |Archival pigment print | 36 x 24 inches unframed; 37 x 25 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

REYAH | Becoming Reyah 4| 2023 |Archival pigment print | 36 x 24 inches unframed; 37 x 25 inches framed

36 x 24: Edition of 5 (3 available)
60 x 40 inches: Edition of 3
2 AP’s for each edition

Press Release

 

Reyah: Becoming Reyah

 

 

Exhibition Dates: February 24 – March 30, 2024
Reception: Saturday, February 24th from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

 

MARK YOUR CALENDARS! IN CONVERSATION:

🗓️ Saturday, March 9th, at 1:00 pm: The gallery is honored to host poet and author Phillip B. Williams, who will read selections from his books, as well as interview Reyah, whose introspective self portraits intersect with Williams area of scholarship. 

Phillip B. Williams is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. Williams is currently on tour with his new novel, OURS, published by Penguin/Viking in 2024. 

“In Ours, Phillip B. Williams creates a fictional town with a complicated, magical history that is as thrilling to explore as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The mysteries at the heart of this novel are deeply considered, as is the concept of freedom itself. With a poet’s precision of language and a seasoned storyteller’s attention to character, Williams has written a truly one-of-a-kind epic.” —Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House

__________________________

 

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY was honored to successfully debut a stunning series of archival pigment prints from Reyah, a self-taught artist, at Untitled Art 2023. The gallery now greatly anticipates Reyah’s first one-person exhibition opening Saturday, February 24th–a not to miss event!

Reyah’s body of work in self-portraiture represents a multi-year timeline of building knowledge and experience with their medium-format camera. Their nude self-portraits are classic compositions, until the viewer registers yards of manipulated rope coursing round their body. Dre Hudson is an artist, who gave agency to his nonbinary alter ego Reyah, releasing Hudson from binary gender assumptions in the studio. Reyah composes, costumes, and photographs themself using rope as regal motifs of pageantry. Reframing rope from its legacy of violence and restraint liberates the artist from it’s historical weight. Alone in their studio, Reyah takes agency with all aspects of their process, constructing the rope costumes, lighting their body, and finally exposing the shot. Reyah advances a seductive coming of age story, Becoming Reyah.

 

 

Artist Page

James Gobel: The Charles Laughton Papers

James Gobel | CL & JG | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 72 x 60 inches

James Gobel | CL & JG | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 72 x 60 inches

James Gobel | Anonymous Limerick | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 64 x 52 inches

James Gobel | Anonymous Limerick | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 64 x 52 inches

James Gobel | Beyond the Wall | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 108 x 180 inches

James Gobel | Beyond the Wall | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 108 x 180 inches

James Gobel | Christmas, Fourth of July, Lincoln, Easter, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 48 x 38 inches

James Gobel | Christmas, Fourth of July, Lincoln, Easter, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 48 x 38 inches

James Gobel | Window Old Vic | 2019 | hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on felt | 72 x 48 inches

Press Release

 

James Gobel:

The Charles Laughton Papers

 

Exhibition Dates: February 24 – March 30, 2024
Reception: Saturday, February 24th from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

🗓️ Saturday, March 16th, at 1:00 pm: The gallery welcomes William Moreno, who will interview James Gobel about the extensive research and preparation that comprise The Charles Laughton Papers.

William Moreno is the former museum director of  The Mexican Museum, San Francisco and founding director of the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, Claremont, as well as a founding board member of LACE. He is a contributor to Artillery Magazine, as well as other publications and is the principle of William Moreno Contemporary, a consulting firm to museums and arts organizations.

 

JAMES GOBEL | Beyond the Wall (detail) | Hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on canvas | 108 x 180 inches; 274cm x 457cm

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present The Charles Laughton Papers by Bay Area artist James Gobel.

The Charles Laughton Papers were extensively researched and meticulously composed, an exquisite and important body of work in the oeuvre of James Gobel. The series debuted in 2020 in San Francisco; however, due to the onset of the pandemic, the exhibition received little visibility. When I recently visited Gobel’s studio, I caught glimpse of a plastic-covered painting, one of several comprising The Charles Laughton Papers. I seized at the moment; not only was I a Gobel fan, I was a huge Charles Laughton fan. I suggested we unwrap the paintings and present the series in Los Angeles, where many Laughton films were produced at Hollywood studios, including 20th Century Fox, RKO Films, and elsewhere.

James Gobel’s works are made with hand-cut felt, embroidery thread and paint. Resembling tapestries, the mosaic of both wool and acrylic felt, meticulously positioned, have depicted Gobel’s figurative and abstract compositions for over 20 years. The method of construction is a creation of Gobel’s own invention. The subject matter over the course of his career has steadfastly centered around the queer male body. Gobel selects from the margins of the LGBT community, choosing the pudgy individual or the lumberjack to be his sitter, redirecting the viewers attention to the communities less typified figures, allowing them access and inclusion to the cannon of representational painting. In his most recent series, “The Charles Laughton Papers”, Gobel has created a series of felt paintings inspired by the life and notoriety of 20c British-born actor Charles Laughton. This project has lead Gobel to research his archive of papers in the UCLA Special Collection, interview his biographer, and in 2018 a pilgrimage to the actor’s birth site, the Old Vic Hotel, in Scarborough, England. This series also reveals a new level of precision and detail in Gobel’s marquetry, replacing yarn lines with embroidery thread, allowing for tighter and more agile arrangements within the picture plane.

“I have used images of early 20th century film icon Charles Laughton (Scarborough UK, 1899-1962) as inspiration since I began painting. Laughton’s character portrayals are still seen today as some of early films most dramatic and notable performances. Lead roles in films like “​The Private Life of Henry VIII​”, “​Les Miserables​” and “​The Hunchback of Notre Dame​” would also make him memorable for his physical transformations. These characterizations serving for me as a way to see a different gay body, one of considerable physical stature, occupying, in celluloid for the first time, great characters of history, both in imagination and fantasy. A closeted gay man, Laughton would create an entirely hidden identity, little known to the many that surrounded him, including his wife of 33 years, Elsa Lanchester. After his death in 1962, a clearer understanding of his life and work is now better understood. Three biographies are written on his life and work. They reveal an artist of considerable intellectual depth and social complication. He shared his presence with many of the times most forward thinking writers, artists, and filmmakers; Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht and Peter Ustinov among them. In addition to his films and publications that he both produced and was a subject of, I examined and documented his personal archive papers in the UCLA Special Collections. I continued on a pilgrimage visiting his birthplace and childhood home until 19 years of age, The Old Vic Hotel in Scarborough England. I continued by interviewing his biographer, British actor Simon Callow, to complete my research.

“I have chosen not to represent his likeness or directly reference his performances, but rather attempt to create opportunities to collaborate or reveal biographical agencies most meaningful to the actor. It is important to note here that my subject’s seminal biography was titled “​Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor​.” Known for temper tantrums and creative differences with many of his peers, Charles’ story is made of many layers. The collection of paintings that are part of the series exist under the title “​The Charles Laughton Papers​””

– James Gobel

James Gobel, b. 1972, is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the California College of Art, San Francisco. His work was featured in Hammer Projects, a one-person exhibition at UCLA Hammer Museum in 2000; and in 2022/23 the Orange County Museum of Art, (OCMA) California Biennial: Pacific Gold. Gobel’s work was included in the traveling museum exhibition curated by Dave Hickey, titled Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland, Las Vegas Art Museum (2007), Surface Value, DesMoines Art Center (2011), Kemper Museum (2012), Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (2014), Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara; the Museum of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands; the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, and the McNay Museum, San Antonio, Texas. His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Beautiful Decay, as well as numerous catalogs. He received his BFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1996) and his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999)