Within Reach
Teresa Ho and Yair Sarmiento
March 23rd - April 14th 2024
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Within Reach, a two person show with Teresa Ho and Yair Sarmiento.
In the 1989 text Le Goût de l’archive, historian Arlette Farge writes, “Archives are neither faithful to reality nor totally representative of it; but they play their part in this reality, offering differences and alternatives to other possible statements.” A dizzying prospect–for every record kept, there are countless more that have been omitted, excised from history, condemned to be inaccessible to us on the other side of the veil. And to add to our sense of mistrust, whatever is retained still fails to capture the enormity of what has past, even if it happened to us.
Within Reach at Monte Vista Projects, the two-person exhibition by Los Angeles-based artists Yair Sarmiento and Teresa Ho, induces viewers to explore the hidden mechanisms of the world through the artists' extensively material-forward approaches.Their parallel bodies of work, comprising paintings, prints, and drawings—demonstrate a commitment to wrestling detail and meaning from oblique surfaces and tools, as well as exploring a fluid, continuously evolving language of disrupted vernaculars ciphers, and other methods of encoded information exchange embedded in quotidian or overlooked materials.
Superficially resembling codices or variants of asemic writing, Sarmiento’s Surfeit is the result of a durational investigation into the expressive potential of everyday materials—permanent marker, pens, and graphite. For the artist, these are associatively inscribed as accessible, pedestrian tools that can be wielded by anyone, in addition to recalling formative memories of mark-making. Innumerable small dots inundate the flat, white plane of the canvas, which acts as an arena activated by the repetition, revealing the gestural act’s sculptural and mutable nature. Tundra, a large drawing composed of similarly abundant, meticulously applied blue ballpoint pen, vacillates between degrees of saturation and phantasmic variances in opacity. Like Surfeit, Tundra is inscribed with a dynamism that possesses no referent other than itself, proposing a universal value that circumscribes the treachery enjoined by lexical particulars.
The paintings by Ho, with their use of image transfers and vestiges of plausibly familiar landscape signifiers, recall a photographic, archivolithic impulsion. While almost anyone can take or source photographs to be harnessed as reference material, their total material transformation in these works evokes the process of ‘redescription’, a paradigm defined by and often associated with the artist Vija Celmins. As Frances Jacobus-Parker writes in Redescribing the Photograph, “In approaching photographs as ready-made templates to meticulously redescribe, Celmins arrived at a methodology that combined abstraction’s attention to the formal properties of a medium with representation’s observation of the world.” Oyster is a painting where the natural world is effectively redescribed–grass, clouds, water, and other geological features are reconstructed spatially, becoming a monument to the transient interval which they were observed, as well as a steady armature for the artist’s layered marks. Spillage, with incongruous dimensions, recalls organic structures from both within and without-in presenting a moment of potentiality, the viewer has the opportunity to observe the mediation present in their own world, as they traverse both personal and global realms.
Through their work and chosen tools, both artists connect us to a previously intangible dimension of the everyday, encouraging a heightened awareness of the intricate workings of our environment, awareness, and perceptual limits. By creating a space to contemplate surface as an archive of highly methodical, spatialized gestures, (which are themselves transmuted associations), Within Reach asks viewers to examine their relationship to memory, the distortion of which is intrinsic to human experience.
- JASMINNE MORATAYA
Teresa Ho (b. 1996, Da Nang, Vietnam) is currently based in Los Angeles. Their practice explores space, time, and memory through subversion of self-constructed painting systems. They received their BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2020 and is currently an MFA student at the University of California, Irvine. Within Reach is their first duo exhibition in Los Angeles.
Yair Sarmiento (b. 1994, Mexico City) is currently based in Los Angeles. His practice explores universal connectivity through an inquiry on materials and inscription as documentation of presence. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2021. Within Reach is his first duo exhibition in Los Angeles.