Mindy Shapero: Black Dots

Broadway is pleased to announce Black Dots a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Mindy Shapero.

The exhibition takes its title from an early recording by Washington, DC punk royalty Bad Brains and nicely encapsulates that scene’s combination of DIY ethics and a commitment to ecstatic physicality. The make-do presence of spray paint and stencil contrast with transcendent aspiration—a vigorous, cacophonous reaching for something less pedestrian achieved through readily available means.

Her intricately stratified paintings, made from many layers of stenciled, stippled, and sprayed pigments, as well as precious metal leafing, have their own peculiar logic of painterly warp and weft. What is ostensibly obfuscated by each successive engagement with the surface, tends to haunt the composition as texture evoking textile or reptilian skin. The overall effect is a fastidious yet soulful dazzle that mingles the divine and debased—taking us all the way out there while keeping our feet firmly on the ground.

While certainly a vertiginous, geologic accretion of specific studio moves, Shapero’s method also serves to compound and complicate meaning. A thousand gold and silver points of light amass atop humble, spray-silhouetted ghosts of found materials from the artist’s daily life: kids toys, old house keys, studio detritus and cheap sunglasses. These broken, discarded objects represent a historical strata —the sculptural scraps of a personal and cultural anthropology.