Sarah Quiñones Wolfson, HYPERALLERGIC, February 17, 2023

LOS ANGELES — The Spring Break Art Show, an offbeat respite from commercial art fairs, is back in Los Angeles for its fourth year with 59 booths represented by curators, galleries, and individual artists. Situated across a single floor in Skylight Studios, a mid-century building in Culver City, are seemingly endless displays of ceramic sculptures, textile tapestries, paintings, and installations with a nod to the Neo-Renaissance theme Naked Lunch. Open to interpretation, each exhibition interior is transformative in narrative and design — some a lucid dreamlike sequence, colorful and bubbly with delight — and others more broody and complex. 

Visiting the second day of the fair this week, I shuffled between a tattoo-parlor-slash-glory-hole by Kevin Hennessey; an ode to Hollywood flair and talent featuring a rare 1930s portrait of screenwriter Fanya Foss by Alice Neel; and Shelley Burgon’s vibey sound chandeliers that elicit hauntingly mesmerizing acoustics propelled by electromagnetic transducers.

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Yard Sale, co-curated by Janet Loren Hill and Jonell Logan, features work by Taylor Lee Nicholson, a multidisciplinary artist who grew up in eastern rural North Carolina. Nicholson presents a fantasy-like recreation of a greenscape — an immersive lawn setting of childlike nostalgia. On a sidewalk covered with chalk scribbles, large-scale paper-mâché and ceramic objects are purposefully placed throughout, such as tabloids jeweled in sequins and beer cans surrounded by cigarette butts. The magazines and their bloated, swollen materiality are charged with a familiar but tenuous symbolism. As a child, Nicholson’s grandmother used newspapers in the basement to reinforce the foundation of the home from flooding. The splashy headlines used to draw attention to generational poverty and the space, pointing to a time right before the demolition of their childhood home.

A standard reference throughout the fair is Édouard Manet’s 1863 provocative painting “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.” For Nicholson, this was a moment in art history where they could deconstruct so-called “high art” and reach for everyday environments.

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