The Pit is pleased to announce a solo exhibition honoring the life and work of the late Los Angeles artist Miyoshi Barosh (1959-2019), held in tandem with exhibitions by Night Gallery and Luis de Jesus Gallery. 

The exhibition will run from January 12 to February 22, 2020 with a public reception on Sunday January 12 from 4-7pm.

The exhibition consists of three large-scaled sculptural wall reliefs and a large-scale sculpture in the round, installed in the newly remodeled second gallery.  The mixed media sculptures contain varying elements such as fabric, metal, neon, molded plastic, dye, and paint.  Alongside the sculptural pieces are a series of framed sketches made in preparation of the sculptural works, containing annotations by the artist.  

Over the last fifteen years, Miyoshi Barosh made her work with humor and dystopian irony in a style she called “Conceptual Pop.” With an emphasis on cultural blindness toward death, decay, and the disintegration of both utopian social constructs, and ultimately the individual body itself, Barosh saw her work as “a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity politics through a handmade carnivalesque, a mischievous confrontation." Given her untimely death in 2019, her message is made even more poignant, if not tragic, because she lived it.  

In speaking about her work, Barosh said, “Questions of value including perceived aesthetic value, are part of the narrative. Ideas about originality and authenticity are mocked while pointing to larger cultural failures that have to do with consumption and ecological disaster. I talk about materialism, accepted notions of value, and resulting anxieties through my work—subjects that are relevant to everyone. While socio-economic questions are raised around ideas about women’s labor and value in the use of craftwork, ‘value’ also becomes a projection of ourselves onto things like cute animals on the Internet, mythic American landscapes, and the built environment.”

Text by Carol Ann Klonarides

More information about each exhibition can be found on the galleries’ individual websites.