Closing on Halloween and with a Zoom-friendly séance, Joy Ray’s Ghost Visions was perhaps the most seasonally accurate hosting of an art exhibition to appear in greater Los Angeles. The always provocative artist hosted a robust opening, a well-attended art talk, and the aforementioned magical séance, but it is Ray’s art itself which haunts with a lushly dark beauty.
From black, dense, and fanciful sculptural work, such as the spooky “Diadem” and “The Futility of Consent,” to lushly textural wall art and mysterious plasma cut shapes on metal, Ray’s work here has an otherworldly quality that is entirely intentional.
Fabric based wall art sometimes feels richly balanced, visceral both in terms of texture and visual layers. Like melted artifacts from a fire in a haunted house, her dimensional sculptures range from a blackened bat mobile with shiny black paint and a seeming growth of sand to a sand obscured blackened kneeling child figure in “Thoughts and Prayers.” These found objects made sculpture are perhaps the most spooky element of the exhibition, witty and dark, both literally and figuratively.
Wall art includes materials with their own “past life,” materials and repurposed garments purchased at thrift stores, specifically the denim material used for jeans. Much of this work has a metallic appearance, alight with a kind of inner, silvery glow, as with the striated “Spirit Duplicator.”
Rusted metal pieces comprise other, smaller sculptures in which the artist has described her process of metal sculptural use as a process in which the conditions she creates in determine the final outcome – a collaboration, if you will, with the spirit world, or at least the environmental one. Standing rectangular works feature kinetic scrawls akin to a signature, wave like and not quite intelligible. These are the works the artist created during a six way stay at the Chicago School of the Arts Institute, using a CMT plasma cutter and a simple string as the basis from which to cut. Each 4 x 11 piece has patterns cut directly into steel, and are reminiscent of a name plate, the kind a ghost or sea nymph would leave on an office desk.
Dark and experimental, Ghost Visions is also experiential – viewers could enjoy a haunted moment or two contemplating each work. The exhibition is also playful, an invitation into another realm. Some of the works are available for viewing through Shockboxx’s Artsy page, at
https://www.artsy.net/show/shockboxx-1-ghost-visions-a-joy-ray-solo-show?sort=partner_show_position. If you missed the show in person, or if you’d simply like to bring a little ghostly glamor into your life, be sure to make a visit
