From Samara Golden’s mirrored installation at Night Gallery to Ulysses Jenkins long-overdue survey at the Hammer, these are must-see shows in LA
Owen Fu
O-Town House
29 January – 26 February
At O-Town House, ask to see the hand-turned wooden bowl, belonging to proprietor Scott Cameron Weaver, which artist Owen Fu improved with a Sharpie while Weaver’s back was turned. Now, the woodgrain is animated with tiny eyes and a mouth smoking a cigarette. In Fu’s show, faces are everywhere, often appearing on otherwise abstract shapes or inanimate found objects. Ordinary Things, the shelved collection of totems that shares its title with the exhibition, is a huddle of faces – mostly worried or glum – drawn or painted onto found ceramics, rocks, a book, and a stress ball, amongst other knick-knacks. It’s in his paintings, however, that Fu is most ambitious. This body of work is more abstract and amorphous than his previous exhibition at O-Town House in 2020 ('Small Talk'), with figures melting into backgrounds or into each other. Suggestions of clumsy erotic interactions are suffused with a chasmic loneliness. In the gallery’s newly expanded next-door space, Fu hangs crepuscular oil paintings against industrial shelving units that reveal the marker-pen drawings – more improvements – on the backs of the canvases.