Kayla Ephros

The Fall of Last Year

January 7 - February 4, 2023

CHECKLIST

In Lieu is pleased to announce The Fall of Last Year, a suite of new paintings and drawings by Kayla Ephros and the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. 

2 beginnings for kayla

To Kayla,

It’s the first of December but here two bodies languid, backs supine on damp sheets, languishing under the roofs of Paris, or LA, some humid night in some city, a cat pauses its saunter to dip into a plate of spaghetti, a meatball and a half for two minutes, 44 degrees to nothing, in relation to moon, owning lines to hang clothing from, putting off sun rising, she picks up her skedaddle, i love a good listing (new morning routines), I wash my hair in an anonymous motel sink and think of the knee’s seaweed tattoo, cracking open today, letting it issue afters, sizzling yesterdays. I miss shiny faces on the metro, reading titles while I ward off the brash lurches forward, submitting to the sway. Hit the toothbrush twice against, undoing wet. A thong for a hat. A text that reads like a track. I can’t stop thinking about this collage that dunks. Need to return my Calvins. No more to-do’s!!

luv, P

☆ Dear Kayla, ★

Have you tried the campari and orange juice mixture yet?

I feel as if I should be typing this on marbled paper (following the eddy, riding/writing? the billows).

On my way out of the green hills, I was listening for words we’ve exchanged on edges and exhaustion...how you talk about the edge of painting, the shared edge of the paintbrush, painting edges, the painted edges that hold your paintings, the exhaustiveness of paint and what to paint, the necessary exhaustion, the exhaust smoldering of the formalized thingness and aboutness of it all, the edge and the exhaustion meeting at the point of what I call stuckness, others call impossibility. It becomes a question of what to do with the impossibility, the residue of the exhaust that gunnies. What is it about the edge of paint that must be a container? Where are the edges you asked me the other day. Maybe it is this skirting encounter with the impossible held for you by paint(ing) as this edge. What seems like mediation or negotiation into meaning but, really, is meaning realized itself. The space not-in-between. I let out a sigh as I write this, not as relief nor as lament but a recognition of the exhaustion of the lifting of the skirt and the prancing around from the sheer arduous spirally-inclined movement required of it all—tawny drugstore panties and ass out.

I have this dress made of sheer panels and plaid panels (latter, mostly) throughout, sometimes interlocking, and a sly lopsided lifting of the hem, flirting to the point of baring the bottom of the left buttcheek—you know, like, where the outline of a half moon shows the most. It’s sexy but it’s itchy. Layers of nothing that is all the things worn and worn down all over the tableaux. The undressing of this dress that is its meticulous dressing. Other ways to put this...like framing with time, the edges of your works now as clock hands, deboned, more like the yellow church candles, with structure, yes, but proximity to heat, moth to a flame, transforming its dimensionality, yet still held by makeshift aluminum foil holders. Hand holding clock hands carrying, wearying themselves down to no bone no thing/ re:forms, and then blanched yellows. Still more ways to put this...open doors letting the rain inside to cool down the house, gin pickle star, the owl heard all the way down the street, you know what I mean.

Arrows, steady ears for licking, locks, time I cannot tell, nice accidents, blue roomed bars as maps of the world, flies, cherry notes, the pointed indifferent reach of the foot into the boot,

dreamed of Xes for eyes, more arrows, another reaching for, a trickling down, bowls of maraschino cherries waiting to be filled, spread legs, spread cheeks!, potatoes waiting to be burned, “she’s a poet” declared at the bar, balmy nights, filmed in progressive order fuck the edit, It is these attempts, aptly named final attempts over and over again, that bear witness to the starry eyed. I know I’ve written to you before of Eddie’s star beauty mole. It nestles itself under his eye as she shines on screen, I think of it like how you want to keep it in a moment. It falls under sight but catches up with myself in this way.

The attempt to organize desires by prayer and prayers wrapped around a green string worn around the neck of someone I love. Are they the same thing? I don’t know if I believe that organization is necessary for recognition of desire. In front of me now, I don’t see organization or its contrary, more an unhooking of the green string and the prayers it bears, rolled around the edge of the paper in spiral form, unraveled that continues the vertiginous line quavering unto itself, rescinding, filling, extracting, dribbling, voiding, drawing forths, brimming, vacating. It rolls out heavy canvases. Writing on the wall is inverted: the wall is on the writing, the writing is awol, walls are broken down to re-signify. Its shaped into letters that ensue into these mounds of desire (de-possessive). The piles terrify like long highway rides at night, what drives, the sight of the orange moon, it looks bigger as approaching the edge of this world towards the meet. But it’s also the dancing under clouded ceilings, dangling wind chimes. You went to the cemetery collecting words, scared of what emerges from the dead, yet here you are painting such edges, Kayla, issuing mumbled forevers.

xo P

- Perwana Nazif

Kayla Ephros (b. 1992) is a visual artist and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2017. She has had solo presentations at From The Desk of Lucy Bull (Los Angeles), Et. al (San Francisco), and in lieu (Los Angeles). Ephros is the leader of the September Spring writer’s workshop at Kesey Farm Project (Eugene) and founder of Poetry Club at 2727 California Street (Berkeley). She regularly hosts writing and poetry workshops.