Press Release

Mrs. is excited to present resounding, variegated, leaves, an exhibition featuring works by Fabienne Lasserre, Annie Pendergrast and Lily Ramírez. The three artists presented together work along distinct wavelengths, yet come together in a myriad of ways as they embrace the natural phenomena of listening, touching, breathing and looking as it occurs through an exchange between artist and art object. A primordial hum, the aural topography of a cave, a protrusion juts out from the painted surface, an atmospheric aura emanates from a flower. 

The multiple postures of Lassserre’s hanging, standing and leaning ear-like forms project an ongoing moment of repose, surreptitiously confronting the architecture or spectator as they quietly teeter along the tightly wound wire between invitation and revolt. A subtle dissonance pervades from the interaction between the knobby, hand-wrought linen membranes covered in thick paint and the industrial sheen of the vinyl lens at the center of each object. Lasserre’s work rejects neat categorization or classification and rather leans into a multivalent, mutant typology that makes space for an object that can embody painting, sculpture, photography, and performance while not passing easily as any of them. 

Annie Pendergrast’s paintings channel the deep-rooted, unrelenting frequencies of natural organisms thriving in the face of air pollutants, radioactive soil and bioengineering. A palpable heat emanates from the electric hues of flashe, as the paint bubbles up slightly to the surface. Striated bands of color insistently reverberate across each arrangement, buzzing with energy and the possibility for plant systems to reclaim control of the earth through their healing properties and the potential for bioremediation. 

A dense cacophony of accumulated marks maps the terrain of Lily Ramírez’s heavily impastoed paintings—acting simultaneously as a direct trace of the artist’s presence and also an aggregate record of her lived experience and memory. On a cellular level, Ramírez’s gestures evoke chromosomal strands vying to shape the proverbial DNA of each painting; while on a macro level, they convey pathways of movement woven across the artist's native city of Los Angeles or other expansive swaths of land. Overlapping rhythms of saturated color merge and seek equilibrium while contending with the paradoxical confinement of nature persisting within the limited boundaries of rectilinear space—addressing broader notions of inundation and overflow that speak as much to human activity outside the edges of the painting as within.  

To privilege tactility and aurality is to thwart the relentless stream of images flooding visual culture. In this way, the works in this exhibition foreground the primacy of a multisensorial encounter that demands the physical presence of a spectator. While the artworks themselves don’t explicitly make sound or ask to be touched, the artists have imbued their work with a methodology that filters the act of seeing through a form of deep listening and touching, as much as looking, at the natural world.  

-Max Warsh

The exhibition will be on view from July 15 - August 11, 2023.  For available works, press inquiries, and additional information, please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.

Fabienne Lasserre (b. 1975, Ottawa, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and the Maryland Institute College of Art’s current Director of the interdisciplinary M.F.A. in Studio Art, she received her B.F.A from Concordia University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Recent solo projects include With What Eyes, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto and Eye Contact, Turn Gallery, New York, as well as exhibitions at the Hallways Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY and Parisian Laundry, Montréal, Canada. Her upcoming solo exhibition, Listeners, Athenaeum, Athens, GA, will open in 2024 with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Group exhibitions include Essex Flowers, White Columns, The Tang Museum, Ceysson de Bénétière, Palazzo Costa Trettenero, Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Museo de Antioquia, and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among others. She is the recipient of a Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship, a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award, and Project Grants to Visual Arts from the Canada Council for the arts. Her work also appears in public and private collections, including the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Claridge Collection of Canadian Art.

Annie Pendergrast (b. 1989, lives and works in Los Angeles) graduated from Pratt Institute with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in 2012. Her work has been included in a solo exhibition at Shoot The Lobster Gallery, Los Angeles; a two person exhibition at Studio 9D, New York City; as well as group exhibitions at Bozomag, Pasadena; Ingrams, Los Angeles; Bozomag, Marfa; Curve Line Space, Los Angeles; Seasons, Los Angeles; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Big Pictures, Los Angeles; Gensler, Los Angeles; Exhibit A Gallery, Los Angeles; Bombay Beach Biennial, Bombay Beach, California; Collyer's Mansion, Brooklyn; and Repop, Brooklyn, amongst others.

Lily Ramírez (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) received her B.F.A. in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design. Ramírez’s vibrant and playful paintings are inspired by abstractions of the landscapes she has experienced. Recent exhibitions include Furthest Thing, a 2023 solo show at Simchowitz DTLA (Los Angeles, CA), as well as group exhibitions Storage Wars at The Hole (2023, Los Angeles), NEXUS IV: “RAIZ,” at The Brand Library (2022, Los Angeles), SEXY XMAS VI at The Lodge LA (2022, Los Angeles), AQUX at The Mistake Room (2022, Los Angeles), Angelenos at Art Share LA (2021, Los Angeles), Objects of Pleasure at Post Gallery (2018, Los Angeles), Looking Through at Also Gallery (2018, Los Angeles), and Asia/LA at ARA Arts Center (2017, Seoul, Korea).