The Future Perfect - The Goldwyn House, Los Angeles
‘Inner Space’ - JB Blunk, Isamu Noguchi Alana Burns, Ian Collings, and Minjae Kim
Group exhibition Inner Space anchors The Future Perfect’s Frieze LA-week offerings, with additional programming from artist Tod Lippy, and new installations by Karl Zahn and Chris Wolston.
Coinciding with Frieze LA, The Future Perfect presents their ‘Inner Space’ exhibition, featuring work by pioneering American artist JB Blunk , alongside Isamu Noguchi , whom Blunk cited as a major influence. Placing these legendary artists side by side—along with jewelry by Mexico City-based artist Alana Burns, lighting and furniture from Minjae Kim, and stone sculptures and furniture by Ian Collings—reveals interwoven histories and ecologies marked by the rhythmic interplay of bodies and objects.
The work of JB Blunk serves as the conceptual anchor for Inner Space, which uses the material and practical diversity of Blunks’ oeuvre as a template for versatility and vulnerability. It is an openness that allows the elements in, as represented by the venerated work of Isamu Noguchi, stretching its arms through history to the twenty-first century with works from Alana Burns, Ian Collings, and Minjae Kim. Showcasing the overlap in the historical practices of Blunk and Noguchi as extrapolated through the vibrant practices of three contemporary artists, Inner Space generates the endless unfolding of a unique point in time.
Within this immersive realm, the works on view locate viewers in a mutable arrangement, echoing the dialectical system of objects in which our interior-most language speaks in pulses and breaths. Two rare, wooden thrones by Blunk will be featured alongside his ceramics, works of jewelry, stone and wood sculptures, and paintings. Noguchi contributes an editioned galvanized steel table and set of chairs, symbols of timeless innovation, showcasing the artist's foresight in experimenting with unconventional materials that echo across different eras. Blunk’s thrones and the works by Noguchi are generously loaned from Converso Gallery.
Alana Burns, making her debut with The Future Perfect, has crafted new objects, including jewelry, combs, a knife, and candleholders, made from silver and other materials sourced from the sea. Minjae Kim, a Korean artist working in New York who previously contributed to the recent exhibition 100 Hooks at Blunk Space in Point Reyes, CA, brings a quilted fiberglass chandelier, two fiberglass and steel sconces, a console featuring illuminated rods, and a painter's chair. Kim's works are presented in partnership with Los Angeles art and design gallery Marta. A longtime collaborator of The Future Perfect and also a contributor to 100 Hooks, Ojai, California-based sculptor Ian Collings brings new stone sculptures and furniture in a scale previously undiscovered that explore the movement of time as a metaphysical and transformative process.
Inner Space will remain on view from February 28–May 1, 2024 at the gallery’s Los Angeles home, The Goldwyn House
