Month: January 2026

REBECCA CAMPBELL : WOMAN OF THE FLOWERS

LA LOUVER Los Angeles – January 2026 Photos: Matt Emonson

I am a woman, my woman.

I am a girl, my girl. 

I am woman, the woman.

I am girl, the girl.

I know how to work.

My feet work.

My hands know.

I am girl, my girl.

I am woman, my woman.

You made me woman.

You gave me woman.

Woman of the Flowers.

Mother of the Sky.

Woman of the Roses.

Girl of the Roses.

Flowery Woman of the Roses.

Daughter of the Rose in Bloom.

You gave me woman.

You gave me girl.

You took a girl out of me.

You took a woman out of me.

……..

You gave me my spirit.

You gave me my death.

You put my soul inside…

—Loxa Jiménez Lopez 

Loxa Jiménez Lopez is Mayan woman from an untold time. The legend says that Anjel, “daughter of the Lord of the Caves, whispered in her ear and then, in dreams, showed her the Book with all the magic words to be learned.”*** 

I imagined Rebecca the painter was not just giving us portraits of flowers. She adds words for each painting, and titles sound like a ritual she started for herself, about herself: the flowery woman. A face surrounded by Gold Hair, wearing a mask of colors from the flowers hidden in her body, blooming from her hands. 

Pink Punk Rose — A punk rose starting out like a kid starts out, inexperienced. A flower not yet knowing about her destiny, aggressively confused, spreading fullness and tension. The blue tries to contain the edges, before giving up, becoming lines from the sky.

Dahlia Uprising — The dahlia’s flower is a miracle of geometry. Soft with petals, a head full of hair. The artist brings an inconceivable disorder among the petals, a nervous uprising as if flowers were refusing the vase, trying to go away from the corolla, perhaps asking themselves “why” are they here. Why were they cut off.

Pink Heirloom — Who are they their name doesn’t matter. They are valuable forms. Heavy as if full of juices, ripe to death. So is the vase. The last wish of both flowers and vase was picked up by the artist who suspended disbelief: they float in the air.

Nasturtium Crown — They climb, or fall on the ground. Nasturtium hold all their energy in their colors, they do not raise vertical from stem to stern. As a painted crown, they float in the space missing a surface where to pose, and smile. Except the artist gives it to them, filling the wall with a fan of light that pushes the texture of stick strokes away from oneself, and encourages the flowers to be up, for a while, all they can have. 

Blue Hydrangeas — I had them as a child in the back of the house, the shadowy side. Blue and round small umbrellas that stole their color from the sky. In this drawing they look particularly happy, luxuriating in a hat for the lady vase still like a stone, while they play with the light not knowing, maybe, how long. 

Afton’s Abutilons — Red lanterns looking down, imperial, full of themselves as they can be. Although, they might shiver inside, and activate inaudible bells, warning about the yellow danger of the table, an alien flatness they cannot avoid. 

Preppy Poppy — The starch in their look makes them rigid, or slightly perplexed. Red edges around the petals merge pain into their beauty. 

Self Portrait in Green and Red — How vulnerable she makes herself! Yet, to use Eliot’s word “vulnerability was an opening – an ‘entrance.’ Where people were vulnerable was where they had once made room for other people.” Modern people struggled to find a language  to “render what is unacceptable about themselves intelligible.” (Adam Phillips) Rebecca Campbell is an artist,  feelings and desire are her stem. Images are her language. Not everything can be explained, nor understood. That’s why she lets herself unfold, until touching the ground. She apparently accepts her (our) fate: accepting things that cannot be ignored and cannot be understood. But in the end, green is resilience. 

“I am woman, my woman”

REBECCA CAMPBELL

1. Self Portrait with Gold Hair, 2025 oil pastel and UV varnish on paper, Image: 14 x 10 in.

2. Pink Punk Rose, 2025 oil stick on paper Image: 21 x 29 in.

3. Dahlia Uprising, 2025 oil stick on paper Image: 74 x 49 in.

4. Pink Heirloom, 2025 acrylic, oil pastel and UV varnish on paper Image: 19 3/4 x 28 in.

5. Nasturtium Crown, 2025 acrylic, oil pastel and UV varnish on paper Image: 27 1/2 x 19 1/4 in.

6. Blue Hydrangeas for Dot, 2025 oil stick on paper Image: 29 x 21 in.

7. Afton’s Abutilons, 2025 oil stick on paper Image: 21 x 29 in.

8. Preppy Poppy, 2025 oil stick on paper Image: 74 x 49 in.

9. Self Portrait in Green and Red, 2025 oil stick on paper Image: 74 x 49 in.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred, University of California Press, 2017 pp. 369-372. For Loxa Himénez Lopez see Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women, (El Paso, Cincos Puntos press, 2009) a Tzotzil/English version. “The fruit of the work of 150 people across thirty years, these are the first books written, illustrated and put together by Mayan people in nearly a thousand years.”

Adam Phillips, Equals, Basic Books, 2002

rosanna albertini: INSIDE OUT NO CENTER

about Phallus : Fascinum : Fascism 

The Box Gallery, LA   November 2025 – January 2026

There’ll never be a door. You’re inside

and the castle includes the universe

and has neither obverse nor reverse

nor exterior wall nor secret center.

LABERINTO by J.L. Borges

It was probably my fate to be in Phallus : Fascinum : Fascism. As one of the curators and as an artist, a combination I refused for most of my life. One thing at a time was my motto. But a day comes when old habits stop making sense. I thought I had stopped being a scholar, it wasn’t true. Every inch of my long life is here today tickling my fingers, the ones that write. Only three weeks before the opening in Nov. 15, I received the invitation accompanied by a text that forced me to reconnect with a silenced part of myself: years in which I tried to understand what History is or has been told, mostly invented. Years of swimming in waves of books with two amazing tutors providing help and discussions: Arnaldo Momigliano and Emilio Gabba. A storm of nostalgia submerged me while I was reading Robert Zin Stark’s manifesto. I was inside Borges’ castle without surrounding walls nor center, adjusting my sight to a fog hiding or revealing them like cherished illusions. 

This was my state of mind searching for artists to invite. They all appeared in less than a week. They also read the manifesto and followed, as if jumping on a magic carpet. When the whole exhibition was done, filling THE BOX from floor to ceiling with the artworks of 200 artists, the whole gallery became the castle, barely contained by the building. Hard to explain, I felt so good and happy to be in it. I could be nobody. I could not know names and titles of the single pieces, yet it was not hard to enjoy the variety of other reactions to the manifesto, secretly holding everybody together in different ways. The other curators were also a mysterious entity to me.

A photojournalist asked me to point out to him the other curators, so he could take pictures of them. “I don’t know them,” I told him. “But you are a curator,” he replied shouting at me.  “Isn’t it enough?” he threw his arms in the air, exasperated, and finally went away. He wanted a center that didn’t exist, like Los Angeles, like the art scene in the whole world.

“We create and destroy with our words” said a young artist in a different exhibition, Made in LA. Let me skip the name. This is not a review. He is someone thinking about the emotions of a flower, and its language.  I want to look at the art in the show in a similar spirit, thinking without cages. A dead mother covered with fake jewelry, two enormous black vertical penises, oh, the two towers! A purple cloud cut like a stone, the transformation in fake gold of a plant of corn, a naked artist standing in a wooden replica of his carcass lifting little by little a big, heavy piece of wood positioned as a penis; a cactus trying to scare a snake: “NO ME CHINGAS!” A chair becoming an automatic violinist, a concert for metronomes, a magnified page of the LA Times in which the photographs, one after the other, start moving: the flag, the cars, people. Yes, wonderland, but I’m not Alice. There is a rational choice keeping the exhibition together. It’s called equality. As much as words can still be trusted. And its essential companion, the feeling of equality. 

OMG, HOW MUCH I MISS THE FLUXUS AXES, the LIVING THEATER, and BODY ART, the EARLY VIDEO ART and INSTALLATIONS, maybe because they have been the pebbles on the ground guiding me out of from philosophy into contemporary art. The human body was their common catalyst. In our reality so frozen, stiffened in objects supposed to be appealing, with names giving old and new objects a financial validation, this exhibition offers the opposite: a systematic, quiet, elegant proximity of images coming from famous and from completely unknown artists. A large field of drawings, paintings, photos, sculptures asking to be considered for what they are. Known or unnamed blades of grass, an endless variety: a field in the spring before the pesticides. Please forget the rules! Look at them. Be with them. They are alive. So many artist are here that belong to the forest floor of the LA art world. “Inclusion” was not only a word in the manifesto, it’s real.  As it rarely happens, the exhibition displays a convinced, beloved, respected notion of equal presences spreading a refusal of hierarchy, a sense of freedom, of lightness. Nobody prevails. 

Perhaps my sense of elation will have a short life once THE BOX will dismantle the castle, or not. Every time I ‘ve been in unexpected, exciting situations, not always recognized as “art,” my memory never forgot them. They are in my body, and my fingers can write. 

“It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving and destroying.”  Louise Bourgeois