A competitive Scottish dancer in childhood, LA artist Ashley Macomber installed her show of animal drawings and paintings at Kavi Gupta in imitation of a performance. Facing an entrance framed by black curtains, the creatures in five drawings represent “audience members watching,” she says; the whale even holds spectacles. In the larger room five animal paintings are propped against the wall, “coming into the space, interacting with the viewer”; the effect is menacing, in part because the images can be bloody and mysterious, like the beasts in scary children’s stories. Macomber says she’s influenced in part by the “iconography of the fairy tale”–a deer eating its own heart is meant to be a queen, and a wolf in regal attire holding a bloody sword a king. A painting of three winged wolves represents the Fates.
