Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased to present Hoofprint, a group show of works in painting, photography, sculpture, and film, explores the meaning of presence through its afterimage, the trace. Emerging with the latency of a heavy heel, the pressure of a knee, a smudge, a wrapper, or a rind, traces are among the most unselfconscious and revealing forms of marks. Tied together through the Japanese concept of mono-no-aware—roughly, sensitivity to ephemera—these works, by artists Laura Letinsky, Shanna Waddell, Zach Trow, Theresa Sterner, and J. Makary, share an attunement to what is left behind. 

Letinsky’s iconic images of dining tables, kitchen counters, and emptied-out apartments register evidence of lives lived—meals cooked and eaten, candles lit and extinguished, vows made, homes abandoned. Her photographs, at times celebratory, but more often wistful and elegiac, are composed in ways that suggest uncanny interference. Collaborating sculptors Trow and Sterner likewise take on the ephemerality of cast-offs, like nectarine rinds and shopping bags, giving them a ghostly permanence in their frozen, sculptural forms. Working with traces left by people in public spaces, Trow and Sterner dialogue with the historical work of Isamu Noguchi, artist and designer of civic gardens and plazas, and elevate the inconsequential and the overlooked with a patient and attentive formalism. 

Drawing on Southern California beach culture, painter Waddell uses the traces of sun-worshipping bodies on towels to leave an enduring, dark record of the obsessions, addictions, and frivolities that play out on the sand. Her works from this series strike at the heart of our ambivalence to nature—our own, and the wild, deep reaches of the Pacific creeping at the shore. In Makary’s film assemblage for this show, the artist shares her discovery of the burned books of Irish author Brian Moore, pages of which were found blowing on the beach in front of his former home after the catastrophic Woolsey Fire in November 2018. Makary will also collaborate with Sterner and Trow to document, on 16mm film, the performative activation of their sculptural piece commissioned for Hoofprint.

A screening of films programmed by J. Makary and Eli Horwatt will take place in conjunction with the exhibition. 

A professor at the University of Chicago since 1994, Laura Letinsky earned her BFA in photography and ceramics from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, where she grew up. In 1991, she received her MFA in photography from Yale University’s School of Art. Recent exhibitions include To Want For Nothing, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, and Document, Chicago; PHotoESPAÑA, Madrid; Neither Natural nor Necessary, Mumbai Photography Festival, Mumbai, India; Producing Subjects, MIT, Cambridge, MA; The Telephone Game, Basel Design; IIl Form and Void Full, the Photographers Gallery, London; and Laura Letinsky: Still Life, Denver Art Museum, CO. Previous shows include the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Casino Luxembourg; and the Renaissance Society, Chicago. Her work is in collections at the Art Institute of Chicago; Hermes Collection, Paris; the Microsoft Art Collection, Seattle, WA; the John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Musée des beaux-arts, Montreal; the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, and she shows with Galerie m Bochum in Bochum, Germany. Her grants and awards include the Canada Council International Residency; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; The Canada Council Project Grants; the Anonymous Was a Woman Award; and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has published eight books of her photography.

With an experimental spirit, educator and painter Shanna Waddell looks to visionaries and aspirational communities as research for her artistic practice. Waddell’s pursuit of beauty and utopic possibilities has resulted in bodies of work that memorialize fallen public figures and religious cults and their leaders, such as Heaven’s Gate, Satan, and superstars Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix. In her current work, Waddell looks to female forms to embody utopic visions of what art making can be within diverse artistic practices. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Galerie La Croix at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, CA; Ms. Barbers, Los Angeles; and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Noted group exhibitions include Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Itd los angeles; and QUEENS LA. Waddell holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. 

Theresa Sterner and Zach Trow are sculptors living in Los Angeles who have been working collaboratively since 2016. Together they have been artists-in-residence at Coast Time, in Lincoln City, Oregon; the Cooper Union in New York; and the Yucca Valley Material Lab. They have given public lectures at the Cooper Union in New York and Central Park Gallery in Los Angeles, and have exhibited at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale, CA; the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles; and the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, CA, a solo show for which they received a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant in 2019. Sterner received a BFA in sculpture and metals/jewelry from the University of Oregon in 2009 and an MFA in sculpture from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery and Present Company, both in New York; the Every Woman Biennial, Other Places Art Fair, GAIT, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Los Angeles; the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia; SOMA in Mexico City; and venues in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Portland, OR. She has had residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI; PLAYA in Summerlake, OR; and the Stripa Historic Iron Ore Mine in Bergslagen, Sweden. Trow earned dual degrees in Japanese and sculpture at the University of Oregon in 2009 and his MFA in Sculpture at Hunter College in 2014. In 2013, he completed a study-abroad program at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Germany, and mounted a two-person exhibition at Greusslich Contemporary. In 2014, Trow was awarded a full scholarship to SOMA Summer Mexico City and exhibited at Bikini Wax during his stay. In 2015, he was awarded the Fountainhead Teaching Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture, and in 2017 he was a fellowship recipient at Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY. His solo exhibitions include Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA, and Doppler Gallery in Portland, OR. He has participated in exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles.

J. Makary’s films have screened at the Athens International Film & Video Festival, the ICA Philadelphia, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Mana Contemporary in Chicago and Jersey City, Satellite Miami, SPACES Cleveland, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, Human Resources LA, and the American Dance Festival, among other places. At the heart of her practice is an approach she calls “feral editing,” a filmmaking style that weaves choreographic impulses into narrative and documentary film practices with a bit of wildness and play. Originally trained as a writer and editor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, she studied fine art at the University of Pennsylvania and earned an MFA in film at Temple University in 2013. Makary was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 2013 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. She has been an artist-in-residence at RAIR Philly, the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA, and the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks. She is an associate editor for feminist film journal Another Gaze and is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles.