Mandy Lyn Ford: BAT OUTA HELL
October 8 - 29, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 8, 6-9pm

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Tiger Strikes Asteroid is proud to present BAT OUTA HELL, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Mandy Lyn Ford. Bringing together several pieces made over the past 2 years, this show clearly illustrates Ford’s ongoing exploration of the “thingness” of painting. Her work contributes to our shifting expectations of what a painting is and how it is supposed to exist. Conventional wisdom tells us that every painting is a ‘thing’, but not every ‘thing’ is a painting. Mandy upends this in her work by showing us that every ‘thing’ has some sort of latent potential to be looked at as a painting, regardless of its material or form. This kind of verisimilitude is at the heart of Ford’s work, and coincidentally what makes it so impossible for us to look away. At once contradictory and full of conviction, her work is neither firmly painting or sculpture – it is some hybrid combination of the two. Perhaps it is this in-between-ness that makes these wiggly, bizarre, and amazing objects confound and delight in new ways with each and every viewing.

With BAT OUTA HELL Mandy Lyn Ford has created a body of work that is clearly diaristic and highly idiosyncratic. Many of the pieces in this show invoke a strange kind of pareidolia (often summoning hilarious and incongruent references such as church altarpieces and Batman) while others exist stubbornly as themselves – refusing to point to anything external. Mandy Lyn Ford simultaneously screams and whispers. Her strength lies primarily in her remarkable ability to overlap aggression and vulnerability in her work. BAT OUTA HELL is a set piece demonstration of her uncanny ability to perform this magic over and over again.

Mandy Lyn Ford was born in Rancocas, New Jersey in 1989. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2016 she received a BFA degree from UCLA. Her work has been included in numerous group shows both nationally and internationally – recently; Post-Punk Happening at The Invisible Dog Art Space, An Occasional Dream at Life on Mars Gallery, Private Eyes/Grey Sunsets at Circuit 12 Gallery in Dallas, TX, and Savage Sentimentality at the Wignall Museum in Chaffey, CA. Her work has been written about in several print publications, blogs, and online magazines including Gorky’s Granddaughter, Maake Magazine, and Painter’s Table. Concurrent with this show she will be included in a two-person show at Yours Mine & Ours Gallery in NY.

Press Contact:

Tiger Strikes Asteroid - Los Angeles
440 S Broadway, Los Angeles CA 90013
losangeles@tigerstrikesasteroid.com | 318 550 7772
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