JAKE LONGSTRETH SOLO BOOTH LA FITNESS ARMORY NYC 2022 9/8/22 - 9/11/22 BOOTH 420 For The Armory Show 2022, Nino Mier Gallery presents LA Fitness, a series of new oil paintings and screenprints by Los Angeles-based artist Jake Longstreth. These landscapes, all in or around Los Angeles, foreground eucalyptus and pine trees with scenes typical to the region. Some locations are more well-known than others — two paintings titled Chavez Ravine show us the farthest reaches of the Dodger Stadium parking lot as glimpsed from Elysian Park. Mount Lee I and Mount Lee II are named for the peak where the famous Hollywood sign sits. In Longstreth’s paintings, the sign is just out of view, obscured by the essentially life-sized pine tree trunks that bisect the works. Fontana represents the exhibition’s titular LA Fitness rooftop replete with air conditioning units, while Redlands depicts the back of a Home Depot, both buildings foregrounded by the arching limbs of eucalyptus trees. It might be tempting to read these paintings as some sort of indictment or commentary. The novelist Carson Mell belies us of this notion, essaying in the gallery’s monograph on Longstreth’s work, published last year: Jake’s paintings aren’t all big box stores either. There are also dry rolling hills studded with sage-colored shrubs, isolated trees, smoggy, occasionally cloudy skies. Often these are painted alongside imposing architecture and lonely parking lots. To me, these function not as a juxtaposition—some kind of nature vs. the built environment narrative—but the opposite. I see the hills accentuating the naturalness of the buildings and asphalt plots. Despite man’s pretensions and adeptness at executing hard angles and straight lines, he remains an animal. As such, his structures belong among beaver dams, beehives, and birds’ nests. All things manifest from the same mortal wellspring, and eventually the hard angles and straight lines of man will transition back into the wavy lines of the hills and trees. A column or two may remain, but a column holding nothing is but a rock. Jake Longstreth Mount Lee II, 2022 Oil on muslin 86 x 121 in (framed) 218.4 x 307.3 cm (framed) (JLO22.043)