[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog is an Artist Spotlight on Tajh Rust and his collection of works, Reflections.
Based in New York, but heavily on rotation in Southern California, Tajh Rust has been selected to several prominent programs and residencies. Rust received his MFA from Yale in 2019, and has an impressive trail of solo exhibitions since: Reflections, Palm Springs Art Museum (2023); Somewhere in Between, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); and Where We Meet, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020).
Reflections, commented on here, exhibited at the Palm Springs Art Museum mid 2023. Borne out of the Outburst Projects following a Palm Springs Art Museum residency, Rust references personal connections across the Black diaspora. Based on people he met and painted from photographs he took. With subjects from Brazil, Senegal, and the USA, near-lifesize portraits with various reflective backgrounds comprise the Reflections exhibition.
Rust’s exhibition Reflections has many of his subjects leaning or near glass and other reflective surfaces (such as water). But Reflections is meant to be a play on the far-gazing introspection shown by the people. Some of the gazes meet the audience’s eye, and you suddenly feel embroiled in the pensive meditation each character is experiencing.
In his largest painting exhibited as part of Reflections at the Plam Springs Art Museum, 2023, From the Dark, You See Everything, 2023 features sub scenes to the larger flooded living room scene. The reflective windows hint both at exposure to the outside world, as well as entrapment. The water flooding the living space underscores the disruption flooding creates as a natural disaster. However, the flood can also be read as metaphorical, a nod to the transatlantic waters that bind all of the Reflections’ subjects’ stories together.
The large format portraiture engages the viewer in nearly direct conversation with the subjects. They feel more like people because they are scaled as such. There’s a technical prowess to the paintings, yet they somehow still feel accessible and homey. Some elements of the paintings were invented, and color palettes were played with to evoke different emotions.
While his paintings are accessible to all who view them, there’s a contemporary depth imbued in each artwork, and no one explains these better than Rust himself.
Find out more about Tajh Rust:
