Call & Response

Erin Elizabeth Adams

H. Leslie Foster II

September 6 - 22, 2024

Opening Reception: September 7, 2024; 6-9PM

After the shock of trauma, the restoration of health emerges out of an unbalanced and damaged system. Call & Response at LA Artcore considers the impacts of universal events and their influences. Artists H. Leslie Foster II and Erin Elizabeth Adams join forces for the first time and present an exhibition that reviews the cyclical nature of anguish and renewal. Foster and Adams share a connectedness marked by two global pandemics, separated by almost two generations. In their practices, both artists combine interdisciplinary approaches to navigate fragility, ecology, and the beauty of queerness. The scar tissue from which their work emerges notes the desire to savor intimacy and stubborn joy, both gifts harnessed to build new worlds.

In the experimental film diptych, This Haunted Land H. Leslie Foster II plays with time by composing a reactive landscape that lives in the space between call and response. By presenting the films Bitter Crop and Old Magic, New Fury in concert, the artist reflects on generational trauma and the overwhelming feeling of breaking free from subjugation. As devotional sounds of chanting are interwoven with archival audio and diegetic tones, Foster’s ceremonial space amplifies themes of sanctity and otherworldliness. The films projected onto expansive sheets of delicate Sekishu rice paper display a character who contends with the materiality of their surroundings. The use of non-traditional materials in This Haunted Land or in Amniosis, a work that evokes a desire for tenderness, points to queer materialism and the resistance to the tangible impact of authoritativeness in society by valuing vulnerability.

Erin Elizabeth Adams' Back to School III performance filmed during the Coronavirus pandemic at the University of California, Santa Barbara taps into our most primitive instincts around connectedness. Emerging from the corners of our subconscious desire to feel good and safe, those wants were challenged with COVID-19. Adams' ritualistic imagining of finding safety while in chaos, inside a 6 ft. plastic walking bubble publicly addresses the process of isolation. The performance offers an opportunity to ease individual and collective anxieties and agency through action. Similarly, in Anthropocene, Splat, and Thank You the use of salvaged objects reveals a reclamation of materials and the complexities of systems of power. Presented in a Fichtean Curve, the works represent a community of unique individuals who have been suppressed and assimilated, yet the
refusal to homogenize tips the scales, and within that collapse new life emerges.

Throughout the exhibition, Leslie Foster II and Erin Elizabeth Adams' call and response to life-altering events provide a conversation about how to create new ways forward. Foster’s Ghost Breath portrays a figure projected onto frames of fresco and wax singing yet muted, signaling a powerful urge to be heard. In the somewhat self-titled work, ERINELEZABETHADAMS, the sculptures reclamation of a derogatory term for lesbians embedded in the artist’s name creates new semantics and pragmatics challenging how we assign meaning to standardization, power, and evolution. Call & Response is the sound of collaboration exploring trauma, empathy, and queerness while highlighting social inequalities in honor of openness and resilience.

Text by Taylor Bythewood-Porter, curator and writer based in Los Angeles.