Zarina Van Ranzow: Let it Bleed and Music for Lovers
- Kristine Schomaker
- May 24
- 4 min read
By Barbara Patterson
Zarina Van Ranzow's debut solo exhibition featuring work from her ongoing series Let it Bleed and Music for Lovers opened on May 8 at STONE/AGE Studios in East Los Angeles. Drawing from archival photographs of the artist's family and portraits of a variety of musicians, the series adapts photographic content into oil and airbrush paintings that pick up where the camera leaves off. Diffusing the harsh, resolute forms that photography's understanding of the subject furnishes, Van Ranzow paints subjects that radiate past the bounds of the photographic form. The works contend with a range of figures and experiences that are personal to the artist, regardless of whether she has encountered them in the flesh. Shifting between the artist's kitchen, her grandparents' wedding decades prior to her birth, and portraits of singers influential to the artist, Van Ranzow publicizes a personal and dynamic archive that articulates a defamiliarized, familial conception of memory. Interrogating how we form our backstories, Let it Bleed and Music for Lovers reconstitute the photographic subject through the artist's perception, revealing how memory functions as a social network rather than an individual, objective archive.
In Let it Bleed, Van Ranzow introduces the viewer to her family's lived experiences as understood through an album of photographs her uncle compiled when creating a family tree. Originally from Sri Lanka, the photographs track her family's journey from their home country to the United Kingdom, and eventually the United States. The endless shifting through photographs and documents that comes with the task of creating a legible genealogy stalls, and the paintings cull a history that precedes the artist yet lives in her presently. The only oil paintings in the exhibition, Shelter and Untitled enunciate in soft, illusive brushstrokes the paradoxical challenge we all face when confronting our lineage: How can we be so knowledgeable yet so ignorant? Faces of family members in the paintings are indistinguishable, as if the same face has repopulated across individuals. Unable to state exactly who some of the subjects are, Van Ranzow reaches an understanding of her lineage that uses both photographs and memories that have circulated through her family as source. Citing memories of her family members' distinctive fashion senses, the vivid colors of subjects' clothing become both a reproduction of the photographic referent and a communal act of remembering.
Music for Lovers commits itself to a similar task by creating a visual history of the artist through recreations of portraits of musicians impactful to her. Airbrushed interpretations of Chaka Khan, Dee Dee Sharp, and Strawberry Switchblade take histories unrelated to the artist and assimilate them into the artist's own biography. Dee Dee draws from the cover of Dee Dee Sharp's album What Color is Love, presenting a version of the singer as idealized as her true-love-seeking lyrics. Matte ink redirects the viewer's eyes to focus on the diffuse texture of the hair and the pensive look in the singer's eyes, inviting a reading that considers the intersection between Van Ranzow's experience and Sharp's artistic force. By becoming the visual biographer of these artists, Van Ranzow creates an artistic experience that folds perceptions of others' experience into her own autobiography, ultimately creating a history that is unafraid to reference others.
To say that Van Ranzow is painting memories or naive interpretations of reality is too simple. Through her newest exhibition, we come to understand that memory's inability to infallibly replicate experience does not speak to our insufficiency to process reality, but to the cumbersome nature of truth itself. The subjects' circulation through lived experience, photograph, memory, and ultimately painting replicates how memory enmeshes itself in various dimensions, taking on new meanings everywhere. Taking the reflections from Van Ranzow's exhibition, we are forced to consider the highly selective processes of archivization, memory, and identity making in the rest of the world. Though Van Ranzow has created an artistic experience that is able to deconstruct dominant forms of memory, when we leave we are left to question the things in our lives that exist in exactly that form.
Let it Bleed and Music for Lovers are on view by appointment until May 29 at STONE/AGE Studios 3400 Folsom St, Los Angeles
Barbara Patterson is a writer and legal professional based in Los Angeles. Originally from the Coachella Valley, she moved to LA to study comparative literature at UCLA and fell in love with the LA visual arts scene. She is interested in how visual art inherently implies community in its meaning-making process and is committed to developing the cultural conversation around art by considering artistic and critical perspectives that have historically been excluded from its ambit.
