Night Gallery is pleased to present Beyond Oy Too Scared to Ha-Ha, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Marisa Takal. This will be her second solo exhibition at Night Gallery.

Takal creates landscapes of places, times, interiors, intestines, disillusions, and emotions. Keys, legends, scales and languages guide us through disquieting planes. Quivering colors carve inconsistent foregrounds and backgrounds. Scenes seen through the eyes, bootlegged in the brain, and then painted and painted and painted with both hands until it’s reached its conclusion. Tikal’s inconsistent hands mix modes of representation as she works against rules of color and design. She endeavors to work as unselfconsciously as possible—impulsively and without inhibitions as a means of finding the picture. The paintings become Rashomon narratives of meals eaten, car trips taken and neuroses entertained.

Relying on vulnerability, as skilled comedians do, Takal reveals a satire that always eventually gives way to sincerity. By experimenting with both prehistoric and modern painting tropes (roughly traced hands, political text), she allows sincerity and satire to oscillate like a joke setup that never quite reaches a punchline. Having commenced work for her inaugural show the same week as the presidential inauguration. Lively Elysian pastorals thus stand in subversive contrast to the frustration, anger, and sadness of the gestures that built them. Beyond Oy Too Scared to Ha-Ha is both a recognition of a world in crisis and a proposal of hopeful defiance.

Marisa Takal (b. Montclair, NJ, 1991) received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. Takal has since shown in numerous solo, duo, and group shows at such venues as: Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles; Alter Space, San Francisco; SADE LA, Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark, New York; and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn. In 2016, she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award and the Stanley Hollander Award. She lives and works in Los Angeles.