Commonwealth & Council inaugurates its new location with a season of G.L.O.W. exhibitions. This series of artist match-ups pays homage to GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling while expanding on the trademarked acronym with possibilities for other meanings in the midst of our shifting realities and narratives of difference. As a code of conduct, our G.L.O.W. encourages teamwork and positions its participants as co-conspirators rather than adversaries.

Match One teams up Math Bass and Mariah Garnett with an invitation to utilize Commonwealth & Council as a studio space leading up to the exhibition, Grab Lunch or Whatever. This permutation of the acronym resists naming any predetermined structures of gendered or sexualized identities and pays tribute to the constructed personas and choreography of the performers of G.L.O.W. 

Math Bass’ Leaning Against the Wall and Falling On the Floor is a collection of half sculptures and assemblages from an abandoned studio practice. Dormant props and objects from Bass' studio create a disjointed narrative that contemplates the floor space and the leaning against the wall space. Half cruising, half clumsy, some things have been sitting for years. 

Mariah Garnett’s Piderman gives physical shape to an internet meme. In this 10 second looping 16mm strip of film, dancer and choreographer Andrew Wojtal performs a series of moves originally conceived of by a nameless software designer and performed by an animated Spiderman on youtube. The work is a gesture of alchemical projection where a body is gently eased out of the metonymic space of the internet and into our physical world by stages. Underlying this gesture is the fear that our bodies, once transformed into data, can never fully be recovered. Piderman is a pre-emptive experiment in re-appropriating them. 

Math Bass is an Interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in LA. She received her MFA from UCLA and her BA from Hampshire College. Her work has been exhibited at Leo Koening Inc. Projekte (New York, NY), Artist Production Fund (New York, NY), The Fire Place Project (Easthampton, NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center (Copenhagen, Denmark), Art in General (New York, NY), Or Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Parker Jones Gallery (Culver City, CA), 2nd Floor projects (San Francisco, CA), REDCAT Theatre (Los Angeles, CA), Anthology film Archives (New York, NY), Documenta 12 (Kassel, Germany) and Overduin and Kite (Los angeles, CA). 

Mariah Garnett is an experimental filmmaker and artist living and working in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Calarts in Film/Video and BA from Brown University in American Civilization. Her work has been screened internationally: Venice Biennial (Swiss Offsite Pavillion), Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Beiruit), Outfest (Los Angeles), Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis), Mix NYC, Girl Monster (Hamburg), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Acuna Hansen Gallery (Los Angeles), Montehermoso Cultural Center (Vittoria, Spain) and Workspace Gallery (Los Angeles).