INFORMATION

Asher Hartman  Karl Holmqvist  Jasmine Johnson Klein Ken Okiishi  Colin Self  Amalia Ulman

Mariposa and New Theater Hollywood present SELF TAPE FOR SOAP OPERA, an exhibition of eight videos by seven artists who have staged, or will stage, plays at New Theater Hollywood. Each video work takes the form of a remake or re-representation, often as performance documentation, but they plunge deeper: channeling spirits, historical figures, and grief for what is lost in the capture.

The show’s title comes from Klein’s eponymous video, in which she re-enacts all roles in a fifteen-second trailer for the British soap opera EastEnders, submitted as an actual audition tape for an acting school. The self tape is a stand in for a body, a promise of more to come—a ghost ready and willing to be plied with narrative.

Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections is shown as a slideshow in the window of the original Hollywoodland Realty Co., next door to the gallery. Originally a performance made for Instagram in 2014, Ulman created a fictional persona and performed her extreme makeover via the social media platform for five months, accumulating almost 90,000 followers before revealing that it was a fiction.

In the first room of the gallery, works by Ken Okiishi and Jasmine Johnson summon legendary figures who died young. In Okiishi’s video Death and the College Student, the artist delivers an elegy for James Dean and River Phoenix from his college dorm, punctuated by partially-re-enacted scenes from My Own Private Idaho performed wearing a Keanu Reeves mask. Johnson’s EDIE: Experiments in Solitude reimagines Edie Sedgwick, played by Murphy Penn, drifting through different vignettes untethered from chronology, asking, or begging, for a different outcome, something other than wasted youth.

In the kitchen, a video by Colin Self documents Austrian ‘gender illusionist’ Vera de Vienne as she teaches him a Travesti routine during COVID lockdown in 2020, an act of transmission he would later complete by performing it himself in his opera Tip The Ivy (2021).

Three works are projected in the second room. Karl Holmqvist’s L.A. SHADOWPLAY (Meshes of The Mackey Apartments) is a remake of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon – a film preoccupied with the dream-logic of the filmed self – starring Dese Escobar, made while in residency in Los Angeles. Psalm’s Trust Vol. 2, Klein’s highly edited video of the play she made at New Theater Hollywood, follows Blessing, a YouTuber who is also a vampire, whose story recedes as the media in the foreground takes over. Finally, Asher Hartman presents a video of Blessed with Switch, performed by his collaborator Jasmine Orpilla, who is possessed by language, wrestles with it, and releases it in a physical barrage of utterances. The three-channel video, edited by Anna Wittenberg, approximates something like liveness, occasionally with three different versions of Jasmine’s performance playing simultaneously. The performance ends in repetition – “switch, now turn it off” – as if Jasmine herself were a channel, begging someone, somewhere, to change it.

New Theater Hollywood is a theater in Los Angeles founded by artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff in 2024. Operating out of a 49-seat black box on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood’s Theatre Row, New Theater Hollywood commissions, produces, and stages experimental plays by visual artists, theatermakers, musicians, writers, and filmmakers. It follows the original New Theater, a storefront theater run by Henkel and Pitegoff in Berlin a decade earlier.

Mariposa is a gallery committed to presenting artists working across a broad range of practices. Founded in 2023 by Alec Smyth and Noah Ruttenberg as a nomadic project, the gallery now operates permanent spaces in Los Angeles and New York. 

Blessed With Switch was produced with support from Los Angeles Performance Practice's BRIDGE THE GAPS and the city of Santa Monica's Art of Recovery.