To enter into an art gallery is to, at least in part, uninstantiate oneself from the structures of the world outside the gallery, to reform oneself within the confines of the artist’s design. In the most ridiculous and poetic sense (and, really, what is the consumption of art if not ridiculous and poetic?), the entrance of any gallery serves as an otherworldly threshold, one which forces the visitor to lose and subsequently relocate themself in the space that the art occupies. At Night Gallery this month, there are multiple thresholds across which one can tumble, dissolve, and reconfigure; from November 11th to December 22nd, the Los Angeles-based gallery will be running two concurrent exhibitions: Julia Haft-Candell’s The Yearning, and Amy Adler’s Audition. 

The boundaries of the universes in the Night Gallery this month are made concrete by the art that populates them: Haft-Candell will exhibit sculptures taken from “The Infinite,” the artist’s conception of a science-fiction-esque parallel universe, the dimensions of which are perennially renovated with every new exhibition, and Adler’s oil paintings in Audition that serve as windows– snapshots, even– of a lively, cinematic, animated world.

The Yearning is Julia Haft-Candell’s second solo presentation with the gallery, following Interlocking in 2020. If there are physical rules that bind “The Infinite” universe, yearning seems to be the gravitational force that pulls the ephemera of symbols (as infinity signs, eyes, chains, and hands– hands reaching, hands holding, hands cupping) together. Celebrating imperfections, foregrounding the importance of the tactile in the realm of the unfamiliar, The Yearning showcases Julia Haft-Candell’s impressive ability to generate visual language, and to use it in intricate, unpredictable ways.

Similarly, Adler’s Audition– her first solo exhibition with Night Gallery– elucidates a vivid, ongoing cinematic universe: since the 1990s, Adler has coaxed a world of narrative oil pastel paintings to the realm of the gallery space, playing with the film world jargon by treating each painting like a cinematic still.  Much of the exhibition toys with the philosophy of character:  Audition extends the world of a previously painted protagonist as she presents herself to an imagined audience and Extras explores the performance of masculinity in American filmmaking. Much of the exhibition toys with the philosophy of character and the considerable force of the voyeur; throughout Audition,  Adler uses photographic techniques to facilitate a specific, unique viewing experience; thus, the audience absorbs the exhibition just outside of the blurry jurisdictions of art and cinema, within the dynamic, fleshy realm fabricated by Adler herself.