SPD
  • SPENCER.PATRICK.DOUGLASS
  • PAINTING
  • VIDEO
  • COLLAGE
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THE SUNDOWNERS - CURATED BY SPENCER DOUGLASS - THE HAPPY LION - LOS ANGELES, CA - NOVEMBER 2007

Sundowners: Nomads. Searchers. Setting up shop. Working the land. Moving on. On the lam. The weathered 
American landscape filters through the windows, its once wild frontier a myth, a relic, an old motel with 
its entrails spilled. Los Angeles. A mythical, mystical illusion unto itself. Its waterways paved in concrete, its 
arid soil choked with mortar. A desert teeming with prim lawns and post-atomic flowerbeds lining endless 
rows of anonymous stucco. A city built upon projection, of limitless futures and invisible pasts, like props in 
an endless cycling of celluloid. Sundowners. A community of people downing the sun, shooting stars out of the sky, 
yet simultaneously basking in their light.

The Happy Lion is pleased to present Sundowners with works by Seann Brackin, Naomi Buckley, Spencer Douglass, 
Arangna Ker, Candace Lin, and Maeghan Reid. Works in painting, drawing, sculpture and animation share an 
interest in terrain — both internal and external, and the vehicles used to navigate it. In reaction to a shared truth 
concerning the fragility and futility of production, these artists obsessively construct works that smile snidely at the 
simple gesture.Naomi Buckley employs an intense layering of materials: thin strips of wood, plastic, wallpaper, 
paint samples, screws, and bolts to create forms that reference vessels for travel. Maeghan Reid's work refers to 
landscape focusing on the oft-neglected peripheral aspects of her surroundings. The telephone wire, the dilapidated 
shingle roof, the warped linoleum, are the embellished areas of the vistas, the focus turned away from the lush 
greenery or the setting sun and set to our urban surroundings. Spencer Douglass uses discarded materials such as
floor paneling, pillowcases, and mirrors as foundations for abstract paintings, translating the language of mass 
production into a personal one. Candice Lin creates fantastical landscapes that depict an idiosyncratic world of cloaked 
figures, horsemen, and heroines in delicately rendered watercolors. Seann Brackin’s cardboard spacecraft is easily 
imagined emerging from the desert running on some hybrid fuel, aiming to make it halfway around the world, or at 
least to the next discernable mountain. Aragna Ker’s skull sculpture, based in part on a ceremonial feast of his native 
Cambodia, seems to embody all aspects of life as the composition shifts from cheek bones to mountains, from trees 
to candles merging both the physical properties of self and landscape.

THE HAPPY LION
963 CHUNG KING ROAD
LOS ANGELES, CA, 90012
P. 001-213-625-1360
F. 001-213-625-1350