MaryAnna Pomonis, Torrance Art Museum as part of 12 Gauge, Rapid Fire Study of Art in Los Angeles, curated by Max Presneil

Maryanna's work immediately presents us with an earnest conflict between linguistics and image. She chooses to use the material object as the location where a personal yet accessible speech is interjected. The work rationale is based in metonymy, and utilizes a rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things spatially contiguous to it. Her work consists of drawings of old letters, receipts and used targets that serve as catalysts for a cathartic experience, with titles such as "Nothing Special Without a Reply" and "Artemis and Acteon". The show is an arrangement of images of images, stories of stories, with many levels of mediation and a somewhat compulsive emphasis on production. There is also an encrypted personal description of the fluctuation between the contempt and jouissance that describes the experience of making art. This is detected in the details of the work, such as a glimpse of Pandora, repetitive words, such as "You are so special" and an obsessive consideration of fonts, text sizes and mark making.

All of this allows for an ordering that is self-aware of ideological superstructures outside of language. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes states that no language can be separated from structures of ideology and power and their associative hegemony. The artist presents the "other" as a westernized form of archaic and primal murder, both of a physical nature and symbolic, seen in imagery of dissolution and the breaking down of language and coherence. Maryanna's methodology is based on the exertion of control and orchestration of these threats as well as an anticipation of new visual-language systems. Her exploration in semiotics is keeping in observance Ferdinand de Saussure's statement that "Speech always implies an established system and an evolution; at every moment it is an existing institution and a product of the past. To distinguish between the system and it's history, between what it is and what it was, seems very simple at first glance; actually the two things are so closely related that we can scarcely keep them apart."

MaryAnna engages in a secret and primal language based in mythology. Pulling from her Greek roots and archetypes, there is a liberation of the anima contained within the object and the elevation of a vocabulary of encrypted signs into a well-crafted mythological foundation that is transcendent of temporal constraints. Her use of the target is based on archaic and active symbolic remnants as well as imagery of trash reminiscent of leftover visions that have collected in the subconscious mind. While the show pulls from seminal art theorists such as Lacan or Baudrillard, it also wields an unexpected level of dissidence, shifting between written and spoken poetry, with a foundation in Dadaism and the automatic writings of Tristan Tzara and Guillaume Apollinaire. This particularly seen in the sculptural objects placed on the floor, titled "Rapid Fire Pistol Targets."

- Maya Lujan