The family album is traditionally a tightly curated document, a tidy archive of mid-century domestic and social conformity designed to scrub away the rough edges of real life in favor of a unified, bourgeois narrative—sort of like Instagram, but with different priorities. Tolstoy famously observed that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way—a sentiment Ayin Es upends by suggesting that the true anomaly lies in the fiction of that performative “happiness” itself. In “Relative Strangers,” Es executes a raucous, painterly intervention into their own family’s sanitized and sanity-assaulting version of the past. She eschews nostalgia in favor of epigenetic timeline-cleansing psychological repair. Based on an archive of a time in the artist’s life—the events and many people associated with which they would prefer to forget, except like all of us, can’t—the works operate on two planes at once. In the studio, it’s a literal and fairly straightforward process of remediating toxic memories with the tools of an art practice. On another level, it’s pure spiritual alchemy.

        By deploying an expressive, urgent brushwork that physically destabilizes the flatness of the photographic source material, Es collapses time-stepping directly into the frame of childhood estrangement as their actualized, present-day self. In works like Tourists and Shabbos Dinner Abandon, domestic scenes are both enlivened and unpacked with gentle mockery and other visual renovations. The paintings initiate a striking extra-chronological reclamation where the vulnerable past is actively shielded by the sovereign present. In single-character portrait interventions like Judgy, Es takes the time to get a bit more vengeful with their interventions. Across the whole exhibition, Es utilizes the tertiary 1960s and 1970s spectrum of avocado greens, harvest golds, revved-up reds, that inexplicable brown, and random wild oranges, infusing these fraught scenarios with a playful sense of both cathartic expressivity and radical acceptance. It’s the “what would you say to your younger self?” question, answered in the most extraordinary, empathetic, unencumbered way.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. Formerly the L.A. Weekly arts editor, she is a contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, WhiteHot, and other culture publications nationally.