Three short, single-channel videos, the longest just under three minutes in duration, anchor a show of nine large drawings by New York-based artist Chloe Piene at Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects.
The drawings are all rendered in clipped, spindly, agitated lines that loosely describe fragmented, luxuriously reclining female nudes, all shattered in the amorphous space of large sheets of paper. Reminiscent of De Kooning’s choppy, seaside clam-diggers, they’re titled more aggressively -- with variations on the word “Valkyrie.”
Those are the women in Norse mythology who decide which soldiers in a battle will live or die. Piene’s three short videos installed in an adjacent room are clipped from grim, often brutal found-footage shot with body cameras by American soldiers fighting in Iraq.