South La Brea Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions, D. Jean Hester’s drawings and installation You Better Watch What You Say, and Micol Hebrons’ two-channel video entitled Pas de Deux.

 In D. Jean Hester’s new drawings and installation You Better Watch What You Say, the artist explores the territory of communication, failure, and crisis - the frailty of language and the repeated efforts to connect despite language's inefficiency and tendency toward miscommunication. Through the use of large-scale drawings, Hester’s work investigates the everyday failures and breathtaking catastrophes of human interaction and experience, the frailty of human connection and the precariousness of language."

Micol Hebron’s poetic meditation on the formality of social dining, Pas de Deux, is a two-channel video installation that explores the ritualized protocol of eating, and the unconscious and complicit gestures of excess and consumption that are prevalent in daily activities of western society. Projected on opposite walls, the diners do not speak or even gesticulate to one another, but instead seem focused on the methodic task of eating as they use a different fork for each bite. The video explores the diners’ simultaneous discomfort and indifference as their body language and demeanor speaks to the perpetual negotiation between private and public selves, between actions that are learned versus those that are innate, and between free will and obligation.