Five Churches in a Strip Mall on Pasadena Avenue presents ‘Bodybuilding’, an exhibition of drawing and sculpture by Christopher Goodale and Valeria Tizol Vivas. This show examines two disparate artistic propositions that use drawing in the literal and poetic sense to converge upon the human silhouette.
In his works on paper and mylar Christopher Goodale combines imagery from comic book illustrations, vintage pin-up magazines, heraldry, and animation into diagrammatic drawings that teeter between the planned and the automatic. They recall mind maps, blueprints, or the type of anatomical charts one might see while waiting for an appointment at the doctor’s office.
Goodale’s compositions are frequently arranged around the human figure, which becomes a container for other shapes that in turn push against and deform their boundaries. There’s a particularly didactic quality to the palette of his colored-pencil works that’s reminiscent of textbooks. His mylar pieces, on the other hand, feel obsessive, layered, as if the attempt to explain too many things at once resulted in operational overload.
Valeria Tizol Vivas’s ‘Celosía’ (2025) consists of a set of balusters installed along a circular footprint. Each baluster is made up of linked ceramic articulations that trace the contour of the artist’s body. In so many ways, the sculpture asks the viewer to engage: its position in the room and the direction of its opening interfere with normal navigation of the space. A permeable enclosure that surrounds a pocket of affect, it invites the viewer to step in and relate to its shape and materiality with their own body.
Across the room, an organically shaped wooden shelf holds a much smaller sculpture Tizol Vivas made from the (rib-shaped!) offcuts of ‘Celosía’. It’s a tender companion, a body made from another, and part of a series whose spontaneous assembly contrasts with the premeditated construction of the larger work.
Christopher Goodale currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design for his MFA. He is fond of the rocky, windswept beaches of RI where the briny air beats the sand brittle.
Valeria Tizol Vivas is an artist from Bayamón, Puerto Rico who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a B.EnvD from the University of Puerto Rico, and an MFA in Sculpture from UCLA. Tizol Vivas is currently Faculty in the School of Arts at California Institute of the Arts.