The Queens program template involves a larger show accompanied by a modest presentation in a flat file set into a gallery wall. This fall, Jacinto Astiazarán’s Red Saturn, or Images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it, 2019, a two-channel video, holds the main space, cycling through cosmic and cellular imagery, pictures of homegrown tomatoes and emergent life, scenes of the Los Angeles sky fading into flashes of color with a propulsive force. It literally casts its light across the blacked-out space, edging toward the files.

There, each of the five wide and shallow drawers holds a framed work on paper by Veli-Matti Hoikka (all from 2018). Thin layers of aqueous acrylic are organized into complex spatial relations of overlapping colored veils, forming cresting waves and conjuring would-be figures (most surprisingly, an elephant in a gray field of short strokes, and a cluster of bodies slipping in and out of view). The horizontal viewing angle preserves the works’ direction-less appeal and exaggerates the profound ambiguity inherent in the material-cum-images. Hoikka deferred their resolution, and in his absence (he died earlier this year), this contingency remains.

The work in Hoikka’s last drawer features a male torso and the handwritten phrase “Devil take the hindmost,” a critique of the idiom expressing putative disregard for others. Astiazarán and Hoikka both graduated with MFAs from USC in 2015 and, for a time, worked together in a space in West Adams. Hoikka's work was curated by artist Ben Echeverria, a fellow alumnus who founded Reserve Ames (whose burgeoning archive Hoikka managed). So beyond a formal pairing—the violet of Hoikka’s nebular wormhole, for example, matches a mainstay of Astiazarán’s palette—the exhibition is a portrait of friendship.

— Suzanne Hudson