Between 2021 and 2023, Sigfrids ran a gallery in New York as well. She is the second dealer in the city to announce a closure this week, after Simone Subal, who will shutter her 12-year-old Lower East Side gallery this month. News of the closure of Sigfrids’s gallery and her hiring by Canada was first reported by Annie Armstrong in Artnet News’s “Wet Paint” column.

First opened in 2013 in Los Angeles, Tif Sigfrids showed artists such as Thomas Dozol, Mimi Lauter, and Becky Kolsrud. The gallery relocated to Athens, Georgia, in 2018. The gallery’s last show, a group exhibition called “Bedroom Furniture,” closed in May.

“I’ve been doing this thing by myself for 11 years now, and while some people would love to have all that autonomy, I miss being part of a bigger world, or something that feels bigger than myself,” she told Artnet.

Although artists that Sigfrids has shown will be integrated into Canada’s programming, her roster will not be entirely ported over to that gallery.

Canada’s stable includes Katherine Bradford, Katherine Bernhardt, Matt Connors, Samara Golden, Joan Snyder, and Rachel Eulena Williams. In 2018, the gallery relocated from the Lower East Side to Tribeca, which has become one of the central gallery districts in New York.

Standing in front of the head-size holes carved down the length of Clearing (all works 2014) allowed the viewer to catch sight of the two-toned, purple cylinders of Barbell, Short (LW)—which, at exactly 5 feet 4 inches, is the height of the artist—and the red and green Barbell, Tall beside it. The vertically oriented void at the center of the pink and blue Long Stretch begged for an arm to reach through and try to graze the green column with carved, bright white lines, titled Hedges, which appeared to be just beyond. From the other side of Long Stretch, its fissure perfectly framed Lit, a white totem with recessed rings in lucent yellow that resembled a sort of modernist torch.

These types of sculptural interstices and chromatic brushes established the sense of a network, like the shared root systems of redwood trees in a forest—of things growing in relation to one another. The poetic ambiguity of the show’s title returned for interpretation: who, exactly, were the “people” in nature here, the viewers or the sculptures? But perhaps such differentiation was beside the point in a body of work where the idea of a figure (if not the literal representation of one) is embedded in every form. Williamson chose to work in the round; she carved gaps for arms and holes for heads; she even made one to her own height.

Having worked in a variety of mediums, including drawing, video, text and painting, Williamson seemed in this show to explore the idea of tipping the meaning of an object without ever pushing it all the way in any direction.

Through careful intervention, she undermined the solidity of the columns, while leaving their basic structures intact. She insinuated figures through an associative frame of reference. As a totem, each piece—sturdy, vital, immaculately sanded—stood with its own integrity and also stood in for something more.

When visitors enter the inaugural show at Tif Sigfrids’s new Hollywood gallery, they might wonder where the art is. The independent-curator-turned-dealer will be seated at a desk in the middle of the empty space for “Portraits: An Exhibition Inside Tif Sigfrids’ Ear” (Oct. 12-Nov. 9). Those brave enough to peer into Sigfrids’ head will find six tiny oil paintings by L.A.-based artist Joe Sola, hung exactly as promised.

Those familiar with Sola’s work have come to expect this sort of antic, out-of-left-field approach. One video, Saint Henry Composition (2001), features a high-school football team repeatedly tackling the artist. Another video, Studio Visit (2005), features real reactions from curators as Sola jumps out the window of his second-story studio during a meeting. It’s the sort of sacrifice-the-body approach to art-making that Chris Burden took, but with the po-faced, lo-fi irony of a Michael Smith video

“Portraits” is surely a critique of the nature of painting exhibitions, but what is the hypothesis? Maybe that size doesn’t matter when it comes to expressionist portraiture, or that most art is only worth a ball of earwax? Whatever the case, the show’s site-specific nature is both its advantage and its challenge, binding the dealer to the work in a bizarrely intimate manner

Sola spoke to A.i.A. over e-mail this week about what inspired the show and the challenges of installing it.

MAXWELL WILLIAMS This show comes across as both a rare instance of the dealer being physically involved in the work, and a critique of the limitations on the exhibition space, but one that looks inward rather than trying to “break out” of the gallery’s strictures. Why does the dealer’s ear make a good gallery-within-a-gallery?

JOE SOLA Yes, the gallerist is very physically involved in the work, and I like this idea of [it being] inward-looking. It’s as if you have to look into the head (mind) of the gallerist to see/experience the art. I have a video in the upcoming exhibition “Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950” at the Hirshhorn Museum [Oct. 24, 2013-Feb. 9, 2014], which opens during my exhibition in Tif’s ear. She and I will travel to D.C. for the opening, and she will bring the show with her, in her ear.

WILLIAMS You’ve done paintings before, but never a show exclusively of oil paintings. Does this count as a painting show? What are the paintings like?

SOLA Yes, this is a painting show. The paintings are, of course, extremely small, and they are expressive with regards to brush strokes and the blending of paint. The paintings are composed almost completely from the tiny granules of pigment. Different colors have different size granules of pigment, giving each painting its own texture. On the checklist for the exhibition, you can actually see these granules of pigment from the macro-photography I did of the paintings.

WILLIAMS The scale of the works is about as small as it gets before entering painting-on-a-grain-of-rice territory. Was it challenging to paint on such a small scale?

SOLA Yes, the six paintings in the exhibition are all around 4/64 by 5/64 inches, and they were painted using a stereo microscope. I had to build my own brushes that could handle such small amounts of paint; single bristles and hairs were far too large. I ended up using a .12-millimeter acupuncture needle, which is the smallest acupuncture needle available. That needle narrows down to a point that was still too large to paint with so I sanded that tip, under the microscope, to an even narrower point to construct the tool I needed.

WILLIAMS What was Tif’s reaction when you proposed this show? What will the install be like? 

SOLA Tif was very excited about the project. I have known her for many years, and I screened an old British film, The Rebel, at an evening she organized at [legendary Chinatown dive bar] Hop Louie. On another night, we showed the videos I have made over the years with playwright Will Eno. The idea for this show came while she and I were enthusiastically talking about the exhibition of art during the opening reception of the L.A. biennial [“Made in L.A.,” organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART] last summer. Perhaps the idea came as a reaction to the work we were in front of. About the install, you are not alone in your curiosity. Tif has been getting a lot of emails from preparators and friends asking if she needs help with the installâ??some people are willing to work for free.