Jason Ramos reviews Annelie McKenzie: The Enthusiast at CB 1 Gallery, Los Angeles on view through April 11, 2015.

Ramos writes: "As McKenzie herself puts it, an explanatory metaphor for her paintings is that they are cover songs. The cover song description … offers more conceptual clues and implies the proclivities of the artist herself. Importantly, both cover songs and McKenzie's work are often expressions of sentimentality, or at the very least, employ aesthetics that are associated with ideas of sentimentality. In contemporary art, such expressions sometimes get cast in a dubious light without the contextual presence of intellectual rigor or irony. But genuine sentimentality itself, though spoken around and suppressed, arguably makes up much of painting's conceptual history, casting the past in a particularly wistful and romanticized light from the get-go. McKenzie's use of sentimental and gendered processes focus her art historical references through a satirical lens, revealing content where the personal and the political are one."