Installation

It’s easy to get jealous in Los Angeles.  Most everyone came here from somewhere, even if it was here, to try and create art of some sort, to go behind the curtain of media-making in an attempt to toss in a pinch of their own individual ingredients.  The result is an endless stream of Facebook invitations, familiar postcards on coffee shop pin-boards, and a daunting sense that others’ ingredients—some friends, some enemies, some people who just got to town—are taking over the stew.

But if there’s anything I learned in college—a smaller, but similar stew—it’s that the work of my peers, in analysis or collaboration, is often the best teacher out there.  And it’s precisely because you are jealous, because you can view their creative process as a mirror of your own.  You can say, “Huh, this person is no genius, they’re practically an idiot, but they made this choice.  I never thought about doing that.  Maybe I too can make that choice, only better.”  It’s creative capitalism, but the only way it works is when you’re actively supporting one another.

This seems to be motto of the Los Angeles-based art collective, This Is What We Imagine (TIWWI, or Teewee), a group of young video, film, photography, and design makers—many of whom I went to school with—that are exhibiting their latest projects tonight, Saturday night, at the Echo Park Rec Center.  Beginning at 9:00 PM, the program, called “Show and Tell.” boasts the premiere of two recent collaborative efforts: “Weekend of Wonderment 6” and “Remember When.”  If you haven’t heard of the first five installments of the “Weekend of Wonderment” campaign, it’s comprised of about four or five projects, all made within the time-span of two days and with the help of anybody and everybody available.  “Remember When,” also the product of many (as opposed to few), is a new comic web-series about a group of friends who try to recreate the lost memories of their amnesia-begotten buddy.

TIWWI’s “Show and Tell” begins tonight, Saturday, 9:00 PM, at the Echo Park Rec Center, located at 1161 Logan Street in Echo Park. For more information, please visit www.tiwwi.com.

A while ago, we posted an article asking what you, dear readers, thought about the distinction between art and vandalism.  Skating the line, with a very charged political message, is British street artist D*Face who has installed two enormous and menacing Oscar statues atop two iconic LA locations: Runyon Canyon and Mel’s Drive-In in Hollywood.  Both statues have skeleton-like figures with bits of flesh missing from their arms and legs exposing Oscar’s blood and bones.  The one that sat at Runyon had a placard that read “Beauty Is One Snip Away,” while the other at Mel’s Drive-In said “Beauty Is Skin Deep.” They’ve both been removed since they were spotted yesterday morning, but the whole incident begs a whole host of questions, not least of which is: really? Mel’s Drive-In? We get Runyon Canyon, but that’s a strange choice.

More importantly, what do you think of all this? The two most basic sides must be: applause to D*Face for exposing a vanity-obsessed culture at a time when it’s at its most self-congratulatory vs. how petulant of this artist to criticize a sector of popular culture that he need not participate in if he finds it so disheartening.

I recently found myself sitting on a couch in a dark room inside the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC watching a play-test of a brand-new interactive video game.  I use the term ‘interactive,’ because it was less like your typical Nintendo or PlayStation proceeding, and more akin to one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ movies, only digitalized, intricately detailed, and not a little influenced by the likes of Spielberg or Christopher Nolan.  The game takes place in a slightly futuristic society, and at one point, the protagonist, a detective, is sitting in his beat-down, windowless office going over clues, when he puts on a pair of special sunglasses.  These sunglasses allow him, and by proxy, us, the audience, to perceive his spacial environment as a pristine mountain-top, or a Redwood forest.  The effect is novel, and provokes a round of ‘wouldn’t-that-be-cool’ comments from anybody who’s watching, yet it also brings up an interesting, modern phenomenon.  I call it the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome, and it works like this: you’re sitting in a beat-down, windowless office, but…it’s not to you.

Don’t get me wrong, this syndrome is hardly new or original, although it is intensifying in our digital age.  And one person who’s exploring this intensification is artist Jeffrey Wells with his newest exhibit Seeing While Seeing at the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Art.  Wells attempts to recreate the optical illusions of everyday life—the after-image of an exit sign, the undulating intersection of two vertical walls that meet at a right-angle—using video projections.  Thus the viewer is left questioning whether or not an illusion is physical or digital.  Both are percepts, separate from what some would call “objective reality,” but only one is an intentionally manipulated percept.

What Wells—along with the interactive video game, to a certain extent—may be attempting to illustrate is the danger of the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome.  Because how do you really know what is?  Or who’s presenting what to you, for that matter?  And as the line between what is and what is to you gets smaller and smaller, what becomes of you?

Jeffrey Wells’s Seeing While Seeing is on view until April 17th at Project Room 1 in the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Arts.  Bergamont Station is located at 2525 Michigan Ave, Building G-1.  For more information, please call (310) 586-6488, or visit www.smmoa.org.

From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know.  And Los Angeles is no exception.  Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the L.A. River remains hopelessly barren, and provides a better bike path to Long Beach than it does a waterway.  But if you’ve ever actually step foot into that mighty concrete divider of our city, then you’d know it’s every bit as organic and symbolic as any other great river.  Whether it’s the plastic bag trees, the graffiti-worn banks, or the garbage disposal current, one would be hard-pressed to not find the same beauty that Mark Twain once described in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, as “…a wonderful book…which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice.”

On show until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the collective exhibition entitled The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River (UGLAR for short) also uses the metaphor of a book, only this one screams its secrets.  Consisting of a wide range of contemporary, LA-based artists, this unique assortment of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and illustrations all converge like tributaries into one central theme: the Los Angeles River.

One oil painting called “Confluence” by Tyson Dolan portrays the intersection of two concrete canals, meeting and opening into the space of the viewer.  The colors are muted, almost foggy, and with the installed background sounds of dripping water and distant train bells echoing throughout the room, one gets the distinct feeling of being alone and drifting through Dolan’s industrial river-basin.

Another piece, up-and-comer Rob Sato’s “Land Admiral Lefebvre’s Fleet Makes Sail”, takes a more surreal, maximalist route.  This multi-medium, ‘Where’s Waldo’ mash-up depicts an elaborate, farcical, eighteenth-century showdown between the Blue-Coats and the Reds on the battlefield of the Los Angeles River.  There’s of course no water for the huge wooden ships, so the implied Admiral Lefebvre sails upon his own ocean, with hundreds of tiny minions carrying the actual waves themselves.  Not to be ignored in this spectacle are Sato’s frequent dips into brash absurdity: slave-like giants, a monstrous fish-man-beast riding a whale like an Avatar pterodactyl, and if you look hard enough, a modern car wreck upon the bridge over the river.

The biggest work on show, however, is a mural completed by all the contributing artists.  It’s title is “The River Experiment,” and it speaks to the theme of the collection, which is one of evolution, or perhaps more accurately, mutation.  Because The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River – to complete Mark Twain’s quote – “[is] not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River runs until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  For more information, please visit pmcaonline.org, or call (626) 568-3665.

Rachel Whiteread, Study for Village - 1st, 2004

It is fascinating to see a sculptor’s preliminary study of his or her work. Especially if the artwork has been created, it is a glimpse into the ever evolving nature of the creative process.  These type of drawings are like a secondary, kid sister manifestation of the artist’s idea.

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993

Speaking of sculptors, Rachel Whiteread, one of the British Young Artists, is well-known for her encompassing sculptures that depict negative space. For an example, the work House is a concrete cast of a house’s inside.  It is as if someone had poured concrete through the chimney, filled up the interior space of the house, and then cracked the roof and walls away with a huge chisel.  But before the sculpture, there were the drawings.

The Hammer Museum presents the first museum retrospective of Whiteread’s drawings and other preliminary work. And the drawings are coupled with objects that Whiteread found and sought inspiration from for her artistic practice.

This show will make you want to dust of your black book to get drawing again.

Rachel Whiteread Drawings closes April 25th, 2010.  For more information, please click here.

It was only a little earlier today that the Los Angeles City Council voted down the proposition to eliminate the Transient Occupancy Tax (the TOT), the sole source of governmental funding behind of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA).  This action, had it been carried through, would have effectively shut down 18 cultural centers—including the Barnsdall Arts Center in Hollywood and the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, host to the Sony Pictures Media Arts Program for middle school youth—as well as five professional theatre facilities, and an array of classes, programs, and cultural events.

Such a worthwhile institution as the DCA might seem like an easy stronghold in such a creatively centered city as Los Angeles, but it was largely due to incredible advocacy organizations like Arts for LA that the proposition was shot down.  They, along with other activist groups and privately-funded museums such as the Hammer, urged their supporters to write letters to their councilmen, and voice their opinions at the City Council public hearing this Wednesday.  Some handed out stickers with the phrase “Arts Fuel LA,” others toted hand-made signs, and one woman addressed the council in a full-on angel costume.

Lo and behold, these efforts proved successful, and as a website strictly devoted toward promoting the arts, artists, and cultural community of Los Angeles, FineArtsLA would like to sincerely thank both the City Council members, and the hard-working advocacy organizations for their aid and congratulate them on their accomplishment today.

Of course the fight for the arts is never through—the council issue still undecided is whether the current cultural grants will be honored—but in celebration of this week’s victory, may I suggest checking out the DCA-funded Municipal Arts Gallery in the Barnsdall Arts Park.  From January 24th through April 18th, they are hosting an enormous series of participatory exhibitions entitled “Actions, Conversations, and Intersections,” all aimed at enhancing the artistic community of Los Angeles.  In residency this week is Smart Gals Productions, whose patented “Reading Preserve and Speakeasy Collection” features public readings from some of LA’s best authors, including John Albert, Noel Alumit, and Aimee Bender (my personal favorite).

The Smart Gals will toast off their weeklong program on Sunday, February 7th at 2:00pm with the collaborative “Winter Picnic Performance,” a fun mix of music, theatre, fresh bread courtesy of the Bicycle Bread Company, and hot coffee from Cafécito Organico.  So come along, fuel the arts that fuel LA, and if you get the chance, thank somebody.

Curated by Edith Abeyta and Michael Lewis Miller, “Actions, Conversations, and Intersections” runs until April 18th, 2010 at the Los Angeles Municipal Arts Gallery in the Barnsdall Art Park.  For more information, visit www.actionsconversationsintersections.com

Pablo Uribe, Atardecer, 2008 (Dusk) - video still

This year, the Los Angeles Art Show made its home at Los Angeles Convention Center.  This venue change provided more space for gallery booths that ranged from contemporary works such as the Wall Project’s Shepard Fairey and Thierry Noir painted walls to landscapes galore — and even more space for project-based installations. The Vox Humana on-site art performance presented street artists Mear One, Kofie, Retna, and El Mac who showed off their talents over the length of the fair on large-scale canvases.  And speaking of more room, I wondered how Sidestreet Projects got one of their woodworking workshop buses into the fair.  These school buses are outfitted with project stations for elementary school children so they can make a nuts and bolts washer sandwich and one FUNdred dollar bills, which I am sure we all could use more of these days.

One of my favorite pieces of the art fair was Pablo Uribe’s video, Atardecer (2008), which screened in a makeshift dark room in the Guest Country program booth’s rear.  While looking at the other works from the 34° 53’ 0” S – 56° 10’ 0” W show, I heard animals sounds curiously mix with the ambient art fair noise.  Upon stepping into the screening area, there was a video of an older man standing before a black background looking as if he were about to perform a gorgeous aria.  Instead of sweet notes pouring out of his mouth, the sound of a dog’s bark came out.  And then the cooing of a bird!  The actor was imitating the sounds of native rain forest animals.

Willy Rojas, Egg

Willy Rojas’ photographs at Barcelona’s Villa del Arte booth depicted miniature figurines interacting with their food-based environment.  Tiny people ski down slopes of salt or a wedge of hard cheese.  A man broke the shell of an egg with his sledgehammer while a couple ice skates on an orange hued soup.

Speaking of food, the Timothy Yarger Gallery presented Jean Wells’ The Giant Kiss quite literally.  The huge chocolate-scented foil wrapped sculpture demanded a tongue-in-cheek presence while paying homage to Claes Oldenburg’s shop.

The Rebecca Hossack Gallery held quite a few treats, including a gorgeous papel picado-esque paper cutting in the shape of a peacock (Ian Penney), a piece of toast with an image of Shakespeare burnt onto it à la the Virgen de Guadalupe (Maria Morrow), and also Phil Shaw’s photographs of brightly colored bookshelves, which was a voyeur’s delight to snoop the book titles.

And on my way out, I spotted three Jeff Koon’s puppy vases filled with fresh flowers guarding Jean Dubuffet’s Tapis at the Jane Kahan Gallery.  In my mind, they were the guardians of the LA Art Show — a much friendlier and kitsch version of Cerberus.

What does pop culture mean to you? The first thing anyone might think is Andy Warhol – largely considered the father of pop art – and his Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup, and Mickey Mouse prints.  On now through February 20 at the William Turner Gallery at Bergamot Station is your chance to redefine pop art for our generation.  Large-scale, colorful prints by two artists, Mikel Alatza and Kadir Lopez are full of color, texture, and familiar faces and things.

Mikel Alatza’s works range from a skull with the Mastercard logo to a clowned, vibrant, contorted painting of Julia Roberts.  Angelina Jolie has been given fire engine red hair and a bright red clown nose next to Paris Hilton whose tan looks even more fiercely dangerous than usual.

Kadir Lopez takes a more muted and almost vintage approach to the pop art world.  His Shell print features a river and skyline fitted within a Shell gasoline sign while his Wrigley’s piece has a distinctly political, textural feel.

Andy Warhol had his finger on the pulse of popular culture in the 70s (we still use the phrase he coined “fifteen minutes of fame” with great frequency) and perhaps its time we find an artist who knows how to transform our current pop culture icons into wild, vivacious prints that speak to us today.  Are you team Alatza, team Lopez, or both?

Mikel Alatza and Kadir Lopez’ exhibits will be up at William Turner Gallery through February 20.  Please call (310) 453-0909 or click here.

Yesterday, I journeyed to the center of the Earth.  And by the center of the Earth, I mean Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, an exhibition at the Fowler Museum.  The whole experience wasn’t too strenuous and it provided a welcomed break and plenty of inspiration into my day.

Upon entrance, there is a huge bear made out of striped sweaters standing on its hind legs.  Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen.  Your journey has just begun.  In the same room, a three-panel screen showing different videos sets the tone of the show because they depict Nick Cave’s Soundsuits in resonating action.  Soundsuits are elaborate, labor-intensive costumes, or “suits,” made out of household materials.  The name of each suit is the sound each costume makes when worn.

Marching straight out of a hallucination, the 35 Soundsuits on display boggle the mind because they are part ritualistic garb and part Alice in Wonderland with a touch of Liberace.  They range from knitted bodysuits patched together from afghans to intricate headdresses turned body-based sculpture covered with sequins and video tape.  Considering the sculptures are to be worn, one can start to think about the notions of performance whether in terms of art, ritual, or art and ritual’s intersection.  Furthermore, just imagine wearing one of these suits.  Not only would you need a team to help you put it on, but also you would need to relearn how to move and learn how to be this character.  There is only room for one personality when wearing a Soundsuit.  And I think the Soundsuit would win.

A close inspection of the suits’ materials dazzle the mind.  Materials include remnants of cozy sweaters, sequin jackets, kitsch bird sculptures, vintage toy tops, and buttons galore all stacked on top of each other or sewn right next to each other.  You start to wonder about the life of each material before it was placed onto this sculpture.  Each button was once sewn onto a shirt.  Each afghan warmed families on their couch.  The sheer amount of found materials is astounding.

Furthermore, the show’s installation was a treat.  Instead of following the works-on-white-wall model, brilliantly colored walls and screens lead the viewer throughout the exhibition Wild Toad-style to examine the Soundsuits in the round.

As you walk out of the exhibition, you might be wondering where you could see one of these Soundsuits in action.  If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will.  Nick Cave is partnering up with UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures to create a series of impromptu performance-interventions around the city called Soundsuit Invasions.  Just keep tabs on the Fowler’s Twitter and Facebook feeds for the details.

Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth closes May 30, 2010.  Please click here for more information.

A good lot of us cannot wait to say good-bye to 2009 and the ’00s as a whole.  Sayonara, the aughts.  And hellooo, teens!

But there are a couple of us having a hard time letting go of the holiday spirit.  And if you happen to be one of them, keep your iTunes radio on the Christmas carol channel and bake those cookies just a couple more days.

If ice-skating is your thing, swing by Pershing Square for some outdoors ice with your sweetest.  Hot cocoa is not included, but the fee and skate rentals are  only $8. [Info]  Need a few drinks to ease the pain when the ice breaks your fall one too many times?  The W Los Angeles in Westwood offers a skating rink of its own for those who need a little liquid courage…erm, holiday cheer to accompany them. [Info]

Do you need lots of bright lights to stay warm and cheery?  The DWP’s Holiday Light Festival is going strong…until tomorrow night.  You don’t even need to leave the safety of your own car while driving down a mile-long stretch of ligh decorations gracing Griffith Park. [Info]  If you tend to trot the unbeaten path, head down to the LBC to see Phantom Galleries’ version of a holiday light show.  Aptly titled Let There Be Light!, twenty-eight exhibitions in 25 storefronts will be shining with various light-based works ranging from the subtle, abstract shapes to the bold and fluorescent. [Info]

You don’t have to say good-bye just yet to the holiday season, but since CVS has its Christmas display right next to Valentine treats, the countdown is on.

Image: Fiat Lux IV – Susan Chorpenning; photo by Dan Scott