Mirror House, 2016 by artist Paige Jiyoung Moon was one of the paintings in her 2019 exhibition, Days of Our Lives at Steve Turner in Los Angeles. Her works are all of scenes from her life, painted from memory.
She is currently part of Hammer Museum’s most recent biennial, Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, its sixth iteration, on view until 12/31/23.
The house in the painting, Mirage, was created by Doug Aitken for Desert X in 2017. On the fictional television series, The Curse, created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, the main characters are building houses with similar look.
Raised in Highland Park and East Los Angeles, Terrill was part of a small group of Chicano artists who in the 1970s and 80s created works that diverged from traditional Chicano-based imagery and subject matter to include visual representations reflecting his queer lived experiences. Utilizing the existing image culture that surrounded him, Terrill combines personal photographs, found pop cultural imagery, and reproductions of artworks by queer predecessors, including Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Wilhelm von Gloeden, to conjure utopic spaces. Spanning from his earliest explorations to substantial new works, Cut and Paste reveals collage as a foundational element to Terrill’s expanded artistic practice.
Beginning with abstract collages and silkscreens made while Terrill was an undergraduate at Immaculate Heart College—an art department still heavily influenced by the graphic artist and activist Sister Corita Kent—the exhibition draws out the interconnectivity of illustration, collage, and printmaking in Terrill’s work and their influence upon the characteristically flat style of his early paintings. Like many artists who came of age in the wake of Pop, he found refuge within the fantasies of American image culture–his earliest artworks covering his bedroom walls, which he transformed with a mix of drawings, photographs, and clippings of comic books, film starlets, and music icons. His silkscreens from the mid-1970s–a medium central to the larger Chicano art movement–find him applying a graphic sensibility to not only representations of brown bodies, but queer desire, an impulse he would continue to explore in his episodic Homeboy Beautiful proto-zines from the end of the decade.
Juan Capistrán, Psychogeography of Rage (sending up searchlights in the form of flames) Western, 2019
Kim Fisher- Los Angeles Hedge, 2019
Kim Fisher, Woman Behind Rocks, 2019
Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cinema Sanctuary, 2019
Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cinema Sanctuary (close-up)
Enrique Castrejon, You, me, and all of us are in this together/Reach out to those that don’t know their status, 2019
Enrique Castrejon, You, me, and all of us are in this together/Reach out to those that don’t know their status, 2019 close-up
Every year The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) awards grants to the city’s best mid-career artists. The work created with these grants is then shown in the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) in Barnsdall Park for the C.O.L.A.(City of Los Angeles) exhibitions.
COLA 2019 is made up of 11 artists working in various mediums. Two of the artists, Juan Capistrán and Kim Fisher were also shown together as part of Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition, Made in L.A. 2014. For this show, Capistrán created large brick sculptures that he placed in sites in South Los Angeles that haven’t been rebuilt since the 1992 LA Riots. In his section of work in the gallery, he includes photos of these temporary site specific installations as well as some of the brick sculptures- two of which have balloons tied to them spelling GRATIS. The bricks can be seen as objects of destruction or building blocks, and the dual meanings work well in the context of the work.
Kim Fisher’s large collages capture another side of Los Angeles. From the hedge she used for the largest piece, to the ocean, swimming pools, and car culture, included in her others, the graphics and color come together in a way that feels very much like the traditional ideas associated with the city. The different sections, created to look as if they were torn or cut from magazines, form collages that feel like scattered memories that have somehow arranged themselves cohesively.
Sabrina Gschwandtner took forgotten films made by female directors and stitched them together to form patterns drawn from the history of quilt-making. The use of a craft that is traditionally associated with women and tying it an artistic pursuit that women are only more recently being acknowledged for is an interesting juxtaposition. The resulting work is stunning graphically and reminiscent of Agnés Varda’s colorful house of film reels created for LACMA’s Agnés Varda in Californialand from 2014.
Enrique Castrejon created sculptures that stem from his work in an LGBTQ center in Los Angeles. His sculptures of fragmented bodies are surrounded by strips of paper with HIV infection rates. The humanity of the figures contrasts with the overwhelming strips of typed documentation that swarms all around them.
All of the work created for this exhibition is incredibly strong and these annual exhibitions are a great way to see some of the best work being created by Los Angeles artists today. If you can’t make it to the exhibition there is a video on the site that takes you on a walk through with one of the curators. Also make sure to catch Stephanie Taylor’sMunicipal Art Song, which plays at the entrance to the exhibition. She created song lyrics based on text from LAMAG and DCA’s websites and catalogs, and used them to create sheet music using Schoolhouse Rock! as an inspiration. The result is really funny, especially if you read a lot of press releases.
Things to do in Los Angeles this weekend (6/9-6/12/16)-
Thursday
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery in the Arts District is hosting a series of live music performances Thursdays from 5-8pm called After 5, with DJ Son Zoo performing this week. (free with RSVP)
MOCA Grand Avenue is screening Open Window, a film about artists who use the computer desktop in their work (free)
For Cinefamily’sBand and a Movie, Ted Leo will be playing live and the film is Radio On
Downtown LA Artwalk is back with it’s monthly event- this time the focus is on new filmmakers. Also check out the opening of LACDA’s (Los Angeles Center for Digital Art) exhibition of the winners from their recent juried competition (the artist’s reception is Saturday)
Mutual Benefit are playing with Florist and Jay Som at Resident
Friday Flights, the Getty Museum’s art and music event returns for it’s third year with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith performing with projected visuals, dancer/choreographer Kianí del Valle giving a solo performance, as well as other performances and installations around the Getty complex
Friday through Sunday
LA Pride Festival is on in West Hollywood with a weekend music festival which includes performances by Faith Evans, Le1f, Charlie XCX, Bebe Rexha, Trina, Big Freedia and more, and the large Pride Parade on Sunday
Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo is showing Sunset Boulevard with music played on their famous pipe organ, an audience singalong, and a comedy short before the film (also Saturday night and Sunday afternoon showings)
Make Music Pasadena, the annual one day free music festival returns with a great list of bands including Atlas Genius, Bear Hands, Small Black, James Supercave, Jay Som and more
Today is the last day to see the giant lit up bunny sculptures downtown, created by artist Amanda Parer
Saturday and Sunday
The Playboy Jazz Festival is at the Hollywood Bowl with Jon Batiste and Stay Human, Seth MacFarlane and more on Saturday; Janelle Monae and Pete Escovedo Orchestra featuring Sheila E., Juan and Peter Michael and more on Sunday
Sunday
Long Beach Patchwork Show has over 200 local vendors, chosen by a jury, selling their unique products outside at Marine Stadium as well as multiple music stages
Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only opens at the Hammer Museum
For Gabriel Kuri’s current sculpture show at Regen Projects, he has taken ordinary objects and combined them in interesting and often humorous ways.
From the press release:
Regen Projects is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Gabriel Kuri. Bringing together the artist’s recent explorations into the form, function, and materiality of everyday utilitarian objects, the show will feature a series of new sculptures composed of consumer materials and found elements that touch upon the relationship of value and exchange in contemporary global society.
He is also a part of Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum. His show at Regen Projects closes 6/28/14.
