CLIMATE ISSUE

CLIMATE ISSUE + interview with T.J. Demos SEP/OCT 2021

Los Angeles

A School of Architectural Thinking

sciarc.edu

JOSHUA TREE HIGHLANDS ARTIST RESIDENCY

Kyle Riedel, Foundation No. 2, 2010

15 YEAR ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY MUSEUM

SEPT. 18–JAN. 3, 2022 www.jthar.com

@jtharesidency

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

My Barbarian October 29, 2021 - February 27, 2022 Whitney Museum of American Art

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

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F E A T U R E D G A L L E R Y – S E P T E M B E R 2 ND, 6 - 9 P M

La Loteria de la Representacion A re-envisioning of La Loteria cards

SCAN FOR MORE INFO

Gallery Azul 520 W. 8th Street, San Pedro, CA 90731 galleryazul.com

ILONA SZWARC VIRGIN SOAP SEPTEMBER 4 – OCTOBER 9, 2021 831 N. HIGHLAND AVENUE, LOS ANGELES, CA 90038 (323) 462-2790 | dianerosenstein.com

DIANE ROSENSTEIN GALLERY

F E B R UA RY JA M E S (Don’t) Take Me With You September 11 - October 30th, 2021

WILDING CRAN G A L L E RY

Free Admission

Artist Monica Majoli explores themes of melancholy and desire in this exhibition drawn from the Grunwald Center collection.

1 MUSEUM Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum NATORI SHUNSEN. ACTOR ICHIMURA UZAEMON XV AS NAOZAMURAI (DETAIL), FROM COLLECTION OF PORTRAITS BY SHUNSEN, 1923–26. COLOR WOODCUT. SHEET: 15 7/8 × 10 3/4 IN. (40.4 × 27.3 CM).

UCLA GRUNWALD CENTER FOR THE GRAPHIC ARTS. HELEN AND FELIX JUDA COLLECTION

KELLYANN BURNS Processing SEPTEMBER 11 - OCTOBER 23, 2021

LOUIS STERN FINE ARTS 9002 MELROSE AVENUE / WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90069 310.276.0147 / info@louissternfinearts.com

9:07 AM 6/21/21, 2021 / oil on Alu-DiBond 60 x 40 inches; 152.4 x 101.6 centimeters / Photo: Gene Ogami

michaelwarrencontemporary.com 760 Santa Fe Drive Denver, CO • 80204 (303) 635 6255

Radical Beauty PAMELA JOSEPH

September 21 - October 23, 2021

Table of Contents VOLUME 16, ISSUE 1, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2021

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Climate Issue F E AT U R E S Our Relationship with Water - by leanna robinson T.J. Demos Interview - by eli ståhl Real Horror Show - by geena brown & lauren guilford Hugo Hopping - by clayton campbell Zaria Forman - by annabel keenan

F E AT U R E D

28 34 38 44 48

R E V I E W

Ron Athey at ICA - by jamie mcmurry Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento at LACE - by inda mandelkern

56 60

C O LU M N S ART BRIEF: The Art Industry - by stephen j goldberg DECODER: Turbulence - by zak smith

C O N T I N U E D

22 24

»

ON THE COVER: Zaria Forman, Cierva Cove, Antarctica No. 2, 70 x 105 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2017, courtesy of the artist Zaria Forman.

ABOVE: Hugo Hopping, Rewildering Holographic Weeds, TWO, 2020; cover for the new publication, Nature As Infrastructure.

RIGHT: “Hammer Projects: Max Hooper Schneider,” installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Sept 21,2019–Feb 2, 2020; ©Max Hooper Schneider and courtesy of High Art, Paris and Maureen Paley, London, photo by Jeff McLane. .

NEXT PAGE, Top: Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration #1 (Performance Documentation), 2010, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, 2010, courtesy NRLA, Glasgow; Bottom: Installation view of Heaven, 2019, Nick Dong, photo by Nick Dong, courtesy USC Pacific Asia Museum.

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Table of Contents continued

From the Editor Dear Reader,

50 56 SIGHTS UNSCENE: LA Fires - by lara jo regan BUNKER VISION: Salton Sea - by skot armstrong PROVENANCE: Dogs & Architecture - by c. kaye rawlings

26 52 54

D E PA R T M E N T S 20 70 72 72 74 78

SHOPTALK by Scarlet Cheng: The Fairs LA FALL PREVIEW: Highlights ASK BABS: Labels for Artists POEMS: John Tottenham; Clint Margrave COMICS by Butcher & Wood: Art Book Publisher RECONNOITER: Patricia Watts

R E V I E W S 61 62 62 64 64 66 68 68

HK Zamani @ PRJCTLA Kandice Williams; JPW3 @ Night Gallery Kengo Kito @ Japan House Leo Mock @ M+B Doheny Rosy Keyser @ parrasch heijnen Nari Ward @ Jeffrey Deitch Nick Dong @ USC Pacific Asia Museum Mario Giacomelli @ The Getty

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Happy Birthday to Artillery for turning 15 this year! And to celebrate this milestone we are covering how the world is going to hell!

The climate crisis is our September theme and it wasn’t an impromptu decision or stop-the-presses situation because of the recent U.N. announcement stating our planet is in dire straits.

A climate issue had been lined up for quite some time; we just didn’t realize it would be at critical mass when we got around to doing it.

It seemed like every artist we knew was doing something about the environment. Why hasn’t the rest of the world caught on? Even I, at the tender age of 16 in my high school biology class, made a pledge to never litter—and I really don’t care to mention how long ago that was!

Point being, artists have been doing their job. Does it help, does it matter, does anyone really care? Reading the articles in this issue, I would say that it does—and perhaps some reconciliation between art and politics can bring forth some change by exposing this work to our readership; or at the very least some much-needed immediate action.

Artists in general are very sensitive types, or at least in the beginning, before they become art stars. So it wasn’t hard to come up with an incredible roster of (youngish) artists who are putting forth their efforts into saving our planet. Let’s start with our cover artist, Brooklyn-based Zaria Forman, covered by New York contributor Annabel Keenan. Upon Forman’s first trip to Greenland, she discovered how the changes in the ice fjords were affecting the locals, and made a commitment to tracking the adverse changes in our climate. She traveled to Antarctica and Arctic Canada to record the transformation in ice. Her drawings of icebergs and glaciers are formidable in size and detail.

She uses soft pastels to achieve the amazing realism with these images. Please take a look at her breathtaking drawings inside these pages.

Regular contributor Leanna Robinson addresses the issue of water with her coverage of Los Angeles artists that call attention to our misuse and exploitation of water, to the point of contamination and causing our fresh-water creatures to die off due to the unnecessary damming of rivers that pump water into places that just don’t have water, and probably shouldn’t.

Is all this starting to sound like a futuristic horror movie?

Look no further than the pages of Lauren Guilford and Geena Brown, where they turned to artists Max Hooper Schneider, Hugh Hayden and Kiyan Williams for their takes on the impending apocalypse. Nothing scary about that.

Finally, we get a very realistically dismal picture that articulates the state of the world and how we reached this point: the big C—Capitalism. British writer Eli Ståhl interviews renowned climate expert T.J. Demos whose new book Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing further explains the connections between capitalism and our planet’s impending demise, and how art can be used as a tool against it.

After all that, it’s hard to think about Artillery’s 15th anniversary, and that all my efforts to not litter didn’t really seem to pay off. I will persevere though and hope you will too. We all have to take it up a notch and do our part. I hope this issue at least gets that message across.

C O N T R I B U TO R S

Eli Ståhl writes on international solidarity and world-making practices, artistic and otherwise, particularly in relation to matters of environmental urgencies. They hold an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA in History of Art from University of Copenhagen.

Geena Brown is a curator and writer based in New York. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University and a BA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from San Francisco Art Institute.

S TA F F

Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher

EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Max King Cap - senior editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - copy editor/proof Dave Shulman - graphic design Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant Rocie Carrillo - editorial intern

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tucker Neel, Kelly Rappleye, Laura London

COLUMNISTS Anthony Ausgang, Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Kelly Rappleye, C. Kaye Rawlings, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Annabel Keenan is a New York– based writer specializing in contemporary art, sustainability and market reporting. Her work has been published in The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, among others. She holds an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center.

Lauren Guilford is a curator and art historian based in Los Angeles.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from University of California, Santa Barbara. Lauren is a Masters candidate at the University of Southern California where she is currently writing her thesis on the history of alternative art spaces in Los Angeles.

Leanna Robinson is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles. Her work includes essays, poetry, painting, performance art and design. She is creative director and associate editor of Language Magazine, and has been published in Artillery and Hyperallegic among others.

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Lane Barden, Ezrha Jean Black, Natasha Boyd, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Bianca Collins, Shana Nys Dambrot, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Angela Groom, Alexia Lewis, Richard May, Christopher Michno, Yxta Maya Murray, Barbara Morris, John David O’Brien, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, Cole Sweetwood, Colin Westerbeck, Avery Wheless, Anne Wallentine, Eve Wood, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, Peter Brock, John Haber, Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

ADMINISTRATION Anna Bagirov - sales Mitch Handsone - new media director Kelly Rappleye - director of development & digital engagement

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SUR biennial

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio

Marisa Caichiolo Pete Hoffecker Mejia Frankie Orozco The Perez Bros.

Carolina Sardi Jimena Sarno Curated by Ismael de Anda III & Max Presneill

Gallery Two

Social Fabric Featured artists: Natalie Baxter, Mimi O. Chun, Threadwinners (Alyssa Arney & Liz Flynn), Nathan Vincent, Megan Whitmarsh. Curated by Sue-Na Gay. SEPT 18 - DEC 04, 2021

Dark Room

VideoWords

Magmart International Videoart Festival

HOURS OF OPERATION: Tues - Sat, 11am - 5pm (Closed on major holidays) Always FREE to the public.

Masks required for entrance.

3320 Civic Center Drive Torrance, CA 90503

Hours and programs subject to change in accordance with local health mandates; visit TorranceArtMuseum.com for more details.

310-618-6388 TorranceArtMuseum@TorranceCA.Gov

Torrance Art Museum is a program of the Cultural Services Division, Community Services Department.

Creating and Enriching Community Through People, Programs and Partnerships.

www.torranceartmuseum.com

S H O P TA L K

Felix Fair Report In some ways the fairs and openings that packed the last week in July were a turning point for Los Angeles. It was the first such convergence since February 2020, with the pandemic shutdown following quickly in March. Would people actually show up for live events at galleries and art spaces, hotel and convention center, with the gloomy news of the new and very contagious COVID Delta variant? The good news is that they did, and in some numbers.

The preview of the Felix Art Fair (July 29–Aug 1) at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel was jammed from the start, then became a comfortable crowd by afternoon. It was well attended throughout, with brisk sales afoot.Then the LA Art Show (also July 29– Aug 1) returned to its usual hefty space at the LA Convention Center, and while attendance was down by half it boasted “double the sales,” according to the post-fair press release.The opening of Compound, a new art/cultural space in Long Beach, was also crowded throughout a full day’s worth of programming for an official celebration Saturday, July 31.

Felix was the only focused contemporary fair making a live appearance. Frieze LA returned as an online viewing room, after pulling out of their July slot in April citing “continuing uncertainty.” They had been planning to hold the fair at different locations throughout the city—really NOT a good idea as our traffic returns to its clogged normal. Art LA Contemporary was nowhere to be seen, despite its promising relocation to the Hollywood Athletic Club last year. (The L A Art Show includes jewelry and traditional and modern work, as well as contemporary.) Something new was Gallery Weekend Los Angeles (July 28–Aug 1), modeled after gallery weekends in London and Berlin, with galleries having late hours and holding special events.

This year Felix focused on LA-based galleries, 29 of the

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Jerry Saltz, poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, photo by Mike Vitelli, courtesy of Felix LA.

heavy-hitters and the hip. Participation in Felix is invitation-only, with about a third of the galleries new to the fair, including such big players as Blum & Poe, Gagosian and David Kordansky. In its first two editions, Felix occupied several floors of the vintage hotel, but this year it stayed on one level, the “cabanas” around the popular swimming pool and bar where critic Jerry Saltz was seen at a table piled with half-eaten food—not to say it was his, of course. (I’d love to know how much Felix paid to fly this New York critic out, to add a sheen to our dull lives.) On the net, you can watch his recorded walkthrough of the fair, trying to “read” the art for us and failing to recognize LA art-world VIPs such as Gagosian LA Director Deborah McLeod—even after she introduced herself, he basically ignored her. And they were in Gagosian’s digs! [Put a laughing-with-tears emoji here.]

“People really are coming in from out of town,” says Sarah Gavlak of her own gallery, “and we’ve met new people.”

First-day sales from their offering of three young artists—Alex Anderson, April Bey and Kim Dacres—were very good, she said.

Kurt Mueller of David Kordansky told me their one-man show of Calvin Marcus was sold out—four paintings, six “nose” pots. The paintings are detailed blowups of begonias in all their glory, and the pots are garden pots decorated on the sides with noses that run if overwatered.

I’m happy to report Felix took health precautions seriously.

That meant limiting capacity and requiring visitors to show proof of COVID vaccinations or a negative test. Inside, masks were mandatory.

BY

LA Art Show Meanwhile, Gallery Association Los Angeles launched Gallery Weekend, with some 70 of its members and other art spaces sponsoring longer hours, talks and special presentations.

Galleries such as L.A. Louver and Château Shatto mirrored their in-gallery offerings with what was posted on the Frieze Viewing Room.

I didn’t have a chance to visit the LA Art Show until the last day—and attendance was quite robust for the 70 some galleries with booths. Everyone was masked, though it was hard to social distance in some booths filled with visitors. As usual, it’s an eclectic fair—from fine jewelry to classical art, from contemporary to kitsch. There were many photo ops—people loved the large sculpture near the entrance showing a giant American flag going through a meat grinder—and becoming a pile of gold coins!

There was also remarkable art. I was particularly struck by Julio Vaquero paintings at Pigment Gallery from Barcelona, one of the few international galleries that made it this year. “Sala de objetos des hechos” shows a room with antique furnishings that seem to be in the process of dissolving into ether. As always, Arcadia Contemporary showed excellent realist painters, and the Verne Collection some exquisite prints, many from Japanese origins.

Special programming was in the back. Carmen Argote’s wrenching video, Last Light—of a year gone wrong—was especially impactful—with a large projection in a darkened room. It’s one of the best pieces of art to come out of this difficult time, and well deserves a larger audience.

Above: LA Art Show Floor 2020 FLOOR. Right: V.C.R performing @Compound, photo by Scarlet Cheng.

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

Compound Rapture Now down to Long Beach. Compound is an unusual hybrid of art/culture/wellness—15,000 square feet of renovated space with an ample courtyard. It’s the vision of one woman, Megan Tagliaferri, who says in an online intro, “Art and wellness both have the ability to strengthen our connections and understanding of ourselves, our communities, and the world around us.”

Thank you, Megan!

Right now there’s an art show in their gallery, “Radical Empathy,” curated by Artistic Director Lauri Firstenberg, with works

by EJ Hill, Mildred Howard and others. In the adjoining building there’s a commissioned work by Glenn Kaino—Tidepools, several immersive installations in darkened rooms you are guided through (they do take small groups). I love the last room where you’re given a wish token and get to drop it into an aquarium full of bioluminescent creatures—they get excited and light up!

Compound also offers regular yoga and meditation classes— these are free, you just need to sign up.

The celebration’s evening performances focused on Afrofuturism, and they were electrifying. Among the highlights were a set by V.C.R, a singer/electric violinist,and a screening of the film short BLACK.ECO by choreographer/director Shauna Davis. I’m definitely planning to head back. Check out future programs at https://www.compoundlb.com/

Stripping Away THE VEIL

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A R T

B R I E F

Bidding representatives speak on the phone with their clients during an auction at Sotheby’s, photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images..

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The art world has been a secretive, opaque business for centuries. Secondary market transactions are rarely transparent and auction houses are often silent about the identity of the ultimate seller and buyer (provenances are full of phrases such as “from a private collection”). The use of intermediaries and straw buyers is routine. The last decade has seen the rapid growth of international freeports providing tax-free transfers of art between wealthy individuals who, in many cases, do not even take possession of the artwork.

The US and the EU have levied sanctions against a large number of oligarchs, primarily Russian. To evade these sanctions, oligarchs have turned to money laundering which essentially paid for the so-called “billionaires’ row”— super-tall condo towers on New York’s 57th Street. These multimillion-dollar condos were almost always bought and paid for by shell companies based offshore. The use of shell companies has become common in transactions by both buyers and sellers of major works of art. The FBI discovered that some oligarchs who were evading sanctions turned to the art business for sanctuary over the last decade due to more transparent disclosure laws in the real estate business.

The $65 billion-per-year art business has been labeled “the last major unregulated market.” But things may be about to change big-time for dealers and collectors. The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held hearings last year entitled “The Art Industry and US Policies that Undermine Sanctions.” The committee did a case study of two sanctioned Russian oligarchs who hid their identity by using an art advisor to buy art at auction and found that despite the auction houses’ claims of transparency, these houses did indeed facilitate secrecy in transactions.

The Senate committee concluded: “There is currently no regulation that specifically targets money laundering in the art market, nor does the art market itself subject professional art intermediaries to any standards of professionalism that directly address money laundering.”

The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) was enacted in the 1970s to curb money laundering. It mandates that financial institutions must report all cash transactions of $10,000 or greater. The institutions are required to file suspicious activity reports (SAR) if the transactions indicate possible violations of laws or regulations. The art industry has not been subject to the BSA. This January, Congress passed legislation to make the anti-money laundering (AML) regulations applicable to antiquities dealers (the concern was smuggling of relics from war-torn Iraq and Syria). The legislation directed the Treasury Department to study whether the AML regulations should also be extended to the art market as a whole.

The EU and the UK have recently passed laws requiring dealers and auction houses to determine the true identity of their clients and report suspicious activity. The major auction houses that have substantial business in Europe claim they are now complying with the new regulations and are requiring full disclosure of counterparties and are applying these new rules to US auctions voluntarily. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the Treasury Department will extend the BSA and AML regulations to cover private dealers and auction houses in the near future. A host of new record-keeping and reporting obligations may be imposed on art dealers—few of them ready for it.

ARTnews reports that the Art Dealers Association of America has been working with Congress to ensure that regulations are reasonable and don’t impose an “undue burden” on dealers. Hopefully, the ADAA will convince legislators that most money-laundering occurs at the high end of the art market.

New regulations should either exempt or limit the obligations of increased reporting and record-keeping for smaller galleries that deal primarily with emerging artists.

Currently, the capital gains tax rate on profits from art sales is higher than that for transactions in financial markets and real estate, which are subject to 15 to 20% rates on long-term gains. Profits from art sales are categorized as sales of collectibles and are taxed at a maximum rate of 28%. I believe if art is to be treated similarly to an asset class such as financial instruments and real estate, then it should receive equally favorable capital gains treatment. Lowering the capital gains tax on art profits would be a way of balancing the burden of the reporting requirements that may be coming soon to a dealer near you.

BY ZAK SMITH

D E C O D E R

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Illustration by Zak Smith

Prayer Against Turbulence

You know when an airplane goes from just rattling back and forth to when it feels like the engines stopped and you drop, like, 20, 50, who knows how many feet and then picks up rattling again? I hate that. I don’t want to die.

The nice thing about turbulence is it usually happens way after take-off and way before landing, so your tray tables do not have to be in the upright and locked position. Which makes it easier to draw.

I don’t know anymore how many times I’ve done this.

I hold it together through bad weather that feels like it’s trying to kill me by taking a pen and drawing a thing.

Wait, no, that’s inaccurate—it’s never a thing, it’s always some ragged half-made sketchy shape. The resulting drawing will inevitably be: spidery, black-and-white, unnameable, fragmented, not describable. It won’t be the most popular thing I make, but it will be real. It’s a prayer is what it is. I don’t want to die, I am going to make something so I don’t think about death. I draw until the rattling stops.

With this kind of drawing, you don’t plan. You don’t do what you are taught to do in art school: lay out every idea you’ve ever had and every tool you can master or imagine using, and curate from there some way of saying something about something.

This is the opposite kind of work: you start in a small arbitrary place on the paper and give yourself a small task: fill this in black. Left and right and left and right with the pigma .005 until just filling it in black doesn’t seem right any more, and then just move on intuition.

Start not with an overview like a grand master at a chessboard, but start like a man in a tunnel, seeing by matchlight. Start with just one thing—anything—you know is real, like the left-right that makes the box black.

And then look as close to you as you can for the next thing, and the next thing—just do the next thing you can do. And pray the plane stops moving.

It would be an exaggeration to say this is art that’s getting made because it has to, but it is art being made in the classic devotional mode, like Virgin Marys and wooden idols of fire gods: If I just do this, we will all get through. The crops will grow, the plague will end, 280,000 lbs of thrust pouring from the Pratt and Whitney will continue to overcome 577 tonnes sacrificed to the gods of mass and motion.

I don’t believe a word of it, and I can’t think of anything else to do.

Making a little black line is not a good idea. Making it thicker and thicker by turns is not a good idea. Making a picture because you’re worried you might die is not a good idea. It’s even worse because I definitely am not going to die in a plane crash—this rattling and drop-down broken coaster feeling is so common and survivable I can make it the lede for this piece and all of you recognize it and you only recognize that you recognize it because you’re still alive—because a bumpy flight is very easy to survive.

I’ve done so many of these drawings, though. I could find all of them, every bad flight for how many years, put them together on a white wall.

You might not know this fear, but you know fear. You’re afraid of something—so you could see the lines of fear knowingly. You would know they are real and something human, and emanating from a human consciousness outside yourself. You couldn’t say very much constructive had been accomplished—you couldn’t say fear had been defeated or prevented or even that we’d learned much about fear—but in some small way some part of fear had become something else. Something you could look at, take in, and then live in, as part of your mental furniture. This other life feels fear as I do, as deeply, as undeniably. We are connected.

That’s all we ever do. Find a small thing that is definitely real and bang on it and bang on it again until it is not just what it is.

W H AT W I L L R E M A I N ART IN THE TIME OF HUMAN DOMINION A group exhibition exploring the inseparability of humans and nature Oct 11 - Dec 4, 2021 Preview reception: Thursday, October 14, 5-7 p.m.

Opening reception; Saturday, October 16, 2-4 p.m.

Free weekend parking on campus Admission to all events is free Dean Abernathy* Joy Brenneman* Cheryl Colman Kelli Elliot* Rebecca Erbstoesser Kim Garrison* Blade Gillissen Edward Gomez Will Hare Laurie Hassold John Hesketh Richard Kraft Leland Means* Chelsea Mosher Kevin Myers Matthew Newman

Image: Dakota Noot, Whoa there, cowboy, 2021, archival pigment print

Dakota Noot Steve Radosevich* Kerri Sabine-Wolf Kevin Scianni Katherine Sheehan Natasha Shoro Timothy Robert Smith Yuki Toyooka Smith Noah Thomas Holly Topping Cora Volkoff Roger Whitridge Sam Yip *Mystery Ranch Project

orangecoastcollege.edu/DoyleArts

Due to changing policies and procedures around covid-19, please check The Doyle website prior to your arrival. Masks are mandated on campus as of July 2021.

L A R A

J O

R E G A N ’ S

S I G H T S

U N S C E N E

Birth of a Foothill Fire, San Gabriel Valley, CA, 2019

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A HUB FOR MANY OF LOS ANGELES’ MOST CREATIVE ARTISTS, DESIGNERS, AND CURATORS.

1206 MAPLE AVE LOS ANGELES, CA 90015 213 627 3754 BENDIX-BUILDING.COM

DRIP DRY Our Relationship with Water

BY LEANNA ROBINSON

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Beatriz Jaramillo has had water on her mind ever since she can remember. The Colombian-born Los Angeles–based artist spent her childhood in what sounds like an idyllic wonderland—wandering around the tropical rainforest that surrounded her family’s home. She remembers playing in the water: “It was magical.”

There was a deep connection that came from her family—she has memories of her grandfather, whose house she helped connect a hose to that siphoned water directly from the land. When the artist returned as an adult, however, the area was totally destroyed. “It’s painful,” she says, “My heart hurts every time it’s a new time talking about it.”

This July, people all over the world watched in shock and horror as a fire erupted in the center of the Gulf of Mexico due to a faulty gas pipe. The image of a swirling “eye of fire” seemingly descending to the depths of hell was a keen visual representation of the breaking point we are at, which perhaps accounts for videos of the event going viral. The climate crisis jeopardizes plant, animal and human life in every way on this planet, but possibly at greatest risk is our water.

Our planet is 71% water—be it rivers, lakes, streams, creeks, oceans or seas, and for centuries humans have relied on these waterways for fresh drinking water, food, and as places of recreation. However, more and more rivers, waterways and oceans have been polluted, dammed, re-routed or depleted. The issue of a shrinking suitable water supply is especially relevant for California, where just this year a cease and desist letter was sent to Nestlé (now known as BlueTriton) in San Bernardino, to stop diverting water from communities during what will be another year of drought. Residents and officials are in a fight to keep water from being siphoned from natural environments in a state whose constitution states that all water “belongs” to its citizens.

Jaramillo’s recent work, “In-Between: Wetlands In L.A.” explores the lost wetlands that used to exist—and if fact thrive—in Southern California. Jaramillo, who is a gallery educator at the Norton Simon Museum as well as LACMA, has learned that when people make a personal connection to the work of art, then they are more likely to care about its subject. “So I thought, if I make the work about Los Angeles and they make a personal connection to the land, they will care—they will protect it, they will tend to the needs of that area.”

Her previous works dealt with climate change and both land and water issues on a global scale—her 2018 project, “Broken Ice” explored the melting ice caps. But Jaramillo wanted to bring things back home. Wetlands are something of a gradient, with saltier water of the ocean mixing into fresh water inland. The salt, fresh and brackish water in between give a varied and rich place for a wide variety of species to thrive. Most of the wetlands in Los Angeles are gone—about 95%—and restoration is a rocky and unclear path.

Jaramillo thinks that her duty as an artist is to ask questions, and to reflect and encourage people to be better stewards of the land. Her current project reflects on the contamination of 27,000 barrels of DDT on the California coast near Catalina Island, an amount that scientists called “staggering.” The work is a series of photographs that have been perforated to spell out Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, the chemical name of DDT. The perforations are somewhat obscured by the background—a metaphor for how these toxic pollutants are hidden within our water.

Clockwise from opposite page: Maru García, Membrane Tensions (detail), 2021, photo Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, Bloom Boom (detail), from the “Greetings from West Texas” series, 2020, collage, 6 5/8 x 10 1/2 inches framed, courtesy of the artists, commissioned by Ballroom Marfa; Beatriz Jaramillo, In Between: Wetlands In L.A., photo by Rubin Diaz.

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“ W E U S E L A N DS CA PE AS A FO R M A L WAY TO V I E W N ATU R E AS A N O B S E RV E R I N S TE A D O F V I E W I N G OU R S E LV E S AS PA RT O F N ATU R E ”

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It is, however, impossible to ignore the political aspects at play when it comes to the climate crisis. Carolina Caycedo, a Colombian artist living in LA, is releasing an upcoming project with her partner artist David de Rozas—commissioned by Ballroom Marfa—titled “The Blessings of the Mystery.” The project is centered around Amistad Dam and “shows that colonialism continues to upend in Texas and the US through the extraction of oil and gas, the construction of the border wall, and the erasure of Indigenous narratives and people who live there and claim their relationship to the land,” says Caycedo.

Caycedo has taken her own role as an artist into account, and what the artist’s role is in both society and in nature. “As artists sometimes we are complicit with these hierarchical or colonial perspectives. We use, for example, landscape as a formal way to view nature as an observer instead of viewing ourselves as part of nature, which we are as humans in the middle of nature,” she says.

Caycedo has been working on “BE DAMMED,” an ongoing project that looks at different case studies and communities across the Americas that are impacted by dams since 2012. The project entails community events, videos, sculptures, photographs, publications and other mixed media. Like Jaramillo, she was influenced by environmental events that occurred in Colombia during her childhood. During adolescence she lived on the banks of the Magdalena River, which flows through the western part of the country. In 2012 she learned they were damming the river and diverting it, which Caycedo found “shocking,” and triggered her interest in the issue. Through a friend, she started a relationship with the community and the people involved with resistance to the dam.

“It hit my personal history and sparked my interest and it just unfolded. When you start researching and pulling at so many strings, that took me to the next one, and the next one, and I got awakened in an environmental way,” says Caycedo. She became concerned with how extractivism—the process of removing large quantities of natural resources considered valuable for exportation—operates across the Americas, and the privatization of bodies of water. She points out that development, often said to be beneficial for all, frequently alienates communities, including Indigenous, whose resources are at risk of further exploitation.

Caycedo points to exploring non-western epistemologies as a way to address both the climate crisis and solutions to it.

From a hierarchical perspective, water is solely a resource for people to use, but is separate from any relationship with humans.

Non-western ideas can “understand water instead as say, a relative, as something that sustains life, but understands life as a balanced relationship between the human entity and the water entity with reciprocity.” She proposes humans look even beyond our species to explore different epistemologies—say that of fish or even water itself, to understand our relationship with water and to build knowledge. Caycedo’s project “Water Portraits” (2016) sees rivers as political entities with their own ability to be agents of change, which illustrates this idea.

Caycedo is a firm believer that a one-size-fits-all approach is ineffective in addressing the climate crisis and in activism surrounding water rights. While sweeping governmental reform can be helpful, she points to listening to community members, Indigenous voices, and existing community structure to heal climate issues surrounding those communities.

Mexican transdisciplinary artist Maru Garcia also looks to community for guidance and inspiration for her work. However, Carolina Caycedo, From the Bottom of the River, installation view, MCA Chicago, Dec 12, 2020–Sep 12, 2021, photo by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

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Garcia approaches climate issues from a unique perspective, as she holds an MS in Biotechnology and a BS in Chemistry along with an MFA in Design & Media Arts. This combination of science and art is evident in the aesthetics of her work—which appear at times like the personal laboratory of an experimental scientist— which, I suppose, they actually are.

Garcia’s project, “Vacuoles: Bioremediating Cultures” (2019) explores the environmental and social crisis brought on by the Exide soil contamination in Vernon, in which a battery recycling plant emitted toxic metal dust and neurotoxic lead into the largely working-class Latino LA neighborhood for decades. The installation included 29 ceramic pieces containing lead-contaminated soil from the site, along with video projections.

Garcia’s most recent project is in the works and builds on “Vacuoles” in collaboration with a gallery in South LA, the Getty’s PST and a scientist involved with the Natural History Museum.

The science-based environmental and social justice–oriented project will build on previous community relationships and involvement, with a DIY project of actually repairing the soil in the affected areas of the toxic pollutants. “We are developing a method of lead reduction using minerals that people can apply themselves in their own backyards, so they can be more protected while waiting for the cleanup from the government,” says Garcia. The cleanup, she notes, is taking a long time and is also selective about which areas are eligible so, for some, this DIY solution may be the only one available.

The method of getting down to a cellular level spans into another one of Garcia’s projects, “membrane tensions” (2021), which consists of glass containers containing SCOBY kombucha cultures. Garcia aimed to understand humans as part of a family

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of Earth’s beings, and the origins of human life. The membrane surrounding that cell functions as a limit, but it is permeable and allows for communication. “How can we relate ourselves with the rest of the natural world and think of ourselves as organisms that can have membranes instead of rigid limitations?” asks Garcia.

The piece uses living cultures that have a symbiotic process with water, and is collaborative rather than competitive. The works are testament to evolution due to collaboration, and in many ways Garcia’s approach offers a philosophy of hope. When contemplating contamination and the climate crisis things can seem very daunting, yet the projects bring it back to how we can relate better to our environment and heal ourselves through a symbiotic relationship with the earth. To me, the project sounds like a proposition.

While humans are undoubtedly the cause of the climate crisis and ecological ruin, we can also be stewards and work together to develop solutions to the problems we have caused. By using art, Indigenous practices, community work, governmental pressure, and scientific iinquiries, humans can work together for resolution. Humans are as much a part of nature as the ocean, rivers and seas, and through a connection to our place in nature, we can perhaps find ways to heal it.

Maru García, Vacuoles: Bioremediating Cultures, 2019, installation view, 29 ceramic pieces containing lead-contaminated soil from Southeast Los Angeles, 3-channel video projections, courtesy of the artist.

A LIFE’S WORK

KENT TWITCHELL

RIVERSIDE CITY COLLEGE QUAD GALLERY PRESENTS

VIP Preview, Artist’s talk and Catalog Signing Sunday October 3, 1PM RCC Digital Library

Catalog Sales And Preview Tickets: https://rccboxoffice.com/events/

Exhibition: October 5 - December 2

OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY OCTOBER 7, 6 PM FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

4800 Magnolia Ave. Quad Room #140 Riverside, CA 92506

CLIMATE BREAKDOWN and CAPITALISM An Interview with T.J. Demos

BY ELI STÅHL

T.J. Demos is Professor in Art History and Visual Culture as well as Founder and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Last year, he published Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing a book exploring the radical world-making potential of contemporary art and activism in relation to changing climates. I met with Demos over the phone to discuss these intersections and the meaning of climate today.

ARTILLERY: The topic of this issue of Artillery is climate. You are the director of the Center for Creative Ecologies, and you speak of both environmental and climate crises. Could you start out by defining these three different terms; ecology, environment and climate?

T.J. DEMOS: They are all interconnected, all concerning the urgent situation we find ourselves in today, living under the destruction of lives and environments under racial and colonial capitalism. Climate is a crucial term for me and many people these days as we are entering into a severe period of climate breakdown, evident in the catastrophic wildfires in the Northwest US, Canada and Siberia, and catastrophic flooding in Henan province in China, in Western Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The signs are clear that we are undergoing rapid transformation of the natural systems that have provided for flourishing biodiverse life. While the natural sciences give us that picture, my work is also committed to thinking more broadly about these terms—climate, environment, ecology—and how they connect

to the politics of socio-economic inequality and social justice and injustice. Climate change doesn’t just happen, it happens to specific people in specific places. We know that those with more resources—for instance money, housing, transportation, health care—are better equipped to deal with negative climate impacts, whereas the more vulnerable, those who have suffered disenfranchisement, political exclusion, and economic impoverishment, often over generations, are at the forefront of climate catastrophe, with the loss of housing, jobs, and healthcare resources, structural racism, and exploitation. Ultimately, climate includes the sociopolitical and economic elements of inequality that structure our world, as much as the biogeophysical. This is the context of climate breakdown and ecologies of intersectionality that I research. There’s lots of creative and critical engagements with this more expansive understanding of ecology, environment, and climate in contemporary art and visual culture, targeting ecologies of affluence, environments of inequality, and climates of racism. The challenge is thinking them together with climate change as understood in the natural sciences.

You’ve mentioned before how climate and climate change run the risk of becoming too generic terms. How do you have a broad definition of climate while at the same time insisting on it being a specific and political term?

Much climate-based activism within social movements is intent on declaring a climate emergency owing to the growth of atmospheric carbon pollution and resulting global warming. But within other contexts of social justice activism, organizers are looking at what else emergency means, and they’re finding that it’s not simply in the future, but rather in the past. Melanie Yazzie of The Red Nation, a revolutionary Indigenous organization, says that climate justice began in 1492 with struggles against colonial violence, including socio-environmental violence such as deforestation, forced plantation labor, land appropriations, agricultural transformations, cultural genocide. The challenge is, how do we integrate these different approaches to emergency, and refuse to participate in the forgetting of that past, instead integrating the politics of decolonization, abolition, and climate-justice activism within our environmental politics more broadly. For me, it’s crucial to avoid participating in the colonial act of de-futuring whole communities because we’re focused on a narrow conception of climate change instead of the climates of racial and colonial capitalism. Proposals like the The Red Black & Green New Deal, from The Movement for Black Lives, present this kind of comprehensive analysis we all need to get behind.

In Beyond the World’s End you mention various political movements and autonomous communities—like Standing Rock, the

Above: T.J. Demos. Opposite page: Rasquache Collective (Ann Altstatt, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Karina A-Monroy, and Kyle Lane-McKinley), BordersBordados: A Rasquache Time Machine, 2020, mixed media.

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ZAD, Rojava and the Zapatistas. What do such communities mean to the climate on a larger, international scale?

These examples are all highly visible and mediagenic. While being local struggles, they all have larger ambitions. Standing Rock—an ongoing protest against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, specifically oil pipelines in North Dakota—was not limited to that single event and, more broadly, concerns claims for Indigenous sovereignty and a post-carbon future in the Americas. It’s a struggle against fossil capitalism itself, premised on the understanding that we live in this comprehensive system of global capitalism based on a fundamental contradiction, according to which capitalism is driven to produce more and more value but devalues those who produce it, and devalues the material sources of earthly wealth on which it depends. It’s clear that capitalism is the cause of climate breakdown, and it’s structurally incapable of fixing the problem. The question for those of us who are dedicated to climate justice is, how can we link up the local to the global, to actually challenge the domination of this global economic system that is intent on destroying conditions of life on Earth? Anti-colonial land and water protectors are attempting to do just that. There are glimmers of hope in some of these practices and in their potential networking and organising activities too—including the transnational networking of Indigenous resurgence, Idle No More and The Red Nation, connecting to the current resistance against Enbridge’s proposed Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, the autonomous zone at the ZAD in France and their attempts to live a non-alienated life connected to the commons and multispecies flourishing, and Rojava’s anti-patriarchal freedom fighters, in part inspired by the social ecology of US anarchist Murray Bookchin, which sees environmental violence reflecting and extending the social violence that happens between people. These are only the most visible of the infinite number of local practices found just about everywhere today that are dedicated to living life otherwise.

In the book, you argue that maybe we should treat this political organizing as the most interesting contemporary art taking place. However, is it potentially reductive to speak of activism as art?

It is a complex and challenging argument to make. I’m not suggesting that all activism is simply art, but rather trying to expand understandings of what art is, connecting it to a world-building creativity that everyone is capable of and in fact practices in their own ways and in everyday life. In this sense, it’s possible to understand activism as fundamentally creative, dedicated to living otherwise, and claiming a political aesthetics that exceeds the boundaries of what’s capturable in commercial art institutions and the luxury commodities that the wealthy class invests in. How might art dignify and grant aesthetic expression to the struggles for collective well-being, social justice and multi-species flourishing? These are the questions I’m trying to ask, beginning with democratizing the category of art.

Installation view of Apologia Mediterraneo and Bad News Map, 2021, by Newton Harrison at the opening of “Beyond the World’s End,” March 2020, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, curated by T.J. Demos.

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How do you as a curator engage with the relationship between art and activism, for example in your most recent show at The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)?

Institutional spaces are filled with contradiction and complexity. There are certainly material forces of capital flowing through institutions, guiding them in clear ways. But there are also energies of resistance, radical imagination and critical transformation that are occurring at the same time. When I engage with institutions, I’m always trying to be conscious of those contradictions and operate within them, including by joining collective struggles for institutionalizing otherwise—through models that are nonprofit, dedicated to collective joy and emancipation, not ones that appropriate collective wealth and are run by billionaires. See for instance the urgent initiative Strike MoMA in New York and its attempt to liberate and decolonize institutions.

The MAH exhibition I organized assembled a range of artistic works to present options for thinking critically and imaginatively about futurity, asking how the world-to-come can connect with social justice and environmental flourishing in ways that recognize the long history of catastrophe as it has unfolded during periods of colonisation, indigenous genocide, and transatlantic slavery. “Beyond the World’s End“ was a small group exhibition in a local, community museum space. The intervention was about introducing audiences to the amazing possibilities of speculative thinking about the future within the artistic context, including by joining conventional science-oriented understandings of climate and ecology with approaches to social justice, de-colonial, anti-racist understandings of climate and ecology, as with Afrofuturist and ecosocialist practices. It was an invitation to think about, feel, and perceive this more expanded, comprehensive understanding of what climate, ecology, and environment can mean today. Emancipatory futurity begins with creative imagination.

BRANDON LATTU Empirical, Textual, Contextual

LYNNE MARSH

Who Raised It Up So Many Times?

ANNA WITTENBERG The Ruminant

FALL OPENING RECEPTION 3824 Main Street Riverside, CA 92501

ucrarts.ucr.edu

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 5–9PM

A REAL HORROR SHOW Ecological Dystopia in Contemporary Art

BY LAUREN GUILFORD & GEENA BROWN

Our apocalypse is self-inflicted. We gouge at our wounds in acts of self-harm. Our collective anxiety festers as disaster takes hold, yet we remain paralyzed by fear, unable to face our reality.

Implausible flames dance on the ocean’s surface; acres of California mountains are scorched black; storms terrorize and devastate our cities. The environmental crisis is no longer looming overhead, it is no longer an abstraction—an unsettling shadow we choose to ignore or hide from—it’s here, screaming!

Artists Max Hooper Schneider, Hugh Hayden, and Kiyan Williams consider the ecological horrors of our past, present and future. These artists explore the intersection of ecology and horror, examining the ways in which “eco-horror” speaks to our precarious and terrifying reality. Monsters take shape in many forms as we explore our house of horrors.

Throughout art history, terror has been represented in the mysterious and untamable presence of Mother Nature. Modernist notions of “the sublime” often inspired feelings of fear and dread in the face of nature’s beauty, most notably in the sublime landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner.

In 1991, Damien Hirst assumed the role of God when he submerged a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living attempts to suspend a moment of terror—the petrified shark grins menacingly upon spectators—embodying the false and dangerous idea that humans can control nature. Hirst asserts dominance over one of the most feared animals, laughing in the face of Nature. Perhaps our modern era’s “sublime”-terror should be redefined by ceaseless colonization and the harrowing conditions of late capitalism.

Dread resides in the banal as well as our narcissistically gluttonous systems of consumption. Drunk on greed and ego, we have mistaken ourselves for gods, when we are actually monsters.

Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982, Los Angeles) imagines grotesque and ruinous landscapes of a human-centered world. He explores the complex interdependence between human and nonhuman life, between organic and artificial materials. Hooper Schneider’s mutations take shape in the form of terrariums and site-specific installations. For his large-scale installation at the Hammer Museum in 2019, Hooper Schneider imagined a dystopian junkyard in which organic and artificial materials coexist in a menacing entanglement. A plastic Costco size container of cheese puffs sits atop a mountain of cacti. A mangled shopping cart is engulfed by vegetation, its wheels reaching out as if gasping for air. Sneakers, toys and costume jewelry—once fleeting objects of desire—form a petrified litter of decay. Hooper Schneider’s defunct objects signify the headstones of late capitalism and their siting, nature’s ultimate triumph over humankind.

The inextricable bond between nature and culture, linked in a complex and tentacled web is considered in Hooper Schneider’s works. His background in landscape architecture and marine biology led him to challenge empirical scientific disciplines through art-making. He brings together concepts that have now become absurdly oppositional—nature and culture—as he examines sur-

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Kiyan Williams, Reaching Towards Warmer Suns, 2020; soil from Elmhurst, Queens, steel, gems, minerals, and crystals, 25 feet diameter, 6.5 feet high, photo by Mark DiConzo.

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“Hammer Projects: Max Hooper Schneider,” installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Sept 21,2019–Feb 2, 2020; ©Max Hooper Schneider and courtesy of High Art, Paris and Maureen Paley, London, photo by Jeff McLane.

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vival on multiple levels; micro and macro, human and nonhuman.

He asks, Who will inherit the earth? Will plastic relics of “human progress” haunt the planet when we finally perish?

Kiyan Williams (b. 1990, Newark, prefers their/they pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist who frequently utilizes what has now become their signature medium: soil. The earth is where we bury our dead, grow our food—a material of decay, rebirth and growth. Soil contains so many histories; some perhaps lost forever, and others lying just beneath the surface, ready to emerge.

Their work exists between the horrific and the cathartic.

Their large-scale sculpture Reaching Towards Warmer Suns (2020) is a group of 20 arms springing up from the earth and reaching towards the heavens, not unlike scenes of the dead rising from their graves found in countless horror movies. The hands make defiant fists, raise middle fingers, and gesture urgently, almost begging to be released from the earth of which they are composed and contained. These disembodied limbs are at once eerie, joyful and defiant; they recall the horrendous traumas of enslaved Africans, kidnapped and forced onto American soil, stripped of their identities, families and cultures. Standing more than six-feet tall, the arms are visceral, tragic and hopeful.

In their video piece Dirt Eater (2019) Williams wears a steel patinated punishment mask—a device once forced onto enslaved people who practiced geophagy (dirt-eating). As they remove the mask from against their mouth, it pulls at their hair,— they wince. They lick, suck and kiss the dirt figure in front of them, expressing lust and disgust as they chew and swallow the thick brown paste. They smear what resembles both mud and feces across their mouth, eliciting a response of attraction-repulsion.

Williams’ work evokes the horrors and violence inflicted upon enslaved ancestors. This violence has solid roots in American soil, passed down through generations like a festering wound that refuses to heal. Williams’ haunting imagery confronts the colonialist atrocities embedded within the American landscape and upon which modern American capitalist society is built. Blood has seeped into the lithosphere and absorbed

into the landscape. Williams’ work acts as a reminder of the violence embedded in the very ground we walk on, but also functions as a form of liberation from the traumatic shackles of the past.

New–York-based artist Hugh Hayden (b. 1983, Dallas) investigates our connection to the natural world, and the ways in which trees and organic materials carry traces of memory, survival and exploitation. For his 2018 show at Lisson Gallery in New York, Hayden’s carved objects of domesticity embodied the fantasy of the American Dream. A dining table, a picket fence, a crib and a stroller stand unusable. The wood’s smooth yet spiny skin seems threatening.

What should carry feelings of comfort and safety instead summons danger and fear, suggesting the violent price of the American Dream. Hayden sharply questions who is provided the opportunity to attain ownership and safety in America. His large-scale installation titled “Hedges,” exhibited at The Shed in New York in 2019, depicts an archetypal American home. Branches jut out ferociously from the pores of the wooden frame, alluding to the unruliness of nature and piercing the surrounding space. Throughout his work, Hayden uses environmental issues and organic materials to speak about his personal experience as a Black man in America.

Hayden exposes our complex interactions with the natural environment and the ways in which systems of oppression are tangled up in history, politics, economics and just about every facet of life. He explores multi-layered, multi-temporal, multi-species ecologies. America remains haunted by racist systems that condition and perpetuate the endless exploitation of bodies, land and resources. We exist in a constant struggle to respond to and define our relationship with the environment and each other.

As our collective home continues to perish, we might ask: who lives and who dies? What kind of radical transformation will enable cooperation and collaboration over dominance and control? A collective exorcism? Can we face our demons? How can the horrors of our reality help develop strategies of survival (for humans and nonhumans alike)? Until then, we remain afraid, very afraid.

Hugh Hayden, America, 2018, sculpted mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) on plywood, 43 1/8 x 80 7/8 x 80 7/8 inches.

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Organic Improvisations AUGUST 25 - SEPTEMBER 18, 2021

SHIRLEY ASANO GULDIMANN Noh Way Back

ELYSE WYMAN Caution

GARY POLONSKY

Atma

CARLOS BUITRAGO A Night On The Town

SHELLEY LAZARUS Ice Cream Time

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Nature As Infrastructure Hugo Hopping and The Winter Office

BY CLAYTON CAMPBELL

I became aware of LA artist Hugo Hopping in 2009, when his conceptual work appeared in the exhibition “Post American L.A.,” curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas for the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Since then his trajectory has taken him to base his practice between Los Angeles and Copenhagen, where he co-founded The Winter Office (TWO) with Johanna Ferrer Guldager.

TWO is an experimental and professional group of artists, curators, architects, designers and social scientists, who are exploring artistic and design interventions looking to uncover emerging solutions for a sustainable urban and natural infrastructure.

TWO’s theoretical and creative approach to architecture, urban planning and art is deeply enmeshed in the climate challenges of a warming world. Through a process of collaborative experimentation, TWO explores problem-solving through idea-sharing and research workshops, including rising housing inequality, economic displacement, houselessness and environmental disaster.

Hopping, with members of TWO, were back at 18th Street in 2019 for a residency. They developed a study of the cultural landscape of the surrounding urbanity and communities, including climate gentrification. TWO also presented at the Armory Center in Pasadena, with “Non-Perfect Dwelling,” a visual environment where urgent approaches to dwelling and cohabitation could be imagined and planned.

After quarantine in Copenhagen, Hugo Hopping is back in LA, doing advance work for TWO’s project, Nature As Infrastructure. Last year it was road-tested at the European Biennial Manifesta 13 in Marseilles, France. Their project is researching how to re-establish new connections to nature, rethinking a renewal of society, and inspiring the design of future public spaces by asking how to reintroduce nature into cities. Following a methodology they describe as the “creative practice of spatial justice,” TWO navigates from discourses of power and human survival to conversations of collaboration and thriving.

TWO’s and Hopping’s practical-theoretical research is being conducted in Frogtown’s Elysian Valley and will be a continuation of the forthcoming Nature As Infrastructure publication. It documents and describes their work on designing forests as a program element leading to the establishment of natural infrastructure. Hopping says, “Frogtown is a very special area walled by the 5 Freeway and the LA River, near urban parks and a sizable number of trees. However little or no sound walls or the use of trees to absorb the plastic and CO2 pollution is in place. The lines in the diagrams for the project suggest the interplay between full-grown tree canopies and shared cultivation models mixing public and private land to build a powerful natural infrastructure. Our study aims to understand this

Opposite page: TWO, Rewildering Holographic Weeds No. 2, 2020, cover for the new publication, Nature As Infrastructure.

Above: Research photos: Frogtown Elysian Valley.

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area in full in order to generate a near-future proposal that can involve public and private participation to help implement most of our suggestions.”

Perhaps a precursor to TWO’s work is articulated in Suzi Gablik’s thesis, The Re-Enchantment of Art (1991). It promoted reconstructive art practices with a basis in real-world solutions.

TWO’s work also brings to mind recent LA participatory environmental projects that were artist-centric. Mel Chin’s The TIE that BINDS: MIRROR of the FUTURE, a water conservation art project, was part of Los Angeles’ 2016 Public Art Biennial. Chin’s project began at the Bowtie, a parched stretch of land adjacent to the LA River in Atwater Village, where eight sample gardens were created. The project envisioned drought-resistant gardens planted throughout LA, reflecting a climate-appropriate collective-future landscape. Another inspirational project was by artist Lauren Bon. Her Not A Cornfield was a 2005 art project that transformed a 32-acre industrial brownfield into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. It was a wonderful breath of optimism and boosted public awareness that this area could be more than another industrial site, expediting the process of turning the site into a State Historic Park.

Nature As Infrastructure, along with the launch of TWO’s pub-

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lication about the project, discusses the importance of generating higher standards of spatial justice through the design of urban forests, along with new roles of citizen participation. LA as a laboratory for environmentally based social practice art is unique because the city embodies many of the climate change and climate justice extremes and challenges we face. Artists and thinkers like Hopping and TWO, who address these issues proactively, are on the leading edge of an evolving, collective 21st-century art and social science practice.

An advance look at TWO’s forthcoming publication can be seen at https://rssprss.net/product/nature-as-infrastructure-two/

Above:This second diagram image relates directly to what TWO plans to further theorize for Elysian Valley and that they hope citizens can buy into in practice and for full implementation.

OCTOBER 2 - DECEMBER 26, 2021

STRUCTURE Opening Reception

October 2, 2021 | 4 - 6 PM

Solo Exhibitions:

HK Zamani Cinta Vidal Jim Richard Kimberly Brooks Chelsea Dean Mela M Matjames Metson Collection Highlight:

Coleen Sterritt @LANCASTERMOAH

@MOAHLANCASTER

Lancastermoah.org | 661-723-6250 | 665 W. Lancaster BLVD, Lancaster, CA 93534

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FEAR AND AWE Zaria Forman Showcases Beauty and Fragility

BY ANNABEL KEENAN

Climate change is a crisis that we must all recognize and work together to mitigate. For artists engaging with climate content, their activism manifests in many different ways. Some choose to showcase the devastating evidence of global warming, while others highlight the beauty of the natural world. Part of the latter group, Brooklyn-based Zaria Forman has been engaging with the issue of climate change through her large-scale drawings depicting some of the most beautiful and powerful aspects of the environment, including towering glaciers, crashing waves and melting icebergs. Impeccable to the point of appearing photorealistic, her works are at once serene and turbulent. Using soft pastel applied directly to the paper with her fingers and palms, Forman captures moments that reveal the tenuous balance between nature’s grandeur and fragility, and serve as reminders of what we all stand to lose.

Forman began drawing the natural world at a young age, but it wasn’t until she experienced the impact of climate change firsthand that she grasped the severity of the crisis. In 2007, she took her first trip to Greenland and learned how changes to the ice fjords were challenging the lifestyles of Inuit locals. From then on, her work undertook a larger mission of addressing climate change. In the years since, Forman has traveled around the world to remote locations, even joining several of NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne missions, for which she flew over Antarctica, Greenland and Arctic Canada, mapping changes in the ice.

It’s on these trips, as well as her own expeditions and partnerships with organizations like National Geographic, that Forman gathers source materials. Traveling to locations that most people never have the chance to see, Forman takes thousands of photographs, which she uses along with memories of how she felt on-site to convey the same sense of awe to the viewer.

This sense of awe is perhaps best seen in her drawings of ice, the bird’s-eye-view works done on her trips with NASA, as well as those featuring close-ups of melting, weeping surfaces. In one powerful work titled Wilhelmina Bay No.2, Antarctica (2019), the artist has drawn an aerial view of a pristine, white iceberg partially submerged in deep blue water. Off to the side are fragments of ice, so faint they appear to be on the brink of melting away. The juxtaposition between the dense, solid iceberg with the tenuous fragments is a vivid reminder of the vulnerability of the natural world.

In other works, Forman showcases the immense scale of nature. In Cierva Cove, Antarctica No.2 (2017), Forman depicted a monumental cliff of craggy ice. The drawing is equally monumental, measuring 70 by 105 inches. The size of the drawing and Wilhelmina Bay No.2, Antarctica, November 23, 2018, 58 3/4 x 74 1/8 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2019.

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the foreboding position of the ice, towering over and jutting down towards the viewer, create an impression of incredible strength. Forman has carefully drawn the edges of the ice to convey movement, as if the wind is whipping off of the surface.

What comes through in Forman’s art is a sense of magnitude: that of nature’s beauty, and of nature itself.

Underscoring her work is the magnitude of the climate crisis. For many artists and activists, this magnitude— this weight—is an anxiety-inducing burden. Forman’s approach to the subject is refreshing and offers a necessary break from the more fearful representations of climate change, which are equally important but often

daunting. This is not to say that her art is cheerful, but rather her approach is sensitive and nostalgic, offering snapshots of the natural world at a particular, often fleeting, moment.

This balance between fear and awe was the subject of a recent group show at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey that featured Forman alongside artists James Prosek, Catherine Chalmers, Jeff Frost and Ted Kim. Pairing powerful representations of the devastating impact of the climate crisis with poignant yet beautiful images of nature, “Implied Scale: Confronting the Enormity of Climate Change,” was a compelling call to action. Included in the show was Forman’s Charcot Fjord, Greenland 66°21’7.21N 36°59’10.49W, April 22, 2017 (2018), a drawing that the artist completed as part of her work with NASA. Showing an aerial view of bright ice fragments floating in vast, deep blue water, the work is at once dramatic and beautiful. Toward the bottom of the drawing, a large iceberg with water pooling on its surface slowly melts as smaller pieces dissolve nearby, presenting a poetic harbinger of the iceberg’s fate. Though serene and simple, the scene captures the enormity of the phenomenon slowly unfolding below.

In addition to her activism as an artist, Forman also curated two exhibitions of climate-related art for National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions. Her first show, “Change,” launched in March of 2020 on National Geographic Endurance; her second exhibition, “res.o.lu.tion”, will be installed in October aboard the polar expedition ship National Geographic Resolution.

The artists in the exhibitions will join Curate Change, a network Forman founded for artists engaging with nature and the climate crisis as “a place for discourse and collaboration, where new projects, perspectives and solutions are born.” She is also a member of Artists Commit, a group that shares resources on how to make artists’ practices more sustainable and hold their galleries accountable to do the same.

Forman’s next trip will take her to Iceland, a place she’s visited before, but has not had the chance to draw since 2004. In many ways, reflecting on this last point may be superfluous. The changes to the natural world have accelerated in recent years, and the Iceland she saw in 2004 looked different from the Iceland of today.

Even places Forman visited just a few years ago, especially those where climate change has taken the greatest toll, no longer look the same. This sad truth is at the heart of the artist’s practice. The beauty of nature, as immense as it is, is fragile and ephemeral. We are continually approaching the point of irreparable damage, and we are all responsible for our collective future.

Charcot Fjord, Greenland 66°21’7.21”N 36°59’10.49”W, April 22, 2017, 90 x 60 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2018.

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EUGENE DAUB An ex hibitio n o f sculpture mo dels, m aq ue tte s and draw ings Pa l os Verd e s A rt Ce n t e r S ep t 25 – N o v 1 3 | pva rt ce n t e r. o rg

The Abandoned Sea

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

B U N K E R

V I S I O N

A real life John Waters movie: Still from Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, 2004.

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A term that has gained a lot of currency in the past couple of decades is “abandoned.” There are hundreds of social media accounts dedicated to abandoned things.

New websites and art books about them keep springing up.

Abandoned things from the mid-20th century are especially popular. Buildings that seemed futuristic when they were built now show signs of decay and are being reclaimed by nature. Much of this is spurred by economic conditions, but other examples are clearly the result of climate change.

One of the best examples of this is the Salton Sea. It was created in 1901 when an irrigation ditch was installed to create new farmland. Heavy rains caused the irrigation ditch to overflow in 1905, creating a body of water of 15 by 35 miles.

By the 1950s this body of water (in the middle of a desert) had become a hot new resort destination. Waterfront lots were prime real estate, and the climate was perfect for summer fun all year round. It was nicknamed The California Riviera. In the 1950s and ‘60s it attracted more tourists than Yosemite Park. By the 1970s the lake was shrinking. Chemicals from local farms were killing off the wildlife. The place began to reek of dead birds and fish.

Although many businesses and homes were abandoned, a surprisingly large population of eccentrics decided to stick it out. The whole setup was turning into a real-life John Waters movie, so when the time came to make a documentary about the place who better to narrate than the Pope of Trash himself?

Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea (2004) explores the history of the area. Comparing the vintage footage with the current reality is best summed up by Waters’ description of the area as “where Utopia meets dystopia.” One resident quips that it often hits 120 degrees there, “but that’s why we have air conditioners.” Given how deserted the place looks, it’s surprising that they still have the electricity to run them.

Another resident describes the place fondly as “The world’s greatest sewer.” Early on, another resident points out that the fishing is great: “the hotter the water, the better the fishing.” Cut to a second resident who remarks that eating those fish causes botulism.

The film proceeds at a leisurely pace as it introduces the audience to the people who chose to stay. One woman who looks like a suburban grandmother (in her suburban living room) offers that the Salton Sea is “more saltier” than the ocean and that swimming in the muck “heals your skin.”

We meet a lot of people along the way. Most of them are resigned to the current reality, but a surprising number of old timers hold out hope that the area will revive. The most colorful character is an old Hungarian freedom fighter who calls himself Hunky Daddy. Fans of Outsider Art will recognize Salvation Mountain. Leonard Knight began his project of building an artificial mountain in 1984. As of 2020 it was still standing. The film ends with the closing of the last diner in town. For fans of the abandoned aesthetic, the big surprise is how many people decided to stick it out.

The Silver Lake Reds

BY C. KAYE RAWLINGS

PR OV E N A N C E

Sketch, VDL House, by Richard Neutra.

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There’s no better way to procrastinate with your new pandemic dog than by bringing them to the dog park. And in Los Angeles, there is no shortage of beautiful locations to sweat under the merciless desert sun. One such haunt is the Silver Lake dog park, which abuts the two immense concrete basins making up the “Silver Lake Reservoir Complex:” the Ivanhoe and Silver Lake Reservoirs. Owned and maintained by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the two reservoirs once provided potable drinking water to some 600,000 Los Angeles residences, with the Ivanhoe Reservoir alone holding upwards of 795 million gallons of water at any given time. During its 1907 construction, the task of excavating an estimated 94,000 cubic meters of mud to house the reservoirs enraptured civil engineers from around the world, and provided a template for the later construction of the famed Panama Canal. It was not until the centennial in 2007, that the city was forced to drain these two feats of engineering due to a proliferation of carcinogenic pathogens. (Some of you may remember when, in 2008, the city filled the reservoirs with small black balls to quell the propagation of carcinogens, causing them to resemble oversized, Chuck E. Cheese–styled ball pits).

Unaware of the history that surrounds me daily, like most Angelenos, I had no idea that the reservoirs once provided water for a lion’s share of the city, nor that they were now defunct. All I knew was that, given its teaming with fashionably pajama-clad Eastsiders day and night, the Silver Lake dog park is considered “a scene.” Many visitors to Silver Lake may also be unaware that that their appropriately named neighborhood is home to the city’s most prolific collection of modernist housing. Looking out from the dog park in any direction, you’re sure to be staring directly at a home designed by one of LA’s best-known architects, including John Lautner, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain and numerous others. In fact, just across the street from the park’s Eastern edge are nine stunning domiciles

by Richard Neutra. The collection of Neutra homes in the area span the Southern California architect du jour’s career, with projects from the years 1948 to 1966. The homes are a testament to the architectural and political history that enlivens the dog park “scene,” amidst a small sliver of a community bursting with architectural marvels.

In the midcentury, Silver Lake and Echo Park were known by locals as “The Red Gulch,” being the preferred destination for the city’s thriving population of card-carrying Communists. The architecture is a direct result of the area’s political history, as “Reds” constructing houses around the man-made lake sought to construct projects that reflected their progressive political vision. Next time you’re at the dog park, come say hi (my dog is the one barking, due to her incessant FOMO), and be sure to look around at the architectural totems of a now quashed political coterie.

Luna Anaïs Gallery presents

Ithaca

Amanda Maciel Antunes September 10 - October 23

Artist Talk • October 10 • Moderated by Scarlet Cheng Tin Flats

1989 Blake Ave, Los Angeles

Luna Anaïs Gallery

www.lunaanais.com @lunaanaisgallery 323-474-9319

“QUEER COMMUNION” Ron Athey at the ICA Los Angeles

BY JAMIE MCMURRY

I’m on the freeway traveling through the San Fernando Valley to see the Ron Athey exhibition of art, documentation and ephemera called “Queer Communion” at the ICA in downtown Los Angeles. All of the LA tropes are in place: It’s a sunny and clear June day, the hills of Griffith Park are dry and brown, the plentiful commuters spawning upstream on the 5 all slow to see a majestic Honda engulfed in flames in its natural habitat. It’s all a beautiful sight for plague-weary eyes. Athey’s 40-year praxis along with his countless collaborators have a part in this exquisite corpse known as LA. Although Athey’s international reputation portrays his performances as extreme and on the bleeding edge of the fringe, this new-found institutional embrace of his work in an historical frame makes his densely conceptual ideas about art and existence more accessible than ever before.

Inside the ICA, the show, guest-curated by Amelia Jones, is smartly divided up into several thematic sections playing out like chapters in the Book of Ron. It works well as a complement to the publication of the same title edited by Jones and Andy Cambell.

There are sketches, personal effects, photos, posters, costumes, performance objects and of course documentation of several performance pieces. The themed section I encountered first is called “Religion and Family” and is the best place to begin the journey.

Amongst the very personal objects and documents are not only storyboards and writings, but also family photos and intimate relics that display a collage of the artist’s origins. “Religion and Family” opens for the viewer the often-sited early years of Athey’s work as an artist who has instinctively used his troubled biography as fuel for art-making. Included in this particular vitrine are posters and flyers from evangelical revivalists like Miss Velma and Dr. Lee Jaggers. For the viewer, this particular collection of life objects sews together a river with diverging flows. First is a young Athey with a hospitalized schizophrenic mother, missing an absent military father (Ron Sr.), raised by his maternal grandmother amongst Pentecostal extremists who search far and wide for radical religious zealots to learn from and to show to the young artist. Second is the compulsion to honor lineage while reinventing his own views of things like channeling spirits or fire and brimstone Evangelicalism.

Extracting the value of the ritual without the judgment, it seems as though he saw the power of the chosen family and the weakness of blind faith. A spiritually precocious young Athey was considered to be a promised child in this context and would jump up and shout out in tongues during tented revivals. Other parishioners would lay their hands upon him as a showing of respect to the Lord who had given Ron such gifts. Here, Jones makes visible the lifelong path Athey has laid out for himself in these early years, one of a loving leader in spirituality, here to guide other lost souls.

Joyce, a 2002 performance named after Athey’s mother, was presented in London and included collaborators Sheree Rose, Patty Powers, Lisa Teasley, Gene Gregorits, Taj Waggaman, Rosina Kuhn and the late Hannah Sim of Osseus Labyrint. The work is about the mad matriarchs that raised him, with each one depicted by varied on-stage performances while three channels

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Installation view, “Queer Communion: Ron Athey.” Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 19–Sept. 5, 2021, photo by Jeff McLane/ICA LA.

of projected video content portray harsher aspects of their personalities. The installation shows documentation from Joyce, and it also presents the original video content on its own, while very cleverly synchronizing it with its identical projected material in the documentation footage. This is the first place where the viewer will notice the use of older video monitors to overtly illustrate the difference between documents and live works, asserting that these are mere representations of the work and not an effort to replace the lived experience.

The next sections blend well together as the viewer is moved through the chapters in what Jones refers to as a recursive

chronology, where Ron often pulls from past experiences. With the section “Club/Music” we see the very early foundations of the artists’ compulsion towards the performative act, writing and most importantly finding like-minded communities to escape his past, and to survive the different waves of queer hate that became even more omnipresent during the early days of the HIV pandemic.

The most mindblowing thing to learn from this portion of the show is how truly original and diverse were the different lives that Ron was able to live. He and his boyfriend Rozz Williams lived together in Rozz’ parents house in Pomona not long before

Williams founded the band Christian Death. He began doing performances with Williams as Premature Ejaculation, and the venues for this work were already presenting all the post-punk bands alongside fetish nights and cabaret-style hot messes. Here he also took on the role of organizer and curator of sorts as he would mash together these floor shows with local artists like Vaginal Davis, Buck Angel, Catherine Opie and Bob Flanagan.

Into the ’90s, Athey continued with a similar strategy in the BDSM community. In these underground spaces Athey had again found a setting for his ideas and discovered the crossover that can exist as his work continued to evolve and expand. This expansion

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Top: Acephalous Monster (performance documentation), 2017, Performance Space 122, New York, November 14, 2017 (premiere), courtesy the Ron Athey Archive. Photo by Rachel Papo.

Bottom: Installation view, “Queer Communion: Ron Athey.” Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 19–Sept. 5, 2021, photo by Jeff McLane/ICA LA.

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attracted the attention of Jesse Helms, a senator from North Carolina. Helms took to the senate floor to yammer on sloppily while describing Athey as handsome and telling everyone about how Athey exposed a live audience to his HIV-positive blood. Inaccurate retellings spiraled out of control, leading to a Republican effort to defund the NEA—reactive cancel culture before it had a name. In truth, the performance 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life presented at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis, received the tiniest amount of NEA funding indirectly through the Walker Art Center. It was barely enough financial support to produce flyers for the show.

When looking at the mass of “Queer Communion” and the catalogue, the visitor can easily see Athey in the role of the guru, not just as someone who attracts followers, but as someone who creates safe spaces for communities to develop. In the guru’s truest form, his self-found and deep knowledge of a broad range of things like history, religious practices, philosophy and existentialism originates from an authentic provocateur, and followers seek that out.

Finally, the exhibition presents the viewer with objects and documents in a touching tribute to the groups of people that have circled around Athey in various capacities—collaborators, fans, lovers—a patriarch in the best possible sense of the word.

It’s easy to see this loving gesture as a “thank you,” but in fact it is Athey who has brought them to him as collaborators and supporters, and it’s hard to imagine the community coming together in the same way without him.

HOSTILE WITNESS 2021

LAD DECKER

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LADDECKER

F E AT U R E D

R E V I E W

Tanya Aguiñiga, Metabolizing the Border, 2020. Performance. Photo by Gina Clyne. Courtesy of the artist.

Intergalactix: against isolation/ contra el aislamiento Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

By India Mandelkern Step into “Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the first thing you’ll see is a largish, flattish, squarish stone smack in the middle of a white-walled room decked with wicker beds of tenon sculptures and wisps of fake vegetation. This is Objeto Antiguo, a near-replica of a real Mayan altar stone dating back to 200–900 C.E. The real deal still exists, but it’s far away (in this case, a guy’s backyard in rural Guatemala). That vast distance, between the two stones’ locations as well as the dates of their origins, is precisely curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar’s point.

The past is still with us, the piece suggests. Still active. Still sacred. Still folded into everyday life. Wander over to a stack of printed booklets beside the reception desk, and you can read about Objeto Antiguo in the indigenous Kaqchikel language. You can even cut out a miniature version from the booklet’s pages and assemble it like a paper doll. The DIY context charges Objeto Antiguo as a touchstone of sorts, linking peoples across the slippery, invisible borders dividing the present from the past.

Borders make up the theme of this challenging group exhibition, the product of more than four years of research. Drawing largely from art collectives collaborating across a constellation of disciplines

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Crack Rodriguez, Dream Team, 2021: Detail of The Fire Theory installation, Photo by yubo at OfStudio. Courtesy of collaborators and artists.

(performance, photography, video, sculpture), “Intergalactix” (the title is lifted from the Zapatista Army’s call for an all-planetary, coalition-building “Encuentro Intergaláctico” or “Intergalactic Gathering” in Chiapas to eradicate neoliberalism in 1996) uses this event as a launchpad to critique the isolation and violence that borders have inflicted on migrants throughout the American continent.

Physical borders, conceptual borders, temporal borders; you name it. Borders with a capital “B.”

R E V I E W S Shifting the exhibition’s conceptual fulcrum to a largely Indigenous experience was intentional for Quintanar: a means of decolonizing her knowledge, she says. Here in Los Angeles, it’s the US-Mexico border that often first comes to mind. This isn’t to diminish its importance to the exhibition. In Metabolizing the Border (2020), Tijuana-raised, Los Angeles-based artist Tanya Aguiñiga dons a Sonoran-hued neoprene bodysuit and armors herself in surreal, anatomically-inspired objects made of hand-blown glass––headgear, footwear, hollow yokes filled with water, a mouthpiece flecked with corroded fragments of the infamous wall––to ceremonially tread the border’s length. The post-apocalyptic camp of her getup calls out the extreme, even extraterrestrial perils that the journey entails.

As you move deeper into the gallery, the borders sink southward, and you start to realize that their impact on the North American diaspora is more complex than the view from 150 miles away. After all, most migrants to the United States have crossed other borders before. At first glance, the varied colors and textures of the soils showcased in Melissa Guevara’s map of the Americas, Testimonies of the paths that marked the flight (2020–21), seems to hammer in the basic point that no two borders are alike. Study it longer, and you notice that the nations that see the most border crossings are artificially swollen in size, subtly distorting the map’s scale.

Nor are all border crossings equal. Moving southwards is much easier than moving northwards, El Salvadoran artist Crack Rodriguez points out in They don’t take my dream (2021), a happening-qua pick-up-soccer game played on the astroturf field in MacArthur Park. That piece of turf, already known for being uneven, isn’t the only way that Rodriguez toys with the game’s rules. One team has seven players. The other has six. One side can score into a standard soccer goal. The other has to make do with a slim opening between the ground and a felled basketball hoop. In Dream Team (2021), the accompanying installation, Rodriguez displays both goals, netted with hand-hewn webs of twine and feathers, as a caustic reminder that “shooting a dream” has slimmer chances of success when shooting in a northern direction.

“Intergalactix” delights in this kind of highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary, boundary-pushing social commentary, a curatorial outlook that’s very much in LACE’s wheelhouse. Yet Quintanar pays homage to the gallery’s history in more ways than one. The exhibition terminates in the so-called Intergalactix Station, where a display of slides and photographs link the exhibition to antecedents in the gallery’s past. You can learn about an interdisciplinary performance about undocumented migrations to Los Angeles organized in 1991. You can also learn about a multimedia labyrinth depicting life in war-torn El Salvador staged in 1981. You may end up leaving “Intergalactix” with a fleeting realization similar to the one you had when you first saw that Mayan altar stone: a glimpse of peoples from all time periods, around the world, who’ve likely never met, yet are fighting for the same things.

HK Zamani PRJCTLA

By Max King Cap Not front of house, with its symmetrically billeted art objects reflecting in its polished concrete floor, these rawboned works by HK Zamani are arrayed deep in the back, in a brick and concrete garage, its loading dock and ramp illumined by dangling warehouse floodlights. And it is exactly where they belong, because pretty they ain’t.

While there are only four works presented, Inadvertent Protagonists I, II, & III, and Fashion Erasures (all 2021) the exhibition is an enveloping and disconcerting experience. All are large; the slightest dimension of Inadvertent Protagonists is an 8-feet width, while Fashion Erasures, a series of 39 smaller works little more than 45-inches

high, is 11-feet wide. The latter is a series of framed figures, magazine layouts with the imprimatur of high-end couture; yet these figures of fashionista idolatry, once envied and beatified, are transformed in Zamani’s cameos. These icons of desire and emulation have been distorted, becoming abominations of their former selves, misshapen silhouettes of the beastliness within that we so desperately fear confessing. The beautiful models have been transformed into horned and blackened cutouts, tentacled creatures with fins for ears, razors as elbows, pickaxes for tongues. Arranged as they are, like a series of film stills, they suggest a disturbing Muybridge or broken zoetrope, and in this metamorphosis names like Galliano, Valentino and Gucci become Manticore, Basilisk and Chimera. The artist suggests that we see ourselves, our true and unglamorized selves, as part of this shameful vanity, and realize our presumedly well-deserved desires as little more than a humbug.

HK Zamani, “Fashion Erasures,” 2021. Photo By Carl Berg. Courtesy PRJCTLA.

The Inadvertent Protagonists, three larger works on unmounted canvas, are even more fearsome yet. Scraped and weathered, these paintings—a moniker they might dispute—release their shadows to crawl along the crackled floor toward the viewer as if eagerly bearing a message. Each one is a deformed triptych, a sandwiched cut-out of a painting in shallow relief. Two layers of canvas are devised into three, each contrastingly painted. The top layer has been scissored and folded over to reveal blackened profiles, far more ominous than those seen in Fashion Erasures, and these “shadows” appear eager to envelop the spectator.

Protagonists II and III lie on the floor and give the impression of the long remnants oozing inexorably forward, while Protagonists I is wall-mounted and its figures appear to have fallen forward with an almost audible slap, exhausted and resting in anticipation of the bell that signals the next round. In each work the painted surface is raw and scraped, their colors faded and mottled, and each creature/figure/memory/shadow seems locked in irrevocable conflict with its partner/opponent/reflection/distortion.

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R E V I E W S The theatricality of the installation makes for a stunning experience as the artwork and its setting could not have been more suitably paired; grim and bleak have combined to summon a visual and sensory experience rarely found in the anodyne and moneyed ambience of the art gallery. The cement floor echo and the aged crumbling brick have assembled a chorus for painting stripped bare.

Kandice Williams; JPW3 Night Gallery

By Emily Babette “Eurydice,” Kandis Williams’ film and solo exhibition is a work that, once experienced, retains the power to alter one’s perceptions, a power that continues to linger. Both aesthetically graceful and experimental, the central part of the exhibition is a 20-minute, 2-channel video installation of poetic dissidence. It situates itself

temptation of gazing at her and by breaking his vow seals Eurydice’s fate to an eternity in the underworld.

Concurrently at Night Gallery is the solo painting show and outdoor sculptural installation Root-Bound by JPW3. The paintings are installed in a separate gallery from Williams’ work but remain impacted by the music permeating throughout the gallery space.

The oil pastel paintings are thick with dense mark-making in a 1970s color palette, and combine organic and geometric forms. The deep, pigmented pastel is confidently applied to wood panel, creating psychedelic landscapes of the macro and/or micro world.In the outdoor sculpture garden are JPW3’s Season 6 (Episodes 4–6), three large triangular steel prisms grounded by a mound of dirt and grass.

They seem like dystopian alien portals, vanquished by time on Earth, yet incidentally becoming the seeding-bed for new life and new hope. This search for new hope is what ultimately ties together the two emotionally charged exhibitions.

Kengo Kito Japan House

By Genie Davis

Kandis Williams, Eurydice, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

around a loose narrative—a hero’s journey of sorts—and follows a Black male performer as he traverses space and time, appearing in numerous and varied performance situations.

Projected onto two large screens that intersect at slight angles, the installation grants the viewer an immersive experience. An original musical score ties all the pieces together, emanating from the installation and playing throughout the exhibition. The haunting melodic music, combined within the vast and tenebrous gallery, transforms it into a sacred space, one that ushers the viewer into an altered state of mind.

Eurydice (2021)is a compilation of raw material which has been captured by various crew members over multiple locations: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Berlin and Montreal. Some of the footage is higher definition and more skillfully captured than others; the majority appears to have been shot in-situ on smartphones, making the final edit a collage of different angles, perspectives and circumstances.

From an urban rooftop with an LA-highway backdrop to a professional theatrical production in a cathedral-like venue, our hero/ performer arrives, moves and captivates. Not only are we visually consuming the performer over the course of the 20 minutes, but we are witness to his consumption by the various audiences for whom he is performing.

The viewer’s gaze and consumption of the Black male body can be felt viscerally and emotionally, mirroring the myth of the musician Orpheus who is allowed to liberate his dead wife Eurydice from eternity in the underworld but commanded by Hades not to look back as she follows him into the light. Yet Orpheus succumbs to the

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Through his glorious tangle of color and motion Kengo Kito has offered an oversized ravel of joy with Reconnecting (2021) a fascinating and immersive installation of hula-hoop spirals that fill the gallery and immerse the spectator. On view at Japan House in Hollywood, it is a delightful antidote to the divisions and lockdowns of 2020.

For this site-specific installation the Japanese artist has chosen neon-colored hula hoops as his sculptural medium. Kito opens the hoops and links them end-to-end in brilliantly colored coils. Yet the work presents them not as mere tangles—they are an enveloping wriggle, as if part of a living organism—its sinews, its veins, its connective tissue.

The exhibition unfolds in halves. Portions of the work are in both the front window and an area visible within the store, among books and information referring to the work and its ideas. Videos offer a detailed look at the complex process involved in creating the installation, which due to the pandemic was created remotely. In positioning each element Kito operated the visual technology that directed

Kengo Kito, Reconnecting, 2021. Courtesy Japan House.

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R E V I E W S US-based installers. After this engrossing introduction the viewer enters the main installation, at the end of a wide U-shaped gallery.

The artist says the work is his response to a “yearning to reconnect” experienced by individuals isolated over the last 18 months.

His first exhibition in the US, the work revels in its interconnected theme as well as Kito’s use of repurposed, common objects. He also explores Japanese philosophic concepts as this work creates “a visual expression of the idea that our world is made up of “connections.” Shaping long lines from the opened hula hoops, Kito forms varied circles, arcs and twists that cross and intersect. The large-scale exhibition seems to vibrate with life, as if the opened hoops spiraled energy through their conduits.

On a prosaic level, audiences may simply enjoy the candy colors and interplay of a gallery filled with vivid plastic shapes and how much space remains—enhanced through mirrors at the far end of the expansive main gallery—waiting to be filled and fulfilled by the additional connective energy of viewers’ presence. Conversely, along with a sense of vibrating energy, the installation also exudes a sense of quiet wonder. Kito refers to traditional Zen Buddhist beliefs: the circle is both whole and empty. Contemplating emptiness is not about loneliness, rather, but about receptivity, of waiting to be full.

Kito makes it easy to consider this contemplative notion while still serving up an engaging, involving, and just plain fun installation—and the resonance of simply being alive that forms connection between all living things. In viewing the massive work, which employs more than 2,000 hula hoops, one can almost forget that the hoops are merely plastic coils and not alive themselves.

Did the artist perhaps, in creating the installation, imbue them with a kind of kinetic lifeforce? Or maybe that is simply the viewer’s imagination.

Leo Mock M+B Doheny

By Jody Zellen Leo Mock’s oil stick, oil and charcoal paintings are imaginative hybrids that distort the recognizable elements found in the natural landscape into something fantastic and surreal.

Through six large-scale paintLeo Mock-2021-What Is It About Them ings, viewers are taken on a jourI Must Be Missing Something, 2021.

Courtesy the artist and M+B. Photo by ney to an unknown world. PreviEd Mumford. ously, Mock’s landscapes were filled with disembodied legs— awkward linear forms that signed for a human or animal presence in unfamiliar settings. In his exhibition, “Who cares that it makes flowers,” these appendages either bisect the canvases as colored “zips” (à la Barnett Newman) or allude to entities with exceptionally long feet and legs in the form of the letter “L” traversing the picture plane. Created in both Mérida, Mexico, and Los Angeles during the year of COVID19, the paintings reflect the dystopic and unsettling atmosphere brought on by the pandemic. These seascapes and semi-naked vistas possess the loneliness of that recent and yet incomplete isolation, by suggesting empty shores that are anything but pacific, filtered through the glowing colors and ocean vistas of Mexico and California.

Although Mock portrays unpopulated worlds, the paintings evoke human emotions. In But Memories are uncertain friends (all

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works 2021) two solid black circles are attached to thin black lines that angle across the composition, alluding to heads and bodies.

One circle rests below the other on the right edge of the canvas, evoking a gesture of love or longing. Behind is a sepia-toned landscape in thirds—white at the bottom, black in the middle, and a tan to deep brown gradient at the top. The scene is filled with shapes that suggest both rocks and clouds, and has a post-apocalyptic aura.

The only horizontal work in the exhibition, Who cares that it makes flowers, is the most humorous. Here, empty overlapping pink-toned thought bubbles ascend from cream-colored clouds (or perhaps rocks) that float in a pitch-black sea below a deepgreen horizon line. Again, the composition is strangely bisected by a brown line that extends from the top to the bottom of the painting and subdivides it into two uneven sections.

“What is it about them? I must be missing something”elicits an ocean speckled with regimented whitecaps or birds skimming the green surface. Again, the composition is divided into horizontal bands: a row of yellowy green clouds above, and a pea-soup middle of green sky. Below is a brown band embodying ground. A royal blue “L” hugs the left and bottom edges of the painting—the leg of a gigantic creature venturing through this disconcerting and irregular landscape.

Though lush and beautifully rendered, Mock’s off-kilter landscapes feel familiar, yet impossible. Whether an imagined future or an ancient past, Mock infuses them with a jarring presence. The unknown trespassers through the works leave no trace, and these fantastical worlds of clouds, rocks, sky and sea defy logic. They are calming and foreboding places that transcend reality—off-putting and inviting, simultaneously.

Rosy Keyser parrasch heijnen

By John David O’Brien From an ultramarine field, a glyph emerges. It is the shape of something, human or animal, and it appears to pirouette in the center of the canvas. Drawing closer reveals other marks scratched into the surface of the blue, or small fragments embedded in the field. One slowly becomes aware that these perturbations are either substances added to the waxed canvas or etched into the color’s surface.

The entire scene is rendered through a viewer’s active re-creation of the process through which it was created. Minute details are revealed in the larger overall painting, informing us of the need to move back and forth between further away and closer up.

The work in Rosy Keyser’s exhibition entitled “ARP 273”(named after a of pair of interacting galaxies in the constellation Andromeda, 300 million light years away) is mostly compelling. In the vigorously titled RoughRosy Keyser, Earliest Camouflage, 2021. shodder (2021), the work Courtesy of parrasch described above, the inheijnen, Los Angeles. teractions are conveyed

R E V I E W S to the viewer almost viscerally. It has a forceful tension, both visual and material, and delivers to the viewer a virtual schematic of the artist’s process and labor. Her contemporary methods follow the older traditions of process art, where the physicality, procedure and materials are the substance of the art itself—her paint, cast corrugated panels, steel, horsehair and sawdust are the substance and the subject. Additionally, the process of making the work is governed by the notion that everything begins and stops when and where it occurs, not by excessively or overtly composing elements within the work. The success of a process work depends on the believability of these parameters.

The exhibition’s most successful works are the most restrained and nearly monochromatic. In Window Swap (2020) the combination of oil,enamel and paper coalesce into an image of an unfurling. In its suspended field of whites, off-whites and grays, there is a larval-like shape set near the center of the canvas that reveals a mane of hair creeping out around the side and top, and the imagination strains to envision something occurring just out of reach.

In Earliest Camouflage (2021) a triangular slice of canvas—painted on both sides—falls forward to reveal the wooden cross-brace that supports the work’s slashed surface as well as the structural and commercial reality of the gallery wall behind it.Yet it is so heavily reiterated by the complementary colors from the front and back of the canvas that it overstates its portent, becoming a theatrical and didactic exercise.

Overall, Rosy Keyser’s yeomanly material wrangling is evident in the body of work and communicates the power of her rough-andtumble art-making process to the viewer’s intuitive grasp.

Nari Ward Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

By Richard Allen May III Installation—often understood as the act of locating, positioning and inserting—has, in Nari Ward’s exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles, intersected with the examination of founding American democratic principles. This combination of past works and contemporary gestures instigates a conversation about the reality of the Westernized world view and its attendant assumptions—plantation, colonization and annexation.

His work Say Can You See (2021), also the title of the exhibition, shows commodified surveillance disguised as freedom as it waves its message. Its title borrowed from the first stanza in America’s national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner (1814), foreshadows a visceral dialogue with viewers. Studded with 6000 white plastic security tags, a towering American flag drapes against a wall and cascades along the floor toward the viewer, suggesting that there are those who are waved to enter and others who are stopped at the door. In light of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and storming of the nation’s Capitol, Ward’s material is a thematically potent choice.

The connotation of white security tags evokes safety and protection while simultaneously questioning historical privilege connected to the social construct of whiteness. Like such contemporaries as June Edmonds, whose acrylic Allegiances and Convictions paintings series (2018-19) reinterpreted the meaning of this patriotic symbol, and Rodney McMillian’s mixed-media work, Flag (2002), Nari Ward contributes to the discourse surrounding Old Glory as artifact and artifice.

Roll Jordan Roll (2021) references the name of the 19th century black spiritual sung by enslaved Africans who worked on plantations in Southern states. Written by the English cleric Charles Wesley, the popular song was used as a colonizing tool by white slaveholders, compelling their chattel in conversion to Christianity. It was instead subverted by the enslaved as a weapon of agency. Using shoelaces like hanging needlepoint, Ward has

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Nari Ward, Iron Heavens, 1995. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.

written the song’s title on the wall, and the billboard appearance begs to be read. The laces, dripping like Spanish moss from the Southern live oak or the Italian cypress, sadly summons another song, “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday where she sings of the horrors of lynching.

Employing oven pans, ironed cotton and burnt baseball bats, Ward has assembled Iron Heavens (1995). Appearing like a sacrificial altar to be wept over or worshipped at, this installation speaks of servitude and violence, as well as sports being a cultural metaphor for war. After all, in baseball there are winners, losers and cheaters.

Meticulously laying the bats in groups like rifles against the square iron wall suggests that the game is over. But racism in America is always a double-header.

Ultimately, Nari Ward’s body of work initially entices then provokes, asking us to see beneath and beyond what society has been taught to say and we taught to believe. Each work is unflinching in its aggression. Ward’s message invites receptive viewers to repeat what James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond composed in the Black National Anthem: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.

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R E V I E W S

Nick Dong USC Pacific Asia Museum

By Shana Nys Dambrot In his kinetic objects and interactive environments, Nick Dong combines the simple, fractal serenity of Buddhist design with the quirky warmth of Victorian curio cabinets, as well as a refined yet theatrical sense of surprise. Across a handful of discrete objects and three walk-in installations, “Divine Immersion” crescendos along a deliberate path, engineered for impact on the mood and psyche.

Dong speaks about the need for philosophical if not overtly spiritual forms of communication, as we as a society and as individuals emerge from a prolonged period of danger and isolation—and it is his intention with this exhibition to offer such transformation to all who desire it. At certain transcendent moments, he succeeds.

enchantment. The artist promised an energy realignment, a sense of peace. That’s a lot to ask of sculpture, no matter how lovely. What it does deliver in spades is pure delight—what you do with your improved mood is entirely up to you.

Mario Giacomelli The Getty

By Colin Westerbeck The very model for a great photographer in the post-World War II era was Henri Cartier-Bresson, a cosmopolitan heir to a fortune who was a co-founder of the photographic cooperative Magnum and traveled the world taking photographs with his hand-held Leica camera. His is one of the best-remembered names in the history of photography. Mario Giacomelli was another photographer who rose to fame in the 20th century, making photographs with a 35-millimeter camera similar to Cartier-Bresson’s. But, that aside, he was completely unlike Cartier-Bresson because he spent his whole career photographing life in the little Italian hill town of Senigallia, where he was born.

Installation view of Heaven, 2019, Nick Dong. Photo by Nick Dong. Courtesy USC Pacific Asia Museum

The first room appears as if a domestic salon took a trip through the looking glass to the Far East. Pieces of hearty furniture—a dining room chair, a vanity table, a grandfather clock, a side table—have been interfered with in the most intriguing ways. On the seat of the chair three small sculptural objects rest, white biomorphic shapes covered in ink-drawn scrimshaw patterns. Moved by unseen forces, the objects slowly spin and shimmy. The gentle surrealism piques a slightly altered state of mind, so it is not unexpected when the delicate flame-like petals of the golden sphere on Vanity (2021) start to sway. The rest of the sculptures softly perform; the viewer has entered a seemingly familiar world where bits of ordinary magic are not only possible but expected.

The one-person-at-a-time immersive chamber Heaven (2019) is an analog spectacular. It’s tempting to think about Kusama’s “Infinity Rooms,” but at the same time, this hand-made environment is not really about illusion. There’s no “How did he do it?” It’s plain to see how it’s made of metal leaves, ring lights and mirrors, and that is the point. Like the sculptures before and the other room-sized works ahead, Heaven is both luxuriously gorgeous and grounded in the familiar. Dong’s talent for elevating commonplace materials into vessels of magic, mindfulness and evolution is not only rather awe-inspiring, but contains a rich set of metaphors as to how each of us, as we go about our daily lives, might choose to be aware of the potential splendor of everything we touch and take for granted.

After a spellbinding room of viewer-activated singing meditation bowls, the last piece is the most operatic, with the energy of a finale.

Becoming Horizon (2021) is essentially a metal mesh suspended between four posts, with lights, and a silver dancing flicker shape in the center. But its effect—below the “horizon” is an opulent cascade of golden light, falling and accumulating like snowflakes or autumn leaves; above, a sparkling nebula of gathering clouds. Its artifice being apparent in no way lessens, and in fact heightens, the

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Mario Giacomelli, Scanno, No. 52, 1957/59. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum.

Curator Virginia Heckert has organized a lifetime exhibition of Giacomelli’s work, on view at the Getty Museum until October 10. Despite his relative isolation in this town on the Adriatic coast, Giacomelli used photography as the kind of universal language it can be at its best. After his father had died when he was only nine years old, he left school in 1936, at age 11. Fortunately, a townsman later gave him the money to open his own printshop, with which he supported himself for the rest of his life.

He didn’t begin taking photographs until he was 30, in 1955, when he bought a used Kobell camera. While the fixed rituals of life in Senigallia went on as before, his life was changed once he had that camera in his hands. Nevertheless, Giacomelli’s career as a photographer was in some ways typical of the make-do solutions to problems that are characteristic of an isolated little town like Senigallia. Before he could use the second-hand Kobell camera, he had to adapt it to a Voigtländer lens. It was a unique camera that he had, as he put it, “cobbled up.”

In her wall texts for the exhibition, Heckert makes a great deal of Giacomelli’s relationship with Italy’s “postwar Neorealist film and Existentialist literature.” Did he acculturate himself in such postwar influences, or did the postwar intelligentsia just adopt him? Heckert makes a clear case for the former, despite which I’d like to believe the latter. Either way, with his raw, grainy photography he created a masterpiece appropriate to the harsh culture fixed in time that he documented.

15 Y E A R S I N P R I N T

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LA Fall Preview Highlights 2021

California African American Museum LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze September 8, 2021–March 20, 2022

The Getty Center

Fluxus Means Change: Jean Brown’s Avant-Garde Archive September 14, 2021–January 2, 2022

Hammer Museum No Humans Involved

October 10, 2021–January 9, 2022

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Lorna Simpson: Everrrything September 14, 2021–January 9, 2022

Japanese American National Museum Miné Okubo’s Masterpiece: The Art of Citizen 13660 August 28, 2021–February 20, 2022

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Obama Portraits Tour

Los Angeles County Museum of Art Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. March 20–July 17, 2022

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep July 1, 2021–February 21, 2022

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor September 12, 2021–June 6, 2022

Museum of Latin American Art

Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective July 2021–January 2022

Norton Simon Museum Unseen Picasso

September 3, 2021–January 10, 2022

November 7, 2021–January 2, 2022

Clockwise from left: Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Forever), 2017, Amorepacific Museum of Art (APMA), Seoul, installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2017–18, photo by Timo Ohler, courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers; Judy Baca, Absolutely Chicana; Pipilotti Rist, Eindrücke verdauen (Digesting Impressions), 1993, video installation. photo by Walter/Spehr. © Pipilotti Rist, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine; Jennifer Packer, Idle Hands, 2021, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, Corvi-Mora, London.

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Walt “Wali” Neil

Meditation Illustrations

P O E M S

Dostoevsky Takes a Selfie

BY CLINT MARGRAVE

A S K

B A B S

LABELS FOR ARTISTS

HELLO my name is

I’m not surprised to find him in the underground, but I am surprised to find him in L.A. He sits across from me on the metro in shorts and tennis shoes, taking a selfie.

I want to ask him what he’s doing here.

Too much sun for so much beard.

Then again, as a writer of the dispossessed, the clinically insane, the suicidal, it just might be the place.

Take It Easy

BY JOHN TOTTENHAM

I’ve never been to Heaven, but I’ve been to Oklahoma.

Played For The Good Times fifty times in a row, then pissed on the jukebox.

Smeared my blood against a white picket fence, and left town.

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Dear Babs, Certain grants, contests, programs, and such ask me to define myself as an “emerging” or “established” artist.

How does one decide which label fits?

—Dick in Del Mar Dear Dick, Other fields have terms for newbies. Professional baseball players—and cops—are rookies; recently credentialed doctors are residents, and fresh-faced lawyers are associates.

However, unlike these professions, the art world’s term “emerging” isn’t exactly institutionally prescribed; one must claim it for oneself.

Typically an emerging artist is someone who is just beginning a career. A good example is an artist who recently graduated from school, usually an MFA program. They typically have not had a solo show, are not represented by a gallery, and are generally unknown to the art world they seek to inhabit. There’s a kind of freedom to being an “emerging” artist in that you are not tied to a set body of work; no one expects you to make anything in particular.

The reason nonprofits, curators, galleries and museums ask for you to label yourself as “emerging” when applying for scholarships, juried exhibitions and other opportunities is because they are looking for new talent, fresh ideas and unseen work. Unfortunately, “emerging” is also code for “younger” artist, though it’s certainly possible for artists to “emerge” at an older age.

On the other hand, “established” artists have staked out a claim to their little part of the art world. They have exhibited their work extensively—hopefully including museum exhibitions—in solo and group shows organized by influential curators, have sold work to known collectors and/or institutions, had their work covered by recognized critics, and are generally “known” for making the work they make. It’s unclear if an “established” artist can fall so far out of the spotlight that they once again become an “emerging” artist; once you’re out, you’re out. Perhaps the opposite of “emerging” in this sense is “submerging,” an artist who finds themselves sinking further and further into professional obscurity.

One issue with these terms is they imply that the goal is to be “established.” But isn’t it the job of young upstarts to upend the establishment? No matter where you are in your career, it’s more productive to consider yourself constantly “emerging.” Doing so inoculates against the pressure to have a one-track career; it’s okay to meander in and out of notoriety, fad and fame. Instead, make your own labels and work along a path you chart for yourself.

October 9 – December 11, 2021 Hair-pulling Between Good and Evil

Betwixt and/or Between

Curated by Christopher Velasco and Dakota Noot

Organized by John David O'Brien

Christine Morla, Floating Sleeping Mats, 2000 to present

Alexis Zoto, Mashallah in N. Macedonian, 2020

View the virtual exhibition or schedule an appointment at angelsgateart.org/galleries

WE ARE OPEN! Visit molaa.org

August 22, 2021 - January 2022

July 2021 - January 2022

November 13, 2021

Guest Curator Alessandra Moctezuma and MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga

2021 MOLAA Gala 25th anniversary and honoring: Judy Baca, Jaime Jarrín, and The Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Judy Baca project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.

Additional support was provided by Bank of America, the Pasadena Art Alliance, and the Employee Community Fund of Boeing. In-kind support has been provided by the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).

MOLAA is generously supported, in part, by the Robert Gumbiner Foundation, and by a grant from the City of Long Beach and the Arts Council for Long Beach.

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FIVE WOMEN SOLO EXHIBITIONS

October 20 - November 13, 2021 Opening Reception Oct. 23, 5-9 pm

TAG Gallery

5458 Wilshire Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90036 taggallery.net @taggallery (323) 297 - 3061

GIANNA VARGAS

LYNNE RUSSO

SUNNY H. KIM

SUNHEE JOO

JENNETTE NEARHOOD

Patricia Watts is the founder and curator of ecoartspace. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Tewa people.

ARTILLERY: What was the crucial purpose in founding ecoartspace?

PATRICIA WATTS: When I came up with the concept for eco­artspace in 1997, I envisioned it as a physical space where children and their families could learn about the principles of ecology through immersive environments created by artists. In its latest iteration since 2020, it functions as a global membership platform online where artists and scientists can learn about each other’s work, share resources and develop collaborations.

How do you gauge the efficacy of art that promotes ecological awareness/change? Is it functioning within its own silo or reaching mainstream culture? How do you know when it’s having its intended effect?

A majority of eco-artists are painters, sculptors and video artists.

Their work is accessible for collectors, although galleries do not typically represent community arts practitioners or artists whose work is researched-based, collaborating with scientists. These artists, who are usually situated in the public sphere, have to seek support from foundations. I believe the full range of art-making practices keeps the conversation alive.

An art world focused on careerism and commodification, [and] environmentalism centered on activism and communal goals can be opposed in their aims. What kind of balance is necessary between environmental ethics, aesthetics and personal achievement?

Artists need to make a living, and art dealers connected with collectors can educate about artists concerned about the natural world.

What would it take for artists and dealers to turn collectors away from work that has nothing to do with the reality we are facing today, to support art that makes a statement about the impacts humans have on the landscape? We need to be bold, stand up to those with disposable income to encourage an eco-consciousness.

Patricia Watts INTERVIEWED BY CONSTANCE MALLINSON

R E C O N N O I T E R

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What are the critical dialogue(s) that eco-artists need to address today?

We’ve gone beyond warning people about climate change—that it’s coming. It’s here, and people know it. If they are still in denial, they’re belligerent because they don’t want to change their habits or be responsible financially. Many eco-artists have followed the research for 20 to 30 years now and know that behavioral changes are imperative for our survival. While government leaders try to address climate politically, the real solutions are on the ground, regenerating soils, protecting forests and oceans—more in the realm of activism. However, traditional artists can help create more activists, which is desperately needed.

What does the future of ecological-based art depend on?

It depends on people with money who care about the natural world, who are willing to invest in programs that will rebuild our soils, support creative people who can imagine and make a real future where we do not depend on fossil fuels. We need innovative thinkers who can see the potential for artists, divergent thinkers, to play a role in this transition to a livable future.

January 2021 at the Reserva de la Biósfera Santuario Mariposa Monarca, Michoacán Mountains, Mexico, Photo by Anna Marie Garrett.

What are your outstanding accomplishments?

I’ve focused on art and ecology since 1992, almost 30 years. I’ve worked with hundreds of artists, mainly in California, and have assembled over 30 art and nature exhibitions. I’ve conducted video interviews with 30 pioneering ecological artists. There are not many curators that have had this focus for so long.

JOY RAY

GHOST CHAPTERS OCTOBER 8-31, 2021

SHOCKBOXX PROJECT 636 Cypress Ave., Hermosa Beach CA shockboxxproject.com @shockboxx.project @joyrayart

September 14, 2021–January 2, 2022

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