Digital Art Happening

In April there was a moment when Yours Truly realized we were finally, at long last, emerging from the pandemic that has shut us in for over a year. It was Saturday night, and we were lured downtown by “LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light,” a one-night art happening of digital art projected onto building walls in DTLA. During COVID-time I’ve driven through these streets on various missions, and they were so empty it was apocalyptic. But tonight, lower Broadway was percolating with barhoppers and diners and, as darkness fell, art fans and those who had been pent up too long.

Sarah Rara, Perfect Touch, 2021, photo by Scarlet Cheng

We started our rounds a little before the 7:30 official time—first stop was Sarah Rara’s “Perfect Touch 2021.” In a parking lot at 11th and South Olive, there was towering projection equipment and a handful of people, including guards and tech who were running the show. It was dusk, and we were told there was another half of the piece on the “other” side of the building—that is on the other side of the block. By the time we returned to look at the first piece again, it was dark, and there was now a crowd enjoying the sight of gigantic hands playing cat’s cradle—the string burning with light—and a voice reading a poem so aptly addressed to this strange, strange year: “The year of distance, the year of loss, the lost year,” the woman intoned, “The year of acknowledging fragility, interconnectedness.”

I think we will soon be seeing more work about what we’ve been through. It’s been a traumatic time, our shared annus horribilis—and we need to work it out through art: all forms of art, including writing and performance. And it was not only disease that captured us, but also a megalomaniac in power and his minions, bent on destroying the fabric of our civil life.

That night in DTLA we saw mesmerizing op-arty work by Nancy Baker Cahill and cascading images by Carole Kim, and a couple others. By 9 PM there were throngs of people on the sidewalks moving from site to site—mostly young and mostly elated to be out and about. Around us, new buildings were sprouting on nearly every block, some finished, others almost finished. What’s so surprising is that many are residential, housing for the new DTLA Urbanites. For some, the evening had just begun.

Installation photograph, Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2020, art ©Yoshitomo Nara, photo ©Museum Associates/LACMA.

LA Museums (Finally) Reopen!

Museums also began to announce their reopenings in April, hooray! LACMA had a long list of exhibitions scheduled to open last spring and summer but, alas, did not. The biggest and probably most popular is the Yoshitomo Nara retrospective—he of the big-eyed girls holding little knives. To this day I never know what to make of his work—which has strong cartoony kitsch elements that play on its own commercial success. Yes, he is one of the most successful Asian artists today—in 2019, his painting Knife Behind Back sold for $24.9 million at Sotheby’s. I did enjoy looking at Nara’s early work, as he searches for his central themes. There is a reconstructed studio filled with drawings and small collectibles, which we peer into through windows. Then, as his canvasses grow in size and his brush becomes more impressionistic—as he turns away from his roots in line and drawing—he starts to lose me.

The Getty Villa has just reopened, with the exhibition “Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins.” I found the smaller show down on the main level, “Assyria: Palace Art of Ancient Iraq,” far more memorable. The subject matter is more focused (bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces of the 9th to 7th centuries BC) and the images are so vivid, even brutal, in their storytelling: men hunting lions, soldiers storming battlements, kings lording it over everyone. These are on loan from the British Museum.

Also open are the Hammer (“Made in LA”), the Huntington (“Made in LA’s” second venue), California African American Museum (Sula Bermúdez-Silverman and Nikita Gale), and Forest Lawn Museum at Forest Lawn Glendale. Yes, the cemetery has a museum, and it’s currently featuring a terrific survey of work from noted stained-glass maker Judson Studios, based in Highland Park.

Simone Gad, photo by Lynda Burdick.

OBITUARY

Saved by Simone Gad (1947–2021)

Simone Gad understood the tenuousness of appearances, their material possession and assertion. Her work as an artist was a conscious, deliberated and obsessive retrace of those assertions, an insistence upon their value and significance long after the fade-to-black, whether material or psychological (or for that matter cinematic—Hollywood actor and performer that she remained to the end).  Among contemporary LA artists, she was a poète maudite, her work poised on a razor’s edge between redemption and remembrance; and she embraced it in full, transmuting loss and desperation into affirmation, affection, joy, mercy and defiance.

—Ezrha Jean Black

Please visit www.artillerymag.com/saved-by-simone-gad-and-other-souvenirs/ for a full read on the remembrance of Simone Gad.

Comings and Goings

Frieze LA is cancelled, finally. It’s been reported that they had planned to have galleries showing art in various available spaces around town—Paramount Studios, its usual haunt, was already booked to the gills with productions trying to play catch-up after COVID delays. This meant lots of driving for Angelenos (who already drive too much). The wonky logistics of all this apparently collapsed a scheme which would have been pretty challenging, even in the best of times. They’ll be coming back in February 2022 though, in a tent next to the Beverly Hills Hilton.

It was just a matter of time before New York mega-gallerist David Zwirner realized he had to open an outpost in Los Angeles—and Artnet reports he’s found a space near Deitch Projects in the West Hollywood area. LA galleries are making a move too—lots of well-located retail space is open around the city (the unfortunate fallout of COVID and the crippled economy). Moran Moran is moving to Western and Melrose. Luis De Jesus is leaving Culver City for DTLA and Lowell Ryan is moving from West Adams to West Washington Boulevard, in a building with a roomy courtyard. It’s always good to have outdoor space in LA, and of course so very useful for receptions and gatherings.

MENTAL HEALTH

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health is sponsoring a month-long series of free programs and events highlighting the healing powers of art and connection. In its fourth year, WE RISE includes Art Rise with 21 art projects, Community Pop-Ups with over 50 local activities, and a Digital Experience, which can be enjoyed the usual way—virtually.

At this point, I’m especially keen on the RL experiences. Grand Park in DTLA, for example, will be home to “Grand Park’s Celebration Spectrum“ by dublab, in collaboration with Tanya Aguiñiga and curator Mark “Frosty” McNeill. Art installations and programming will “create space for all the missed celebrations in Los Angeles during the last year,” says the press release. Check out the festivities at www.werise.la.