Hammer/LAX Art biennial: Meet five artists
Bio: 33, born in Regina, Saskatchewan; lives in Silver Lake
Work in show: A 24-minute video shot in Mumbai, part of a larger installation.
Jugdeo: “My work is based on intuition.... Even though I work with the mechanics of television and film, I don’t work like a film director who has everything scripted, more like a sculptor where one step defines the next. This allows for the work to be making its own meaning in the process, with connections sort of firing on the fly.”
Curator Lauri Firstenberg: “Vish’s earlier work was more kitschy or campy. This piece has a new sensibility, more mystery and gravity. But it’s still related to the way he works with actors ¿ giving them a script, having them deliver lines on the spot and creating this absurd and not at all linear narrative.... It’s off, otherworldly, like TV made strange.” (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Meet five artists whose work is in the Hammer/LAX Art biennial.
Bio: 28, born in Fontana; lives in Echo Park
Work in show: A video installation featuring six double-sided collage/paintings and a clamshell-shaped bathtub.
Manley: “My original intention [for the tub] was to mirror a topographical image of the Red Sea, but it looked like a slightly formless clamshell. I ended up using it as a character in some of my older videos. I don’t really like considering these kinds of objects props, but I’ve never been comfortable considering them art objects either. That said, I wanted to see if reproducing these kinds of things allowed me to accept a different status.”
Curator Lauri Firstenberg: “Dash has an incredibly dynamic, activated studio. I can go twice a month, and each time it’s completely transformed. There is a high level of experimentation and evolution in his work, in the way in which he reuses materials and ideas -- furniture for a performance becomes frames for new paintings, for example. Originally we discussed taking his studio floor, a wooden slat floor that has traces of all of his activity, and transporting it into the exhibition space, but we realized that was too literal. So he opted to use the floor to create a pedestal for the bathtub sculpture instead.” (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Bio: 51, born in Baldwin, N.Y.; lives in Mar Vista
Work in show: A large-scale mural of her collage “California” and a mural featuring Bic lighters painted in colors from Pantone’s spring/summer 2012 forecast, like “margarita” and “tangerine tango.”
Cranston: “I always like going into a mini-mart and seeing a box of lighters, because it looks like a box of crayons to me. And Bic really controls their colors: People collect Bic lighters, and according to the blogs nobody knows for sure how many colors they’ve really produced. There’s all this folklore about it -- how rare the brown lighter is. I also like the tradition of lighting a lighter at the end of the concert -- a beautiful folk ritual, though now people do it with an iPhone instead.”
Curator Anne Ellegood: “She’s not only a formalist, interested in particular questions about the materials of artworks and obsessed with color theory, but she is extraordinarily responsive to current events and cultural history. Your first reaction is to scratch your head. What is this all about? Of course lighters represent fire: one of the most elemental forms you can imagine. But it might also be something people held up at a rock concert 20 years ago -- or something a smoker or crack addict uses. It’s a simple idea that’s very layered.” (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Bio: 38, born in Taichung, Taiwan; lives in Mount Washington
Work in show: A 13-panel landscape painting showing tidal wave imagery done in oil-based enamel (both spray paint and brushwork), with a vinyl mural of a rainbow installed on the window above.
Hsiung: “At all times there are millions of different natural processes and systems occurring that are invisible to us -- often it’s a combination of us not looking and a lot of them happening underground or in the air. So I find it really interesting when they materialize in these grand forms like volcanic eruptions or earthquakes or tsunamis or super moons or a solar eclipse. It’s not just the forms that interest me, but they’re a useful metaphor for me in my work. The sublime is one of the concepts I think about -- our trying to wrap our heads around the giant scale of the universe but just being a speck in relationship to all of it.”
Curator Cesar Garcia: “Pearl has created this vision of L.A. where you see certain recognizable tropes like mountains and ocean. But it’s imaginary or mythological and she uses this incredibly bright palette that reflects the history of mural art. It’s a place that’s real and not real -- like Mike Davis’ apocalyptic vision of L.A. combined with an interest in landscape painting.” (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
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Bio: 30, born in Honolulu; lives in Koreatown
Work in show: A mosaic made out of carpet fragments from the Bellagio, Palms and other casinos and an architectural relief with Greek and Egyptian motifs cast in flashy colors by a video projection.
Ferrer: “Ten years ago I had this experience of walking through a casino and looking at a carpet with a friend who actually lays carpet for a living. I had this feeling of not knowing where this thing ends, and then there was this moment when he saw the seam and reached down and pulled it up. You can almost sum up the whole architecture of Vegas that way -- this very shallow illusion.”
Curator Ali Subotnick: “Most of us have memories of being in a Vegas casino: You feel like you’re locked inside, you don’t know what time of day it is, they’re supposedly pumping oxygen in the air vents. The carpets enhance that feeling of dislocation. So Tano’s carpet mosaic is something everyone can respond to on a visceral level, while on an intellectual level you’re picking up all these references in the designs -- whether Atari-like motifs or pre-Columbian imagery. Having all these carpets clash with each other emphasizes how strange and surreal they are.” (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
