The Hammer Museum presents Eden's Edge: Fifteen LA Artists, a multi-faceted, cross generational show that confirms Los Angeles' status as an international capital of the arts.
The exhibit explores art-making in L.A. in the past decade, featuring local artists who "track the contradictions endemic to life in L.A., and mix a wide array of media to create fantasized, often ambiguous, worlds," says the presentation. "There is no other city that shares all the formative factors that make L.A. Here there is an insistent, nagging sense that the land itself is unstable, the knowledge of tectonic plates that periodically split and rearrange the landscape."
"Often the city is experienced from a speeding car on an expressway, and far from a homogeneous environment, the urban character insistently transforms itself within minutes, a mutating collage of almost instantaneously shifting constructed and natural landscapes. The media environment of film, television, radio, and emerging electronic image displays is pervasive; a world of flickering, incessantly moving images no matter what the medium."
"These conditions conjure an intuitive and ambiguous sense of the possibility of unexpected change, of states of consciousness that break and fold into one another. Phantasmagoric and surreal visions abound. Divisions between mind, body, and landscape meld, morph, and rupture. There is little sense of a whole; geographic, social, and cultural scenarios abut and slide between each other. Violence is latent but at times explosive, while beauty can be sumptuous and ubiquitous. Sexuality if not blatant often lurks within or below the surface. These are not totally new conditions to the city, but the scene does continue to mutate, the history to evolve, the sense of identity to realign, and the landscape to re-form."
As Venice magazine writes in its May issue [available online at a later date], "While this diverse group of rising and established artists comes from different backgrounds and generations, and utilizes a variety of forms to express themselves as artists, Eden's Edge unites them by their shared perspectives on the complexities and contradictions of consciousness in present day Los Angeles." Says the curator: "What emerges is not so much a single theme as a series of preoccupations: beauty and sensuality, instability and incongruity, craft and materials, articulated within overarching themes of vulnerability, sexuality, and transformation."A great show, to which the Hammer's website does't do justice. Above: artwork by Ken Price, Lari Pittman and Jason Rhoades, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis and Harry Dodge/Stanya Kahn. Other artists in the exhibit: Ginny Bishton, Mark Bradford, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Monica Majoli, Matthew Monahan, Rebecca Morales, Anna Sew Hoy, and Jim Shaw. References on art in L.A.: LA Artland, Los Angeles 1955-1985. Related: Define Art, Putting L.A. On The Cultural Map.
photos via Hammer Museum
