LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 121

I've been on the West Coast covering the art scene in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

Here's a summery of the best L.A. had to offer this month:

 On the Westside, Chi-Ann Briggs animates the

The Wound That Seduces, Chi-Ann Briggs, 2014

will against itself with a sprawling installation that pits memory with an almost alpine effort at self-sublimation. Her first one-woman show at Galax Turnkey in Culver City signals the emergence of an eccentric talent whose use of language at the service of the destabilization of meaning has the potential for redefining poetic space in a post-sculptural ecosystem.

Tamara Udon by contrast, takes the idea of conventional meaning systems quite literally. Her show at Montrose Lucida at the Pacific Design Center focuses on fluid narrative structures filtered through the prism of reality television script doctoring. 

  

Tell It To Me Again, Tamara Udon, 2013

With the use of documentary footage, Udon's videos place the question of dis-identity in the foreground of an architectural reification at the expense of a deliberately disruptive impersonation of authenticity. Though much of the work is difficult to watch, repeated viewings are generally rewarded with the subtle complexities of its baroque format.

Palm #2213, Gary Mint 2002 -2014

Gary Mint's Encyclopedia of Palms is probably one ot the most interesting shows I've seen in Los Angeles in a long time. Compiled over a twelve year period, Mint set out to document every palm tree in Los Angeles County. As most astute viewers know but what few tourists care to admit is that the tree that is commonly associated with Beverly Hills is not indigenous to the region. Imported from New Zealand, the trees thrive in spite of their dislocation. By carefully chronicling every example of this trans-continental graft Mint calls attention to a form of vegetative immigration as a proxy for our own condition of urban alienation. 

The work can be seen at Lover's Lane in West Hollywood. 

All three exhibitions are examples of the growing ingenuity and self-confidence of an emerging group of Southern Californian artists who have bartered their expensive M.F.A.'s for a more sophisticated, less academic relationship to post-post modernism.