Weekly Selections
Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. at the Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, California / This curiously un-hip group show curated by Ali Subotnick (formerly The Wrong Gallery, New York) gradually unfolds the city’s Janus-faced image.
Works that stand out are Kaari Upson’s mixed-media installation The Grotto (2008-09) in which the artist has created a more sinister version of the Bunnies’ grotto at Hugh Hefner’s notorious Playboy Mansion —in true Hollywood spirit out of painted polystyrene. A few rooms later artist Julie Becker exhibits a well-worn, beautiful cover of a 1960s Artforum issue on Surrealism, a fitting art-historical nod given a lot of the works display a more or less pronounced affinity to the genre. Charlie White’s persuasively sleek video projection American Minor (2008) exposes an All-American cutie pie update à la Beverly Hills, 90210 to vivid flashes of David Lynch-like domestic nightmares, while Charles Irvin’s consciously low-end video Membrane Lane (2009) is all over the place introducing viewers to the creepy, hilarious worlds of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Nine Lives runs through May 31st, 2009 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
About this Preview
First published in May 05, 2009 by Daniel Horn.
Daniel Horn is Fillip’s Los Angeles Bureau Editor.
notes
image: Kaari Upson, The Grotto, 2008-09, mixed media installation with video projections, dims variable Charlie White, American Minor, 2008, 35mm film transferred to Blu-ray disc, col/sd, 7:44 min. Image courtesy of Loock Gallery, Berlin
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Weekly Selection Archives
- Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles, California
- Global Kiosk at the Sala d’Art Jove Barcelona, Spain
- Fallow at the Charles H. Scott Gallery Vancouver, Canada
- Doings or Not at Hobusepea Gallery Tallinn, Estonia
- John Bock at REDCAT Los Angeles, California
- Ann-Sofi Sidén at Bonniers Konsthall Stockholm, Sweden
- Kori Newkirk at Laxart Culver City, California