| William Pope.L—Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid…
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Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid… was the first major West-Coast museum exhibition by William Pope.L, the self-dubbed “friendliest black artist in America,” who, throughout his 30-year career, has challenged social inequity with dark humor and biting critique. For the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Pope.L created an installation in three parts—The Grove, APHOV (A Personal History of Videography), and The Semen Pictures—that confronts and examines ritual, human will, and political ego. Pope.L’s interest in ritual layering as an artistic process was evident; all of his “interventions” featured objects or characters that are transformed by layers and veils—made from such materials as paint, blood, or a simple latex mask. Art After White People brought Pope.L back to his roots in experimental theater with installations that resemble stage sets. The Grove was a spectral forest of potted palm trees that were hand- and spray-painted in many coats of white. Close up, their painted skin appeared spotty, sometimes even wart-like—a commentary on the social, psychological, and environmental consequences of man’s will to bend nature. Pope.L chose the palm trees for this installation as “local scenery,” and in his noir vision of Los Angeles, the city’s most prevalent icons of tropical paradise wore a toxic costume that could eventually destroy them. Past The Grove, viewers saw a free-standing screening wall reminiscent of old-fashioned drive-in theaters or highway billboards. On screen, APHOV featured as its protagonist a masked man resembling former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, weeping streams of artificial blood. The blood pooled on the floor and seeped throughout the man’s “lair,” a makeshift archive piled high with cardboard storage boxes of video tapes organized by date. The rest of the on-screen clutter expanded into the real space of the museum, including furniture and the mysterious, locked, industrial doors through which one could only peek at an endless warren of ever-more boxes and ever-more blood. The Semen Pictures were bathed in light beyond the dark and disorder of the first two works. Pope.L’s final intervention consisted of digital scans of magazine collages covered with organic substances within light boxes. These “portraits,” altered by the addition of semen, hair, milk, coffee grounds, urine, and blood, balance readymade pop culture with the natural and handmade, and exemplify Pope.L’s artistic drive to create complex layers of image and meaning. |
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Sharon Levy’s interest in the sublime qualities of the forest and in wood as a medium has led her to craft sculptures of trees in various stages of life and death. For The Wood, Levy created a site-specific installation—a poignant fairytale forest that evoked wonder, surprise, and pathos. Cookie, the center piece of this installation, appeared to be sliced from a giant tree. Made from two canvases stretched on a circular frame, surrounded by foam rubber painted to resemble bark, Cookie towered at nine feet in diameter, dwarfing the viewer. Levy painted each growth ring on Cookie to create the concentric circles that represent the tree’s old age as well as the duration of the artist’s process. The Wood also featured Young Pines, two clusters of tree silhouettes with articulated branches jigsaw-cut from pine plywood (a manufactured material that returns to its original form). Many of Levy’s trees were built using construction techniques borrowed from theater props, tents, toys, and “knock-down” furniture and she delights in the irony inherent in creating portable, artificial props to represent such venerable natural objects. |
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Loren Holland’s paintings lampoon assumptions about African American women. Her subjects are purposefully stylized in order to call attention to the way in which their real-life counterparts have been portrayed in the popular media as mysterious, exotic, sexual, even animalistic beings. With its title inspired by the Santana song of the same name, Black Magic Woman depicted three contemporary Santeria priestesses practicing in a spooky landscape filled with creeping mist. As with traditional representations of saints, each was surrounded by attributes. One, situated in a graveyard, conjured zombies with a nail-punctured human heart, poison from a blowfish, and the miraculous little blue pills that aid in raising the dead. Another, adopting the posture of someone who constantly works on a car in the street, turned her “junker” into a flourishing witch’s garden. The last stood at her vanity, casting spells and hoping to capture the one she loves with the help of a voodoo doll, perfume, and face powder—a combination of Chanel and Hershey’s Cocoa. In all three cases, Holland fashioned images of creative, resourceful women whose magic is a metaphor for using everyday materials to make the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear. Her lush and detailed figurative paintings are simultaneously literal and allegorical; they combine the eerie quality of nineteenth-century ghost stories with the visual language of a hip-hop music video. Black Magic Woman also alluded to a theatrical stage set, calling further attention to the artificial construction of the stereotypes it portrayed. |
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| Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake, 1972-1978
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Identity Theft was the first show to feature the early, pioneering work of Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, and Suzy Lake, artists who developed alter egos or false identities in photographs, videos, on stage, and in real-life performances. Conceived of and guest curated by Jori Finkel, the exhibition explored the history of role-playing in contemporary art through works created during the heydey of feminism. Identity Theft marked a number of milestones in the exposition of these artists’ works: the first-ever full presentation of Hershman's Roberta Breitmore project; the first screening of Antin's The Nurse and the Hijackers since September 11, 2001, when the disaster movie spoof (set on an airplane) was pulled from an exhibition in England; and the first U.S. showing of Lake's groundbreaking Transformations series since their 1975 debut. The exhibition included over 100 photographs, videos, sculpture, and ephemera. In San Francisco in 1974, Lynn Hershman donned a wig and adopted a particular set of gestures to create an alter ego named Roberta Breitmore, a fictional character who grew so real over the years that she acquired her own driver’s license, apartment, and romantic encounters. She also went to Weight Watchers, EST seminars, and psychotherapy. Hershman alternately describes Roberta as the “underbelly” of her own personality and a “mirror held up to her culture.” In Southern California starting in 1972, Eleanor Antin gave birth to three “selves”: a king, ballerina, and nurse, which she compared to Jungian archetypes. First, she painstakingly applied a beard and took to the streets of Solana Beach as a king attending his peoples. She next became her “idealized female self”—a classical ballerina, practicing her technique every day so she could quasi-legitimately play the role in staged and taped performance. Later, in photographs and videos, she brought to life two different kinds of nurses: a flirtatious nurse worthy of any soap opera and a historical figure inspired by Florence Nightingale. Meanwhile, in Montreal, Detroit-born artist Suzy Lake investigated the cultural construction of character by trying on various roles for size. She posed as a glamorous fashion model for one series, which took the form of a slideshow (1972-75). She borrowed the facial features of her friends for another, which consists of large-scale pre-Photoshop manipulated photographs called Transformations (1974). She also applied cosmetics directly to the surface of photographic prints, recognizing make-up as the oil paint of the day, and her face as the canvas. Together, Antin, Hershman, and Lake all pioneered what art critic Kim Levin once called the “high-risk” art of self-transformation. Their work challenged fixed notions of identity and femininity, raising questions of who we are and who we can pass as. They combined acting skills with more traditional art-making techniques to document their double lives in detail. They relied above all on the medium of photography, paving the way for conceptual artists to come, from Cindy Sherman to Nikki S. Lee. |
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Marking the first Southern California museum exhibition for Richard Carter and Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Iceberg presented two independent bodies of work about a topic that has captivated artists throughout time. Carter’s paintings and drawings of icebergs ranged in size from small to monumental. They revealed the haunting beauty, dramatic sculptural quality and unique character of each individual iceberg – from the poetic and atmospheric to the stark and foreboding. Pezalla-Granlund’s iceberg sculptures were formed from paper and foam core. Fragile and irregular, their material construction was lightweight and easily crushed – a purposeful opposition to their real-world counterparts. Suspended from the ceiling, five icebergs of varied dimension and mass floated flat side up with their asymmetrical, jutting edges extending towards the floor. In the intimate space of Project Room 1, the two treatments of icebergs resonated with one another to immerse the viewer in the awe and mystery of their subject matter. |
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The first solo museum exhibition of Santa Monica-based artist Jona Frank, Lincoln High ROTC featured two three screen videos – Julia, Drill Team and Bravo Company, Squad Drill Competition – about members of the Junior ROTC program at Lincoln High School in the San Francisco Bay area. For the past decade, Frank has used photography and film to explore the American adolescent experience. In these films her camera angles and cuts revealed the physical and psychological aspects of the students from their commitment and seriousness to their youth and awkwardness. Without agenda or judgment, Frank elucidated the dualities of her subjects – culturally diverse Junior ROTC students training to embrace a strict and singular vision, and the adolescent penchant to challenge authority against efforts to conform to group rules. At once dispassionate and intimate, Frank’s videos portrayed the timeless and endearingly awkward vulnerability of young people on the threshold of adulthood, searching for personal meaning in their lives by mimicking postures and responses that seek to efface individuality. |
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| Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana/Extraño Nuevo Mundo: Arte y diseño desde Tijuana
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Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana/Extraño Nuevo Mundo: Arte y diseño desde Tijuana was the first major traveling exhibition to explore and celebrate the vibrant interdisciplinary art scene in Tijuana, Mexico, one of the world’s leading crucibles of cultural innovation. The exhibition featured over fifty works by twenty of Tijuana’s most important contemporary artists, architects, designers, and filmmakers. Their bold, cutting-edge work embodied the powerful creative energy of a city transformed by crosscurrents of globalization, media, and issues of migration and identity. Whether as the subject or the actual physical source of the materials used to create works of art, the City of Tijuana was at the core of everything in Strange New World/Extraño Nuevo Mundo.Strange New World/Extraño Nuevo Mundo discovered new visual, verbal, and audio forms to manifest their experience of the rapidly changing interconnected realities of the local urban and global environments. Strange New World/Extraño Nuevo Mundo featured the work of:
Strange New World/Extraño Nuevo Mundo was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. |
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