13ThingsLA: April 15
Earth Day Every Day for your art calendar
A loamy new review at the Hammer; sprouting tree adoption with Fallen Fruit; and elemental new exhibitions at a Jeffrey Deitch & Matthew Marks galleries joint, Charlie James Gallery, Izzy Lee Gallery, Night Gallery, CMay Gallery, Aabee Bleue Project, Dominique Porter Gallery (welcome to the map!), Anat Ebgi Gallery, Pasadena Showcase House of Design, Dorado 806 Projects, and a field trip to a lighthouse in the desert.
Plus Shana will read from her novel Zen Psychosis as part of the Anna Broome Room poetry and music salon’s 12th Anniversary event at Art-Share on Thursday, April 16; and oh yeah it’s 4/20 on Monday. Don’t bogart.
FEATURE
REVIEW: Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials at the Hammer. This ambitious and visionary biennial-ready assertion of material ambition was curated by Pablo José Ramírez, in an exhibition that moves beyond the survey format, granting its 22 artists the space for fully visualized, operatic installations. The gallery becomes a sequence of pocket universes—distinct site-specific environments that maintain a constant dialogue across their sight-lines. With a consciousness anchored by the very satisfying presence of Ana Mendieta, the exhibition’s power lies in how it handles its lexicon. While its synecdochal materials—avocado, cacao, cochineal, and raw earth—are rooted in Indigeneity, the work refuses to be siloed into an anthropological discourse, as these artists engage directly with the Western art historical ecosystem as well.
It is particularly striking to see artists like Carmen Argote, known for working at an intimate corporeal scale, command this kind of expansive territory with such authority—alongside the massive, fragrant earth-mounds of Edgar Calel that reset the ongoing conversation with Land Art and contemporary sculpture, and whose boulders Argote hosted in her studio during their gestation. Jackie Amézquita’s 2,500-pound slab of California soil and harvested rainwater brings geometeorology face to face with the eternal impulse to create understanding; Guadalupe Maravilla’s towering “healing machines” utilize gongs, skeletal armatures, weavings, and medicinal organic materials—affecting works that seem entirely capable of healing, and are occasionally activated with sound.
Gabriel Chaile’s giant clay vessels playfully anchor their physicality and fiery functionality in impossible scale, as hand-built textures turn the medium of pottery into a monument to the artisanally ordinary. Sky Hopinka’s video work, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, acts as a cinematic counterpoint, alchemizing distorted landscapes and choral audio into a rhythmic study of how land and language are mutually constructed. By insisting on a fresh perspective for the global contemporary art moment, the show’s living materials motif offers more than just alternative cultural signifiers—revealing how these are the perfect mediums and modus operandi for addressing the constant flux at the core of all earthly existence. On view in Westwood through August 23; hammer.ucla.edu. —SND
