By Megan Dickerson
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
In her contribution to the new UCLA Hammer Museum exhibit
“Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles,” artist Bea
Schlinelhoff hand-writes participating artists’ resumes onto
white sticker paper.
When removed from the gallery wall in the beginning of
September, the fragile sheets will tear, ensuring that the
installation’s appearance in “Snapshot” will be
its one and only contact with the outside world.
Such temporality is fitting because “Snapshot”
intentionally takes a quick, fleeting glance at new Los Angeles
art.
Showcasing 25 up-and-coming artists from Southern California,
the exhibit does not attempt to comprehensively present all that is
young and creative within the city’s confines. Rather,
“Snapshot” provides a dynamic encapsulation of the
evolving L.A. art world, briefly capturing the moment as one would
catch fireflies in a jar.
By elevating art world neophytes to the space of a
well-established museum, the Hammer portrays the proverbial
“L.A. shot at stardom,” where they could potentially be
revealing”the next big thing.”
Far from “celebrity artists,” many of the 25 artists
represented boast little name recognition beyond, or even within,
the L.A. art world.
Some, like Tessa Chasteen, are being exhibited for the very
first time. There is no buzz baggage here, just the raw works held
up for people to view and judge.
Many of the artists successfully rise to the challenge. Steve
Roden’s sculpture “The Surface of the Moon,”
based on a late 19th-century astronomy book detailing the
moon’s cratered surface, takes a scientific approach to the
creation of art.
Each of his 490 tiny wooden figures, arranged side by side on a
40-foot, low-lying plank, corresponds to an exact formula created
using figures offered in the book.
Roden’s work emphasizes that no art object simply
“comes into being” ““ like anything else, a
scientific set of conscious and subconscious processes lays the
groundwork for its existence.
Florian Maier-Aichen, a German-born artist, manipulates
photographs into an uneasy perfection. Dominated by sparkling blue
skies and waters, the scenes captured in the exhibited pieces act
as glossy facades, resembling images from travel brochures.
However, reality will never rival the technicolor vision, giving
Maier-Aichen’s work a thick aura of expectation and
frustration.
Artists Aiko Hachisuka and Robert Stone also ripple the surface
of reality by dealing with forms of transportation, a common L.A.
theme. By welding a shopping cart with a soft-form sculpture that
mimics the object’s curves, Hachisuka’s rolling sketch
merges the experience of the homeless and the artist while
commenting on L.A.’s many forms of
transportation. Stone, an architect and designer by trade,
presents a strap-on speaker created for a Mercedes Benz,
highlighting excess on the road.
Participating artists also use their art, some more successfully
than others, to critique L.A.’s obsession with hair.
Mimicking a video promoting surgical hair transplant but played
in reverse, Linda Kim’s “Hair Piece” records the
path of tweezers plucking individual hairs out of her own scalp.
Whitish oil oozes out while some plucks even draw blood, leaving
the viewer nauseated.
Mark Bradford and Kori Newkirk, however, make a completely
different statement. The artists subtly examine the connection
between hair and appearance, proving that art need not wax
grotesque to make a point.
Bradford, a hair stylist by day, tints the thin papers used to
make permanent waves to create ethereal collages of fabricated
beauty. Likewise, Kori Newkirk transforms long black hair
extensions into “curtain paintings,” reminiscent of
beaded curtains strung in doorways.
Other installations also challenge and captivate the eyes and
ears. Won Ju Lim’s amassment of haunting pink acrylic boxes
piled before a projected factory scene creates a floating
sensation, while Ronald Santos’ video diptych of pulsating
shapes and moaning sounds simulates hearing sex from another room.
Deb Lacusta’s “Being Slapped” features the artist
delivering lines such as “You’re a lousy lover,”
into a video camera, recreating both psychoanalytic and ““ in
a very Los Angeles turn ““ acting techniques.
With “Snapshot,” the Hammer continues in a tradition
of highlighting Los Angeles and allowing exhibited artists the
license to branch out.
The Hammer establishes itself as a promoter of both Los Angeles
as well as contemporary art, cementing its importance on one of the
busiest corners in Southern California.
At the same time, the exhibit also exudes an odd meat-market
quality. Unrepresented artists line the gallery walls like kids at
a junior high formal, patiently waiting for someone to ask them to
dance. The audition for gallery representation extends for months.
Is the next David Hockney waiting in the wings?
This might explain why many of the works represented are
audacious and starving for attention. Specialization is the key to
the market, and if “hair reduction surgery” garners the
agent’s eye, then so be it.
Eric Wesley’s contributions, then, merit special
attention. Playing on the Hammer’s own sense of place,
Wesley’s structural model of the Occidental Petroleum
building, which houses the museum, is a creative explication of the
artistic process.
The model presents the Hammer as a massive oil derrick, drawing
the black gold from the building’s underground parking lot
and into the gallery space, where Wesley has mounted a large oil
stained canvas. The piece implies that the art world is a mechanism
with many participants. The museum, it could be said, produces
artists.
How many artists will emerge from the 15 minutes or three months
of fame delivered by “Snapshot” remains to be seen, but
the outlook seems positive.
ART: “Snapshot: New Art from Los
Angeles” runs through Sept. 2 at the UCLA Hammer Museum,
10899 Wilshire Blvd. For more information call (310) 443-7020.