You Can’t Lay Claim to Los Angeles, But You’re Welcome To Come Look
“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
As far as cities go, Los Angeles is a profoundly exhibitionist one. Its fleshy pride, all of its chewy, vibrant colorations; the ostentatiousness with which it conducts its affairs, makes it all the more glorious a subject for examination—and examined it has been, splayed out on the lovely tables of Ruscha and Babitz and Almaraz and Chandler and Saar and Hockney, its dynamism asking to be seen, preening while doing so. Where the sun does not shine on the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, it is lit from within. Still, like anything worth knowing, the city remains devastatingly incomprehensible.
It takes a delicate finger to untangle bits of a place that at once begs to be known while changing rapidly by the moment. Perhaps this is why Carl Larsson’s group show, New Boundaries (on view at Invisible Dynamics in Los Angeles’ Mid City until December 20th) is particularly tantalizing. Larsson, founder of the popular social media account The Art Reporter and third-generation art dealer, has gathered a number of emerging Angeleno artists who elucidate their understanding of the place around them with precision, furthermore with an understanding that they are not the sole proprietors of the place in which they live.
See: Nicolas Shake. The California-born multimedia artist endeavors to synthesize the biosphere with the manmade, turning the rust-encrusted every day into objects d’art— works QUICK and Super (Three Down) were originally photographs of signage across the LA area, which he then transferred onto canvases and let out to dry in the arid climes of the eastern deserts. The oxidation process is seminal to Shake’s central concept, and the works are reminiscent of Ruscha’s quippy typographic observations. Shake makes the case to observe, to place oneself at the whims of the weather and the unrelenting light, as naked as the city itself—in Shake’s work, time must be allowed to wash over oneself, to allow oneself to be transformed.
Here, time is as central to the show as place—Meegan Barnes’ Viper Room ceramic sculpture, for one— exemplifies the concretization of a singular moment; a fraternal crowd gathered outside the iconic Hollywood venue. As it stands today, the venue has become ossified in the memories of a Scene That Once Was; laden with tragedy, once co-owned by Johnny Depp, the site of River Phoenix’s final moments before he was set to take stage alongside the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Viper Room of the present is an isle laid claim to long ago by past titans. Molded in Barnes’ hands, the Viper Room thrums with life: exuberant; and quirky.
“LA is a place where anything can happen,” Larsson surmises. Aryo Toh Djojo’s surrealist The Element of Surprise suggests an exhale or unidentified object in the sky, smeared ever-so-slightly by the artist’s signature airbrush. LA is, perhaps by right of its eccentricity or by the spiritualist tendrils woven by its beloved and besmirched science fiction paragon L. Ron Hubbard, a city quite open to the possibility of the extraterrestrial, at once tantalized by the outside and insular enough to maintain the air of surprise when the outside encroaches.
The Invisible Dynamics studio is (unsurprisingly for the city’s repute) a multihyphenate being; a hybrid creative studio/production facility/white cube gallery founded by Oli Walsh, a friend of Larsson. Throughout it, the volatility of medium and work is shaped by the confluence of industries that run through it. Hosting commerce and encouraging cultural conversation, the space is, according to Larsson, “where new ideas take shape.”
What does it mean to work “at the speed of culture,” as the Invisible Dynamics brand espouses on its social media? Art notoriously takes much longer to produce than what’s necessitated by a profiteering culture, one that has become increasingly reliant on the ephemeral interests of an observer. It may seem antithetical that a creative brand that takes pride in its cultural pacing has championed a physical show, but Larsson’s curation (and the gallery’s deliberate and beautiful organization of the space itself) is anything but short-winded, keeping in mind both Los Angeles as a center of culture, but also as an aesthetic ideal.
Nabilah Nordin, a sculptor who hails from Australia, puts out work whose form and function resonate across geopolitical boundaries. In her sculptures are a host of materials that form shapes that hover beyond recognizability: epoxy modeling compound, steel, acrylic paint—the textures Nordin creates with these mediums (engaging and earnest, and have landed her spots at The National, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia) ring with a resounding and satisfactorily Angeleno tenor: where there is not distinct form to recognize, there is common materiality that produces a recognizable feeling.
New Boundaries does not just aim to exhibit the artists but frames itself around them, and how each artist reflects, according to Larsson, “LA’s ongoing transformation into one of the most exciting hubs for contemporary art.” An ongoing transformation indeed: throughout the show, works transmogrify inspiration from Light and Space-era artists into something aesthetically prescient. Who decides what Los Angeles is, has been, and can be? Certainly not Ruscha, or Babitz, or Larsson. Not Shake, or Toh Djojo, or Nordin. The city is not tenable towards reaching a common understanding. There is no arbitrator here, as New Boundaries makes abundantly and tenderly clear. Just the city, the light, the examination.
Open through December 20, 2024, New Boundaries features Aryo Toh Djojo, Connor Tingley, Lacey Stoffer, Meegan Barnes, Nabilah Nordin, Nicolas Shake, Nick Modrzewski, and Tim Irani at 3422 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019.
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