Founded as a kind of synthetic chimera driven by real-estate speculation, Los Angeles is the city that beckons dreamers. For artists, it is a city that offers not just a notable Masters of Fine Art program, but a web of artist-driven, community-based activity that forms across its vast basin, while still leaving enough room in the gaps for a quiet, heated practice. It is hard to describe Los Angeles in a new way, for—given that it is in many ways a city of surfaces—all its surface-level clichés turn out to be fairly accurate. Made in L.A., a biennale exhibition initiated by the Hammer Museum and now in its second iteration, surveys and images these surfaces. Opening the exhibition catalogue, I was not surprised to read the artists’ work framed in terms of the city’s vast landscape, with the primary curatorial essay shifting focus geographically, from Eagle Rock to Venice to Lincoln Heights, onward and outward. Of course, to curate an exhibition, even when not a large group show surveying a particular city, is to traverse and attempt to consolidate many spaces—not just geographically but psychologically, temporally, and formally—into one ‘location’.
At each turn, the work in Made in L.A. could not avoid pressing against the visual and sensual beauty of the city. In one room, close to an entranceway, hung a collection of Kim Fisher’s Magazine Paintings; hand-dyed black canvases with clippings of coloured gradients and smoothed textures placed atop. Through a process that the artist previously used only as a means for sketching, these collaged colours were taken from magazine clippings and drastically enlarged to include the blown-up unevenness of their impulsively cut edges. With a texturing that
A.L. Steiner, Accidenthell, 2014. Photograph Brian Forrest.
Works by Kim Fisher. Installation views at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photograph Brian Forrest.
