Shana Nys Dambrot
Every year for more than two decades now, the city of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs offers what’s known as the COLA Grants. These are panel-juried individual awards of $10,000 per artist (performance-based and literary as well as visual artists are eligible), with the funds intended to complete a proposed new body of work. The results are exhibited, read and/or performed as needed each Spring. COLA 2019 is that show, and it’s on view now through July 14.
What’s consistently fascinating about these annual showcases is that without exception the exhibitions work as coherent wholes, with material and narrative themes emerging between and among the projects, despite no topic or motif being directed by the curators. Such is the case with the current crop of eleven artists on view at LAMAG, each of whom engages a sense of space, materiality, personal history and social constructs of identity in ways that range from the analog to the futuristic.
Highlights include Katie Grinnan’s “5 Seconds of Dreaming,” a sculptural instrument based on readings of the landscape, carving and composition, made in wood and stone. Its topmost surface reflects the topography of the region; what look like power lines between intrusive towers are strings to be played; and portholes through the underlying strata reveal cave complexes and whimsical site lines.
And Alice Könitz’s “Domestic Pavilion,” a design of conceptual functionality, straddling the line between domestic space and survivalist strategy. Jenny Yurshansky’s “A Legacy of Loss,” involves the illusion of a shady wooded glen, with cast metal and glass blank lens throwing shadows from a leafy canopy. Amid this conjured clearing stands a life-size, elaborately hand-stitched shroud sewn for the grave of her family from the Old Country. It is a lovingly made work of craft and intention, with elements referencing an array of aspects to her family’s immigration story, some of which are outright geopolitical, some matriarchal — but all of which are both melancholy and magical.
Peter Wu’s “Or, The Creatures of Prometheus II” is perhaps the strangest, most unexpected and technologically progressive work in the show. A sculptural pavilion in a darkened chamber stands stark, a cast of the artist’s head a la Bruce Nauman on a stand at its center. All at once, the space comes alive with a variable flood of light and images, projected and fractured on, through, and across the parallelogram screens into the room. Then it starts to speak, the head blended with imagery captured at Chinese novelty stores, the dialog coming from a deep beyond, celestial, philosophical, and nonsensically prophetic. Broadly speaking as an experiment on consciousness, Wu taught an AI language program English by feeding it a strict diet of Mary Shelley, and then the AI “wrote” its own dialog. That’s the animated speech you hear within the soundscape, and it’s calibrated to the visuals which are like a Planetarium laser show of “The Wizard of Oz” but on ayahuasca in a spaceship.
The 11 artists whose ambitious grant projects are installed at Barnsdall are Enrique Castrejon, Juan Capistrán, Kim Fisher, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Katie Grinnan, Alice Könitz, and Olga Koumoundouros, Sandy Rodriguez, Stephanie Taylor, Peter Wu, and Jenny Yurshansky.
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., East Hollywood; Thu.-Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; free. (323) 644-6269, lamag.org.
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