Art-Heavy Weekend, Pt. 1

With Munitz's resignation lingering in the Los Angeles smog, I took it as a sign that I should see a glorious gloop of art during the weekend--and indeed I did. I'm happy to report that all of it kept me interested and engaged, and it was certainly a testament to Los Angeles's prominence on the international contemporary arts scene. Here's part one of three...

FRIDAY: UCLA MFA Open Studios
Though I went to the UCLA MFA Open Studios on Friday night [hat tip, Caryn, for the heads-up], I was utterly exhausted from a long week of work, so I just bandied about, popping in and out of various spaces, looking for the pleasure of looking and not really paying attention to names. For me, it was more of a trip to investigate this mythic thing that is UCLA's MFA program, particularly its painting program, and a nice thing to help ease into a Friday night. The space was surprisingly large; I didn't expect that the program had quite so many students. As I was walking through, I was suffering from a bit of an end-of-the-week slump, so I'm not sure how informative this post will be. But, I will say that the work--on the whole--was definitely solid, and much of it market-ready.

I was really impressed by how diverse all the work was. There were painterly paintings, some elegant performance (which I wasn't able to see because I arrived too late), quiet and compelling sculpture, and even some good photographs. Here are some highlights that stuck out: I really loved the arrows that punctured the hallways, which were the prelude to a ceramic horse stabbed with dozens of arrows, all arrayed as a kind of invisible globe around the horse (sadly, I didn't catch the artist's name). Along the same "prelude" lines, in the main gallery, there was a strange zoetrope that seemed completely incomprehensible, totally blank and uninteresting, but as you wandered around the studios, you realized that one of the studios was showing this animation-looking video of a camera going round and round a hallway. The question, of course, was how these artists could install this in a less labrynthine space--i.e. how does it fit into the context of the gallery.

In the main screening room, jokester Brian Bress's video about sporks was hilarious and engaging; it looks like he's having lots of fun. And in the maze of studios, I was also very interested in first-year Juliana Romano's portraits -- they have an Alice Neel sensibility inflected with a Julie Mehretu intuition for color. (Full disclosure: she and I went to middle school together for a little bit.) And just around the bend from Romano's cubicle, I was impressed by Jun Ho Kwon's Sarah Sze-like sculptures (which the artist referred to as paintings) that used tripods, globes, even ladders as devices for making some rather explosive 3D collages. There was also a photographer whose pictures featured band geeks and firefighters. The firefighting pictures were excellent--really beautiful, and weirdly peaceable moments in the face of disaster.

All of these -- and the overall feel of the studios -- gave me a better idea of how one goes from being a so-called student to being Elliott Hundley. Brenna Youngblood (whose name is undeniably awesome) is already on the rise, so it begs the question of who might be heir apparent...