June 3 to September 2, 2018
10899 Wilshire Blvd., between Westwood Blvd. and Glendon Avenue
Los Angeles, hammer.ucla.edu

Summer in Los Angeles almost inevitably means three things: brutal fires, the Dodgers raising our blood pressure, and – this being an even-numbered year – another iteration of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s buzz-attracting biennial. This year’s, officially the fourth, encompasses 33 artists. Curated by Hammer Senior Curator Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale, this provocative exhibition is notable for its demographic inclusiveness, with 23 female or non-gender-conforming artists and 21 artists of color. As the curators didn’t nominate a unifying concept, the biennial, spread out across the entire museum, thus seems even more sprawling than usual, leaving the viewer to take each installation on its own terms. Surprises abound. Even so, unlikely dialogues spark. Issues of identity and community weave in and out, along with numerous references to the human body. That confluence of sociological critique and bodily engagement provides the closest thing to a central theme, and gives the exhibition the feeling of a quirky, consciously “woke” travelogue of sorts.

Setting the tone for the show is 97-year old Luchita Hurtado, the latest under-recognized artist to be rediscovered in a “Made in L.A.” biennial, a welcome hallmark of the series. Born in Caracas, and associated with the Dynaton Group in Northern California in the 1940s, Hurtado is represented by a set of compelling, surrealist-inflected paintings from the ‘70s that playfully manipulate perspective, employing parts of her own body – feet, belly, breasts – as elements of landscape. Mysterious, self-affirming, and oddly timeless, the work is a revelation. Although the show is at pains to blur the boundaries of old-fashioned media, two younger painters also memorably twist figuration to their own ends: Christina Quarles, whose looping, semi-abstract protagonists blithely overflow their domestic props, geometric confines, and peeling patterned backdrops; and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, whose figures navigate their own subjective relationship to both narrative painterly traditions and scenes of traditional Americana. Durham, August 14, 2017, 2017, her image of an overturned, contorted Confederate monument amidst diverse viewers’ legs, is the show’s most telling take on the current political moment. Diedrick Brackens’ striking textile works look to revive and interweave threads of lesser-known African-American history with unsettling glimpses of narrative, while Aaron Fowler’s playful scrap-filled wall reliefs juxtapose automobile fragments of an El Camino, with mirrors, neons, and piñata-like Minion characters, to reflect his own take on American iconography. Inhabiting an altogether more pensive space, Rosha Yoghmai’s folding screen layered with talismans, glass objects, and light projections, meld allusions to the artist’s own Iranian family background and Southern Californian light and space and assemblage art, to quietly haunting effect.

The show invites, and rewards, ambitious visions: Eamon Ore-Giron’s mesmerizing geometric lobby mural, which draws from such disparate sources as Russian Suprematism, Latin American abstraction, musical scores, textiles, and indigenous mythology, rocked its space, distilling its diverse sources into a dynamic formal machinery. While Charles Long’s giddily nightmarish installation conjured art historical specters such as Guston’s smoking klansmen and Munch’s The Scream, conflating tree trunks with phalluses, through a forest of cartoony faces made from giant cross-sections of penises. The image is both goofy and disturbing. A scathing critique of patriarchy’s effect on the environment or a dark joke, once experienced you can’t unsee it. Formally innovative and often pushing limits, Long is the sort of figure you love to see given free rein in a show like this. He’s also currently the subject of his first L.A. solo show in years in the inaugural exhibition of Tanya Bonakdar’s new Los Angeles gallery. Yet it is to the curators’ credit that more intimate visions also had room to shine. One highlight is the work of Linda Stark, whose formally graphic, densely built up oil paintings conjure personal and feminine topographies, with striking technique and an appealing sincerity. At times her work is startling in its vulnerability, as in her emerald green rendering of a woman’s sex and ovaries, with ocean waves for pubic hair, and her witty/loving portraits of cats she has known. Self Portrait With Ray, 2017, an example of the latter, shows a tabby gazing back at the viewer from a circle inset like a third eye in a tearful woman’s forehead. To anyone who’s ever lost a beloved animal friend, or just anyone searching for some actual human feeling in contemporary art, Stark’s precise but soulful canvases resonate powerfully. It’s nice to be touched and dazzled by work, not just dutifully impressed or pleasantly intrigued. Reveling in its diversity of visions, this “Made in L.A.” is an eclectic survey that delivers on all counts.

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January 28 – May 6, 2018
2814 Wilshire Boulevard, between Stanley and Curson Avenues
Los Angeles, cafam.org

That old dog, clay, seems to be pulling off an impressive array of surprising new tricks. While ceramics remains among the most venerable – and stubbornly tactile – of mediums, that doesn’t mean that it has been resistant to the conceptual upheavals within the ceramics world of recent decades. If anything, this ambitious survey exhibition suggests, the current moment seems to be a highly fruitful one for practitioners pushing the medium in all sorts of new directions, through promiscuous hybrid forms involving installation, mixed media, technology, and even time-based performance.

Intended as the first iteration of a ceramic biennial, ”Melting Point” is at its best in examining the overlap between the medium’s allegorical impulses and its roots in functional form. Featuring 22 artists from around the country, ranging from established figures to recent graduates, the show sprawls insouciantly across the museum’s three levels, flaunting a panoply of stances, scales and sensibilities, from the ragged to the glazed, the distilled to the distressed, to whatever unlikely unions of the above.

The interrogative tone for the show was set at the opening, with a performance work by 28-year-old Armando Cortes, who laboriously dragged his own weight in raw clay several long blocks from the sidewalk in front of LACMA, finally hauling it up the museum’s stairs as it scuffed the floor: literally lugging the burden of the medium’s complex legacy. Titled El Peso de La Tierra (2017-18), the work melds references to Chris Burden’s infamous ordeal-performances of the 1970s and the medium’s proletarian roots, through the muscular immediacy of manual labor. The show’s curators identified a trio of themes that link the works: “Anti-Disciplinary Approaches,” “Ephemerality,” and “New Sociopolitical Interpretations.” But these groups were considered loosely and many works, like Cortes’s performance, embraced more than one category.

Stanton Hunter’s works overtly invite audience participation. In his series Untitled Unvesseled II (2018), he asks viewers to drip water onto vessels of unfired clay, allowing them to crumple over time. Wayne Perry courts viewer reaction through placement; setting out sagging clumps and clusters of small pots along the museum’s staircase, and other peripheral spaces, interspersing white and black vessels among groups of terra cotta, he employs his notably imperfect vessels as a loose form of social allegory. The dramatic works of Cheryl Ann Thomas also revel in their formal imperfection; made by firing large, thin columns of clay to the point of collapse, and evoking giant swathes of gauze, they derive poignant form and purpose from their surrender to gravity.

Emphatically allowing his process to mold his forms, Walter McConnell, a professor at Alfred University and one of the show’s elder statesmen, presented a quixotic meditation on nature and culture. Set off by the plastic curtain enclosing it, his pillar of flowery forms, called A Florid Heap (2018), remains perpetually moist and unfinished, in a self-contained terrarium of sorts. To anyone still expecting ceramics to be prim and neatly allusive, McConnell offers a sharp theatrical rebuke. The show does include its share of LA-based ceramic hotshots. Among them: Matt Wedel, with his monumental rocklike desert blooms; Julia Haft-Candell, whose twisty infinity forms interweave references to sketches, knots and bows; and Kristen Morgin, whose remarkable trompe l’oeil tableaux of paint cans and ragged toys and tattered old paperbacks and record albums conjure the detritus of family attics or basements, the flotsam and jetsam of childhood memory.

Patsy Cox, who also curated this year’s Scripps Ceramic Annual, merges technological and formal innovation. Her concoctions of tiny top-like shapes, multiplied via 3-D printing, suggest at once loopy baskets of plastic toy flowers, blow-ups of cellular organisms, and fractal abstractions. In terms of sheer diversity of surface and technique, the show offers a startling range, from the giddily baroque fixtures of Anthony Sonnenberg to the vividly colorful, oozily distressed cups of Brian Rochefort. Despite their roots in traditional functional forms, the subversive intent of these works is intoxicating–though you surely wouldn’t want to drink from them.

The more banal implications of ceramic as a vehicle for mass-market serving ware or tchotchkes are addressed adroitly through the works of Jonathan Mess, who offered cross-sections of found ceramics, like geological samples; and Emily Sudd, whose bisected vases were stuffed with diverse ceramic gleanings and then fired to their melting points. Adding hints of narrative to the mix, Susannah Biondo-Gemmell’s halved porcelain figures in chunks of lava, laid carefully on their sides, oscillated between blobby hollow abstractions and elegiac reliquaries.

Ling Chun abstractly invokes the subject of gender in teasingly organic wall reliefs cheerfully adorned with spattered pastel colors, enigmatic orifices and plaits of colored hair. The diminutive works of Jennifer Ling Datchuk, meanwhile, from her Making Women series, wryly incorporate tiny wigs of real human hair in varied hues into dainty porcelain discs suggesting hand-wrought make-up brushes, cookies, wafers or nipples–willfully feminine confections for consumption.

Jami Porter Lara’s stately, black-glazed jugs of pit-fired foraged clay are particularly notable in the way they conjure a spectrum of unexpected references, from a uterus to a pair of fists clutching a pipe, to, what exactly: an alien vacuum cleaner? Claiming a space between the sacred and the mundane, she melds the banality of soda bottles with the solemnity of funeral urns, all the while flaunting prominent screwhead nozzles. Her works project sculptural stature without ever minimizing their identity as vessels.

The allegorical possibilities of ceramic were perhaps most potently interpreted by Saint Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving, whose installation, titled Protest: 1883 / United States vs. Harris (Part of the series Undocumented) (2018), formed the centerpiece of the museum’s third floor. At once so subtle it could be breezed over, and physically expansive, at five by five by 12 feet, the work offered an array of hundreds of black glazed stoneware vessels of diverse shapes, set out on a raised wooden platform at roughly eye level where they can’t all be taken in at once. (The scaffold brings its own allusions, from viewing platform to gallows). I took the work to be a prose poem to blackness and a striking allegory of individuality and collectivity. Unpretentious in its language and almost hiding in plain sight, Irving’s silent, querying multitude proves haunting. At once traditional and provocative, nuanced and declarative, it attests to the durability of ceramics as a vehicle for contemporary sociopolitical commentary, even while parading its all-too eloquent fragility.

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