modern art

Lightscape, Utopian City: Angel Chen @ Here is Elsewhere Gallery, Los Angeles

Exhibition November 18th – January 4th 2011
“Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. When the image is new, the world is new”.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetic of Space

Landscape: derived from the Dutch, the word originally meant a patch of cultivated ground, and then an image. It entered the English language in the 17 th century, purely as a term for works of art. With the end of Modernity, it seems that we have now explored all parts of our planet. “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” says Morpheus to Neo in the 1999 film The Matrix. The hero wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiences the Real as a desolate war-torn, yet spectacular landscape. For philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek, this sentence exemplifies the hyperreality we now live in, a world where the Virtual and the Real, the Natural and the Artificial, are so mixed up that it becomes impossible to separate one from the other.
Hence the great tradition of landscape art, especially in the West, has dramatically changed since the time of the great masters- Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, etc. Instead of getting to a deserted, natural Wild West, going out of the city can now be the experience of a post-industrial, dystopian environment. “Elsewhere: future landscapes” is an attempt to explore some of these changes.
All the artists exhibited here focus, in their own media, on that topic. The show is curated as a trip in which we encounter a tornado, a genetically modified human-vegetable monster, a crashed car tree, and sculptures made of a chemical factory. We explore photographic landscapes and post-urban suburbs. We pass through Trona, a desolated city in San Bernardino County, where a local artist transforms the infamous chemical factory’s detritus into assemblage works of art. And end up in Manzanar, a Word War II internment center for Japanese Americans in the Owens Valley now administered by National U.S Park Service. Manzanar’s hidden memory is captured in the dialectical photographs of Andrew Freeman.

With works by
Dan Bayles, Rowan Burkam, Angel Chen, Andrew Freeman, John Outterbridge, Kim Schroensdast, Emily Smith, Mark Ruwedel, Marnie Weber
Directions to Here is Elsewhere at the Pacific Design Center
Pacific Design Center is located on the northeast corner of San Vicente Boulevard and Melrose Avenue in the heart of West Hollywood, one mile east of Beverly Hills. Here is Elsewhere Gallery is located on the second floor of the blue building (space B 231). Self and valet parking @ PDC. Complementary parking for press

Here is Elsewhere gallery
Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Ave., Suite B231
Blue Building, Second Floor
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Cell (+) 3109048966
Hours: Tue thru Fri 11-5PM
and by appointment
www.hereiselsewhere.com

HiE is part of part of “Design Loves Arts”, a residency program shaped by artistic viewpoints and experiment.
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