“From and About Place: Art from Los Angeles”

“From and About Place: Art from Los Angeles” brings together seven artists working in Los Angeles. Their practice, which encompasses drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, and video, is stylistically and conceptually wide-ranging and reflects the diversity that artists freely embrace today.

Scoli Acosta, Edgar Arceneaux, Alexandra Grant, Adam Janes, My Barbarian, Ruben Ochoa, and Fran Siegel represent a current generation of artists who have chose Los Angeles to live, work, and develop social and cultural relations that feed into their artistic practice. They share an interest in both mental and physical place, and their art expresses the mobility and pace of today’s contemporary life. The artists draw inspiration from their immediate surroundings and their personal experiences. The work of Scoli Acosta and Ruben Ochoa reflects on the city’s urban composition and multicultural make up, while Fran Siegel’s drawings are based on her own photographs of encroaching urban development in Southern California as seen from an airplane. Alexandra Grant and Edgar Arceneaux deal with personal experiences through the use of language and video. Grant’s experience growing up in various countries has led her to focus on language and what is gained and lost in translation; Arceneaux works with the notion of presence and absence and space/time rendered as both memory and illusion. My Barbarian is a performance troupe who uses music, dance, video, and theater with a light-hearted approach to address historical as well as current racial, social, and cultural issues. Bringing art historical references into his work, Adam Janes makes drawings and sculptures that are often conceptualized and displayed in tandem. Janes’s interest in multiple subjects coalesces in his visually complex drawings with sculpture providing hands-on practice on which to rethink some of his original ideas.

Mostly hailing from art schools in California—with the exception of two artists who attended art school in the Mid-West and East Coast—the artists in “From and About Place: Art from Los Angeles” opted to remain or settle in Southern California because they have found Los Angeles to be a city that is receptive and open to experimentation. With an extensive network of well-established artists, contemporary art museums, commercial galleries, and collectors, Los Angeles today has the wherewithal to support an artistic community. Whether these artists elect to make the city their permanent home or eventually find greener pastures elsewhere, they will carry the L.A. experience with them imprinted in their psyche and in their work.

Alma Ruiz