AMOUR: Laura Kimpton (@laurakimpton)
Presented by Timothy Yarger Fine Art
This was easily one of the more popular pieces on view at the 2019 LA Art Show last month. Artist Laura Kimpton is the conceptual force behind the Monumental Word Series that began back in 2009 at the annual Burning Man art event in Nevada. Jeff Schomberg collaborated with Laura Kimpton in building and installing her conceptual designs.
Did you catch our blog post from a week ago hipping you to S.C. Mero’s exhibition at the LA Art Show? The day after the L.A. Art Show closed, Mero took Deborah Vankin from The LA Times on a tour of her street sculptures and Vankin wrote it up:
“The cone was part of Mero’s eight-piece solo exhibition presented by Art Share L.A., a nonprofit supporting emerging local artists. Mero’s public art installations, which she’s been making since she graduated from USC in 2011, typically dot the sidewalks of downtown L.A.’s Arts District, where Art Share L.A. is based. The conceptual sculptures employ humor to shed light on pressing urban issues such as gentrification, drug addiction and homelessness.”
“I just love how Sarah directs a lens onto dire societal issues,” said Art Share L.A. Executive Director Cheyanne Sauter. “But she relies so much on the accidental audience, and I wanted to make that more intentional by bringing her there.”
If you missed her show, we recommend you take a self-guided tour of S.C. Mero‘s street art, the locations are listed in the LA Times article.
If you’re at the LA Art Show today, we highly recommend you check out Melissa Morgan Fine Art in Booth #41. We were thoroughly captivated by works by artists Anthony James (whose work we had previously known only by reputation) and Andy Moses (who we’ve been fans of since meeting him at his show at Produce Haus a couple years ago).
“Anthony James is a sculptor, painter, and performance artist famous for setting fire to a Ferrari in a birch forest and entombing the ravaged car and trees in an installation called Kθ (2008). His practice incorporates a variety of industrial objects, steel vitrines, aluminum sculptures, detritus, and wall-mounted installations, his use of vitrines drawing comparisons to Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. James is fixated with speed, mechanization, and the search for new practices to reflect themes of death, destruction, and rebirth.
“Andy Moses is a Los Angeles-based artist noted for his particular take on color and the relationship between space, shape and light. Moses paints with pearlescent pigments on concave canvases, which curve inward like the old Cinerama movie screens of the 1950’s.
Moses pushes the physical properties of paint through chemical reactions, viscosity interference, and gravity dispersion to create elaborate compositions that mimic nature and its forces. Moses also works with convex canvases, which utilize an outward curve, causing his pearlescent colors to shift and change as different amounts of light hit the surface at any given point.”
If you haven’t had the chance to check it out yet, we highly recommend you see Ai Weiwei: LIFE CYCLE at Marciano Art Foundation (through March 3, 2019).
This exhibition is Ai’s first major institutional exhibition in Los Angeles and The Marciano Art Foundation will feature the new and unseen work Life Cycle (2018) – a sculptural response to the global refugee crisis. The exhibition will also present iconic installations Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Spouts (2015) within the Foundation’s Theater Gallery.
On view for the first time in the Black Box, Life Cycle (2018) references the artist’s 2017 monumental sculpture Law of the Journey, Ai’s response to the global refugee crisis, which used inflatable, black PVC rubber to depict the makeshift boats used to reach Europe. In this new iteration, Life Cycle depicts an inflatable boat through the technique used in traditional Chinese kite-making, exchanging the PVC rubber for bamboo.
This multifaceted installation is a continuation of Ai’s ongoing engagement with politics and social justice. It follows the release of his feature-length documentary, Human Flow (2017), which depicts the refugee crisis on film. In the artist’s op-ed for the Guardian in February 2018, he writes, “I was a child refugee. I know how it feels to live in a camp, robbed of my humanity. Refugees must be seen as an essential part of our shared humanity.”