When I arrived at “At The Edge of the Sun,” knowing it would encapsulate 12 different Angelenos’ stories of Los Angeles, I expected to be unfamiliar with the material. I expected to be unaware of the local parks, small museums, iconic billboards and other community signals. I expected to be the alien among the gallery goers not just because it was my first time at Jeffrey Deitch, but rather because I still feel that I have yet to meet Los Angeles.
Tucked away in the 1-mile square radius of South Central, or University Park, it’s challenging for USC students to explore outside our campus grounds and housing sprawl for many reasons. But whatever the deterrent, cost or lack of transportation, avoidance to explore new areas, or even bias against certain neighborhoods, it all summates to a general separation of University and State.
Despite USC’s central location, I still feel separate from most of the city.
I wonder what this distance is doing to our art.
At Jeffrey Deitch’s “At the Edge of the Sun,” this question seems to be answered. The exhibit features the work of 12 local L.A. artists who self-organized a show of their own works all relating to their living and artistic experiences in L.A. Jeffery Deitch, the Los Angeles hub of the famed art dealer, curator and author, is known for its “thematic exhibitions” like this one.
These artists have been friends for a decade, and chose to present this exhibition as a collaboration. According to their website, the show highlights “underground economies, California landscapes, nightlife, local histories, systemic architecture, surveillance, youth culture, public transportation, backyard kickbacks and more.”
In the contemporary exhibition, pieces range from a collage stone fountain to a 3-panel acrylic landscape to two life-size billboards to an interactive trailer chapel. Each artist’s installations express themes of local, shared memory, especially since childhood.
In Michael Alvarez’s landscapes of Hollenbeck Park and El Sereno Park, he depicts specific community events like the Local Rippers Film Festival as well as a combination of intimate, personal, solitary moments in a piece that reflects Alvarez’s many mornings in the skate park. In the same tone, his materials coexist and at times actually overlap. From dried paint flakes from his palette to actual collected trash, the artist interlays discarded scraps of material in displaying his all-too-often overlooked scenes of Angeleno culture.
In the Hollenbeck Park piece, he utilizes blurring and multi-media layering on his canvas to draw focus on different vignettes of moments within his scenes. One vignette depicts a personal memory of a child carrying a stack of pizza boxes, another commemorates a traditional photo for quinceaneras by the lake.
In comparison, in his El Sereno Park piece, Alvarez discussed “different iterations of the skate park” at his exhibition walk-through. This piece depicts a combination of many memories over time rather than the priority of one moment present in the previously mentioned Hollenbeck Park.
In the far-left panel, a small figure in the background stands out as one of the most significant details of Alvarez’s story. He paints a young boy waiting for school, sticking out from the blended landscape only by his bright blue hoodie. The distinct early morning fog places us all in the time and place, and we recognize this figure somehow. Alvarez conveys a special, intimate story about the connection we share with those whom we share space with, even when our paths don’t cross. This young man may not be aware of his presence in the massive 3-panel landscape, and yet his depiction, the young, skatepark-student in East L.A., likely resonates with the new generation inhabiting the park and keeping these memories alive.
In Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.‘s billboard series, iconic lawyer signage is reimagined as a local cultural symbol of what L.A. has become. In the unmistakable fashion and style of real signs, the billboards feel plucked right out of La Puente and nailed down in the studio. Gonzalez did not attend art school, but rather received his training in commercial sign painting. His medium is obviously mastered from his professional background, but also calls on his experience with graffiti. He refers to his own work as “contemporary palimpsests” which reflect the social interaction through graffiti tags and fire extinguisher markings that he saw overlay his original commercial ads.
In Gonzalez’s L.A., these signs popping out of every corner reflect the more relevant cultural state. “L.A. used to be Hollywood! Now it’s just people suing each other,” Gonzalez said during an exhibition walk-through. His work reflects this shift in the visual L.A. skyline while prioritizing audience interaction and street life in a living piece.
What is especially thoughtful in curation and placement is having the two billboards by both Gonzalez and Mario Ayala face each other within the same gallery room, in physical and cultural conversation. Gonzalez’s realism across from Ayala’s cheeky reimagining.
In Maria Maea’s sculpture, the artist calls on her time in visiting female detention centers and our local relationship to water and housing. In these concepts, she’s constructed an operating mosaic fountain that recycles and filters its own water (one of the key elements of this filtering being a particularly sentimental white t-shirt). Just in front of the fountain, often stepped over by gallery-goers, sits a headless female form covered in cactus-like spikes and thorns and draped in a palm tree leaf cape. She sits with her hand held out for change.
In poignant awareness and purpose, Maea declares that they, the two works, are “both wishing spaces.” She finds people to be more inclined to give a penny to a wishing well than to an unhoused person asking. She depicts these two separately, and yet, they are indeed, the same thing, with different subjects. At one you wish, and at the other, one wishes of you. The headless, prickly woman, unable to gaze at passersby, still receives less in her hand than the sparkling bottom of the mosaic-tiled stone fountain, boasting a fiery female visage atop the spouts.
Leaving Deitch’s “anti-Frieze” showing, I felt the distance from my corner of L.A. and the weight of all the missing parts I had just briefly glimpsed. I passed by an “alternative daycare” down the street and decided to walk an extra block around the gallery. When I do get the chance to be in the West Hollywood/Fairfax neighborhood, I am reminded of Los Angeles’ charm and appeal. This is the city with space! Families and young people here live in spacious, residential, central, walkable, urban neighborhoods 30 minutes from the beach. As an East Coast native, these qualities almost never co-exist, and yet after living in L.A. for two years, I am still a stranger to this lifestyle. Down in University Park, it’s not the same.
My pilgrimage to Jeffrey Deitch took me on a tour of L.A. in and around the gallery. According to these 12 Angelenos, I haven’t met nearly enough of L.A. yet. I am reminded, again, of my ignorance to this sprawling city and all its enclaves. I am reminded, again, of how much there is to learn, and how integral local art is in doing so.