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Tag: LACMA

  • Apocalyptic Solstice Dance

    Spirits summer solstice with Richie Hawtin at LACMA (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
    Spirits Summer Solstice Dance at LACMA (Pic: Liz O.)

    The colors flashing across a screen in LACMA’s courtyard were hypnotic and unsettling. A pink Croc morphed into a glossy shade of black. Other sandals shifted between liquid shades of iridescent blue, lavender and bronze, as if vintage Urban Decay bottles had spilled across the art, leaving globs of Oil Slick, Smog and Asphyxia nail polish to ripple across the screen. So prismatic! So toxic! I couldn’t turn away. 

    Spirits is a series of digital sculptures mades by the Irish artist john gerrard using photoscans of 96 plastic sandals that he collected along beaches across the globe and a gaussian splatting technique that allows viewers to stream the images onto their devices and alter them with the touch of a finger. Batches of Spirits have been dropped via LACMA’s website since last December, their release dates coinciding solstices and equinoxes. The third installment of Spirits, all tied to the Mediterranean Sea, was unveiled on June 22, with an in-person component, the Spirits Summer Solstice Dance, headlined by Richie Hawtin.

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  • Choose Your Own Adventure at LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries

    Flower Day by Diego Rivera and a sculpture of Chicomecoatl at LACMA David Geffen Galleries (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
    Flower Day by Diego Rivera and a sculpture of Chicomecoatl at LACMA David Geffen Galleries. (Photo: Liz O.)

    There’s no right way to travel through the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. I just happened to see Flower Day, a Diego Rivera painting where calla lilies are piled high on the shoulders of a vendor, as soon as I walked into the museum. Nearby was a small statue of the Aztec goddess Chicomecoatl. This seemed like a good place to start, so I began to walk an open pathway beyond the ancient Colima sculpture of a dog that stands guard, through a collection of works that’s some 2000 years old and into a passage of Latin American paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries.

    Quickly, though, the art around me looked more familiar, more like the L.A. I know. I was in a nook with rafa esparza’s adobe wall sculpture, …we are the mountains in front of me. To my right was one George Rodriguez’s photos from the Chicano movement. I turned my head slightly to the left and spotted a Smiths t-shirt out of the corner of my eye. That has to be one of Shizu Saldamando’s drawings, I thought. It was. 

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