PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE — GALLERIES AND ALTERNATIVE SPACES
By Yann Perreau
The questions that these organizations pose in their exhibitions are crucial for our very future. What can artists and scientists do in collaboration to overcome ecological damage and imagine a more sustainable future? What does the history of Southern California’s aerospace industry tell us about the movies and current structures of surveillance and control? How have scientists visualized the natural world, and how do artists now envision once-unthinkable scientific developments?” — Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation
PST ART: Art & Science Collide—a Getty initiative and landmark regional event that explores the intersections of art and science, past and present—is bringing excitement to the art community and visitors from around the world. I have only seen a few of the program’s exhibitions so far, amongst the dozens of shows and more than 800 artists featured. Instead of running to the “blockbusters” in the major museums, I have focused on participating galleries and alternative spaces.
The most impressive exhibition I have seen so far is the group show LIFE ON EARTH: ART & ECOFEMINISM at the Brick (the new iteration of LAXART, run by Hamza Walker). “Ecofeminism is a theoretical and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources,” explains Catherine Taft, the show’s curator and the Brick’s deputy director. “In the U.S., it developed from the environmental, anti-nuclear, and feminist movements in the late 1970s and 1980s. In addition to their primary concerns around the subordination of nature and women, ecofeminists sought to resist racism, homophobia, and the capitalist patriarchy.”
Entering the space, my eyes were caught by Protection, the witty broom-like piece by Francesca Gabbiani. It resembles a shepherd’s staff topped with a brush with hair that looks like flames, done in the artist’s signature multicolored, paper-cut collage style. In folkloric tradition, the positioning of a broom above or beside a home’s interior doorway is said to provide protection to inhabitants “by energetically sweeping away nefarious energies that may try to enter,” as the artist puts it. Embracing the continued association of the broom with witchcraft, Protection, per the artist, acts “as a talisman, illuminating how domesticity and caregiving have been used by patriarchal society as ways to control and discredit women.” Gabbiani is preparing an on-site performance for January 12, 2025. Titled Gossip, it will involve visual landscapes, plant medicines, live, projected shadow puppetry, animation, dancers, live drums, and soundscapes.
Elsewhere on the gallery floor is an impressive installation of buckets, seeds, organic growing medium, jute, coco coir bricks, trays, and wheatgrass. Women Reclaim the Earth (1979/2024) is a four-decade project by Leslie Labowitz-Starus. Initiated as a micro-urban farm in the artist’s yard in Venice Beach to feed the people in her neighborhood, this public art project became a full-scale agricultural operation. Labowitz-Starus became a small business owner. Protest signs complementing the piece allude to “Peace Economy,” a “movement towards peaceable policies and actions, to become aware of the environmental effects of war on our food supply and health” (go to www.leslielabowitz.com for more).
A poignant, utopic four-part video work by the Institute of Queer Ecology shows how larva and caterpillar chrysalis open to new social interactions. It made me think about the fiction of heteronormativity and the “techno-bodies” concepts of Paul Preciado and Donna Haraway.
I also wanted to become a lilliput and enter the miniature reproduction of the building displayed on the gallery floor in Owítaya (Lakhotayapi for “gathering”), a new work by Kite (of Wihanble S’a Lab). This small structure is The Lost & Found Cocktails and Dancing. Above it is a map of stars created by transparent glass and acrylic forms. It floats in the air “at the precise time of a recent visit to the location,” according to the gallery. The work is the “realization of a prayer in the Lakota visual language, which combines methods of physical mapping with methods of no-physical mapping, storytelling, photography, field recording.” It is the kind of work of art whose impact I can’t find words to explain, except to say that it touches the core of my experience as a human being. I also loved Tabita Rezaire’s installationWomb Consciousness. Weird, funny, and poetic, this work does something to your psyche too, perhaps “affect[ing] the songs of our body-mind-spirits,” as the Parisian artist suggests.
Among other worthwhile PST ART exhibitions: Liz Larner’s MAGNETIC INSTINCT at Regen Projects. The ninth solo show by the artist at the iconic L.A. gallery featured new ceramic works centered around Larner’s 1989 Rubber Divider. Her use of various materials, including polished metals and ceramics, explores the dynamic interplay between surface, form, and light. Drawing on ecological and philosophical themes, her sculptures challenge distinctions between art and environment, as well as human perception and materiality.
At Morán Morán, Oscar Tuazon’s Los Angeles Water School (LAWS) investigated the role of water in connecting people, places, and materials. The exhibition built upon Water School, the artist’s ongoing educational and mobile project addressing these themes. Returning to the city from the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camp at Standing Rock in 2016, he invited a group of water protectors and artists to imagine, build, and live in an experimental building adjacent to the Los Angeles River. Various experimentations, roundtable conversations, and exhibitions occurred for eighteen months in and around a Zome structure on a downtown L.A. lot. In addition to his experience at Standing Rock, as inspiration for this project the artist cites his discovery of Sierra Spring, a remote rural community in northeast Nevada. “I’d read an article about this region, where the city of Las Vegas planned to build a 360-mile-long water pipeline, going all the way to this mountain and this vast underground aquifer that sustains life in Sprint Valley. But the Spring Valley community stood up and said, ‘You can’t do this. You would destroy the Swamp Cedars’—a rare kind of tree that grows only in this valley.” Tuazon became very close to the local people, notably Ely Shoshone elder Delaine Spilsbury, a descendant of one of only two survivors of the area’s 1897 massacre. Inside the gallery, a heavenly photo of the sun rising on some trees was mounted on aluminum and folds as if it were a fragile, crumpled print. The exhibition also features poetic paintings wherein the artist used a tray of water, floated pigments on the water’s surface, and dipped the canvases in the tray to capture the movement of water.
Tuazon’s most impressive works are what he calls his “architectural fragments”—totem-like wood structures, which, he explains, are elements recycled from the mobile Water School architecture. Metal or wood doors and windows (Cedar Spring Water School Window, 2018/2023), an old water pump, and a group of erect six-foot-long wooden sticks (Sun and Moon and There is no Shame in Failure, both 2024). The artist’s radical gesture is to almost disappear, adding nothing to what is already powerful, built from the necessities of preserving nature, water, and our environment. The straightforward, functional beauty of these pieces comes from the artist’s erasure as an individual creator and his strong interest in collective intelligence and action, nurtured by his LAWS experimentations. Exploring themes such as a return to simple objects and messages, industry, functionality, space, and nature documented in its physical transformation, Tuazon offers a kind of renewed, twenty-first-century version of arte povera, with added echoes of Southern California assemblage artists John Outterbridge and Dominique Moody. The Los Angeles Water School (LAWS) exhibition catalogue, published by DoPe Press, is out now
Another fascinating exhibition—open through early 2025—is Tom Van Sant’s AN EARTH TWIN AT THE DIGITAL DAWN, a GeoSphere Project at 18th Street Arts Center. You may have seen, without knowing who made them, his big sculptures displayed in airports around the world (Honolulu, Taipei, Los Angeles), civic centers (Los Angeles, Newport Beach, and Inglewood), or corporate headquarters (Taipei, Manila, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Honolulu, and San Francisco). The late “father of space” art,” as Van Sant is sometimes nicknamed, developed a grandiose project in the 1980s: the first satellite composite Map of Earth, as you would see it if you were an astronaut in space. A computer geek who was passionate about science and technologies, the artist collaborated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other agencies to bring this vision to life. He utilized cutting-edge imagery and a highly specialized computer program to integrate thousands of individual satellite images, creating a unified, high-res picture of the planet. Unlike previous world maps, the GeoSphere used actual satellite data to avoid distortion, displaying the Earth’s landforms and oceans as they naturally appear. At the time, during the height of the Cold War, “every boardroom and schoolroom in the world displayed maps and globes of the world with every country a different color,” per the artist’s website. “But no one knew what the world, their home, and place in space truly looked like.” When the first map was completed by Van Sant and his team in 1990, it became a huge deal. The National Geographic Atlas of the World put it on its title page, soon followed by other magazines worldwide. I’m sure you have already seen this iconic image, which all U.S. federal agencies still use, and which eventually inspired Google to create its now notorious Google Earth application.
Map of Earth also appeared at a time when global warming was becoming a reality, and the ozone layer was quickly disappearing. It became a tool for scientists, activists, and decision-makers to visualize the unity of our planet’s ecosystems and the impacts of climate change to better manage our resources. Al Gore promoted it when he became a public voice for the planet. After two years of additional research, Van Sant brought his GeoSphere Project to the world in the form of a spectacular, interactive, animated globe. Viewers can see it in the exhibition’s first room through a hole that allows them to have a peek into the main room. This hole is also the eye of a colossal eagle, drawn on a big black wall. Designed by Lara Hoad with Andrew Byrom, the audacious scenography recreates the aura and unique beauty of the project while reconnecting it with the ecosystem that it ultimately praises and protects. The exhibition features other artworks that the artist created over the years, from mosaics and drawings in the 1950s and 1960s to space-related experimentations like Ryan’s Eye (Reflections From Earth), 1980, a manmade image of an eye viewed from space. They are displayed along archival films, drafts, plans, and a timeline of historical events, wars, and scientific discoveries. Van Sant was a kind of twentieth-century Leonardo da Vinci. Like the Renaissance master, he combined science and art in a fruitful, humanist approach. If you can’t see the exhibition in person, I encourage you to go to its companion website.
See info and links below.
PST ART — ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE
LIFE ON EARTH — ART AND ECOFEMINISM
Through December 21
The Brick
518 North Western Avenue, Melrose Hill, Los Angeles
the-brick.org/life-on-earth2024
instagram.com/francescagabbiani
AN EARTH TWIN AT THE DIGITAL DAWN
TOM VAN SANT’S GEOSPHERE PROJECT
Through February 1
18th Street Arts Center
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica
18thstreet.org/exhibitions/an-earth-twin-at-the-digital-dawn-tom-van-sants-geosphere-project
LIZ LARNER — MAGNETIC INSTINCT
was on view at Regen Projects from September 12 through October 26, 2024
regenprojects.com/exhibitions/liz-larner
OSCAR TUAZON — LOS ANGELES WATER SCHOOL (LAWS)
was on view at Morán Morán from September 7 through November 2, 2024
Exhibition catalogue:
dopepress.fr/oscar-tuazon-los-angeles-water-school
From top: Kite, installation view of Owítaya (gathering), 2024, image courtesy and © the artist and the Brick, photo by Ruben Diaz; Tabita Rezaire, Womb Consciousness image, 2022, courtesy and © the artist; Francesca Gabbiani, Protection, 2024, image courtesy and © the artist and the Brick, photo by Diaz; Constructing the prototype GeoSphere, circa 1989, photographer unknown, image courtesy of the Van Sant Family; Liz Larner, magnetic instinct installation view, 2024, image courtesy and © the artist and Regen Projects; Oscar Tuazon, Los Angeles Water School (LAWS) exhibition catalogue (2024), edited by Tuazon, designed by Dorothée Perret, published by DoPe Press, cover image courtesy and © the artist and DoPe Press.
