Final touches put on “˜New Sculpture’

It’s 1:30 on a Friday afternoon and the city is buzzing
outside on Wilshire Boulevard. While people everywhere are rushing
to finish their work weeks, those inside the UCLA Hammer Museum are
bustling as if the work week has just begun. Five short days remain
until the deadline for the installation of the museum’s
upcoming exhibit “THING: New Sculpture from Los
Angeles,” set to open on Feb. 6.

“This is kind of like Christmas morning over the span of a
week,” independent curator Chris Miles said with a smile.
“And you just watch everything get unwrapped. There’s
still a lot of tension, a lot of possibility of success or
failure.”

Yet the artists present, who are installing and adding finishing
touches to their pieces, and especially the exhibit’s three
curators, are picturesquely calm. As it typically is, the museum is
its own quiet and creative environment.

In an exhibition room, sculptor Kaz Oshiro and an assistant
measure the dimensions of parts of his piece titled “Kitchen
Project,” while his other work “Pink Marshall Stack
Wall” ““ made of acrylic and bondo on stretched canvas
to replicate real, full-stack Marshall guitar amplifiers as if they
were dipped in Barbie pink ““ lies horizontally on the floor
in another room in plastic packing wrap.

Alone in another room, artist Kristen Morgin moves almost
imperceptibly, quietly adding the finishing touches to her
large-scale corroding lowrider, which is made simply of unfired
clay, wood, wire, cement and glue.

Further in the exhibition room lie sculptor Olga
Koumoundouros’ giant-size Lincoln Logs, made of PVC, wire,
HydroCal, spray foam, newspaper and vermiculite, also in plastic
packing material. She is discussing with the curators how best to
position her piece “Sagamore: The Good Life” in the
room. They ask themselves, “Do people usually enter this room
from the left or the right?” They then all agree it is the
latter.

These are just three of the 20 emerging L.A.-based sculptors
whose work is being exhibited in THING, which will run until June
5. Most of the sculptures have never been exhibited before, and
over half were made specifically for this exhibit. Created between
2002 and 2005, the work is all very recent. In fact, many of the
dates of the artwork will be just days before the opening of the
show.

“We aren’t joking when we’re saying
there’s work that’s literally being finished right
now,” Aimee Chang, curatorial assistant, said with a nervous
laugh.

This seems to trigger the emotions of her collaborators. Their
words jumble together.

“Like the piece is supposed to be right here … ,”
Miles adds.

Chang finishes this line with rushed urgency.

“But is not yet … ,” she says.

Just shortly before, their quiet voices echoed in the empty,
pristine white corridors of the gallery like they would in a
monastery. What was previously calm and quiet talk among the three
curators suddenly turns into a sonic explosion when the curators
are asked whether there is any anxiety.

“Oh definitely! Major anxiety!” Miles said.

“Sure!” Hammer Projects curator James Elaine
added.

“Yeah!” Chang said.

It is at once apparent that their calm visages were hiding how
stressful this exhibit has been for them, especially when they
begin to discuss how tight the exhibit schedule remains and how
much they have had to rely on the artists to produce the work in
such a short period of time. Many works of the exhibit had not yet
been created when the curators first signed on the artists for the
show April through September of last year.

“In this case, it’s not just finding artists whose
work you like, it’s also been in many cases finding artists
who you think you can put your faith in,” Miles said.
“Doing that once or twice in a show is one thing, but
there’s probably, out of 51 pieces in the show, I’d say
there are 15. So that’s 15 major leaps of faith in one show.
So far we’re getting a good return on that faith. But yeah,
that’s stress.

“¢bull; “¢bull; “¢bull;

Part of the rush is for the exhibit’s timeliness.
According to the curators, there has never been a better time than
now to present contemporary sculpture in Los Angeles with the
recent surge of interest among emerging artists in creating objects
again.

Miles, who is also an art critic and an assistant professor at
CSU Long Beach, suggested the surge has likely been a result of
several factors, including a great number of strong sculpture
professors in L.A.-area colleges, the availability of material and
technological resources in Los Angeles and the city’s visual
culture of faux objects such as movie sets. Elaine also suggested
the simple fact that Los Angeles is more spacious than other
cities.

Many of the pieces included in the exhibit are quite large, and
have caused issues of transportation for the artists and curators.
Sculptor Jedediah Caesar, who earned his masters at UCLA, had to
FedEx his 800-pound geode, which is filled with resin-glued studio
detritus, to an Idaho quarry just to get it cut in half. Similarly,
Morgin’s 16-foot lowrider had to be divided into eight
sections in order to be transported to the museum.

“I think there is a kind of indulgence here,” Miles
said. “It is somewhat of a guilty pleasure to go to your
studio and make a gigantic thing that’s 15 feet long. That
kind of activity used to be ideologically suspect in a bad way.
This is a generation that is over that thinking of art
objects.”

Emerging L.A.-based sculptors also seem to have been liberated
in other ways.

“One thing that we’ve noticed as we’ve put
together the show is that there’s really an intense sense of
openness and fun that artists are feeling,” Chang said.
“With conceptual art in the past 20 to 40 years, there have
been a lot of times when people have had to be very ideological in
their approach to art making and I think now we’re seeing
that artists are able to just go wild.”

Take for instance Caesar’s 800-pound geode, Oshiro’s
pink Marshall stacks and Koumoundouros’ giant Lincoln Logs.
There is also UCLA MFA graduate Nathan Mabry’s piece
“Three-Toed Love,” which sits promiscuously in the
corner of the first room in the exhibition hall. It features a
dark-colored sloth sitting at the edge of a small table with what
looks like a yellow exercise ball squashed between the underside of
the table’s top and the top of the table’s shelf.

Elaine put it more succinctly.

“They’re having fun,” Elaine said.

“¢bull; “¢bull; “¢bull;

It was only last April when the curators began their six-month
search, and now the whole experience is coming to a close with the
opening of the exhibit. In their search, the curators eventually
caravanned and zigzagged across town from Claremont to Long Beach
to over 400 studios. In a single day, they sometimes would visit
eight different studios and drive 150 miles. This experience was no
doubt physically and mentally taxing.

“When you do that for an entire day, and at the end of the
day you haven’t seen anything that excited you, then you ask,
“˜What about a postcard show?'” Miles joked.

Although this exhibit has no doubt been stressful, perhaps the
biggest rewards are those earned with the greatest efforts.

“You have that day when you see nothing that interests
you, and then you have that day when you see something that knocks
you dead,” Miles said.

This is something the curators can all relate to.

“The thing is, that’s just regular fare. I mean, in
life in general,” Elaine added.

Noticing how cliche this sounds, everyone starts laughing.

“No, really,” Elaine said in earnest,
“It’s like having this amazing experience at a
restaurant. You eat a lot of good food, then, one day, you have
amazing food. And it’s really the same way with art. If I
have this enlightenment, this experience, it just goes into my
soul, and I drink it down. It doesn’t happen that
often.”