Review of LA Art Show 2021, Los Angeles, California, United States

The LA Art Show, the most comprehensive international contemporary art show in America, officially kick-off the city’s 2021 art season at the Los Angeles Convention Center on July 29, 2021. LA’s largest and longest-running art fair makes a triumphant return after its landmark 26th anniversary. LA Art Show is the unparalleled international art experience with over 80 galleries, museums, and non-profit arts organizations from around the world exhibiting painting, sculpture, works on paper, installation, photography, design, video and performance.

Los Angeles has emerged as a global epicenter of art & culture, with a distinct, interwoven multi-cultural influence unique to the city. Diversity is our strength and art is most impactful when it includes or transcends all borders. As LA rises as the world-class destination for art, the LA Art Show continues to lead the way with innovative programming and one-of-a-kind experiences for an expanding collecting audience. The LA Art Show served as a driver behind the city’s rise as an arts capital, and providing a sense of normalcy after a year full of turmoil and uncertainty for the art world.

The LA Art Show creates one of the largest international art fairs in the United States, providing an exciting, immersive, insider art experience to sponsors, their select guests and VIP clients. The show attracts an elite roster of national and international galleries, acclaimed artists, highly regarded curators, architects, design professionals, along with discerning collectors.

This innovative, exceptional cultural environment attracts executives and board members of Southern California businesses, state, county, and municipal government representatives, as well as leaders of the region’s cultural institutions. Attendees are trendsetters, influencers and alpha consumers, who seek and demand the newest and the best in all areas of their lives—art, design, food, technology and travel being specific passion points.

The 2021 edition of DIVERSEartLA, curated by Marisa Caichiolo, focus on the presence, contributions, research and documentation of women and non-binary artists at the forefront of work at the intersection of art, science and technology represented by guests Museums and Institutions. This part of the show focus on the presence, contributions, research, and documentation of women and non binary artists at the forefront of work at the intersection of art, science, and technology, represented by guest museums and institutions.

The LA Art Show has developed some unique programming to highlight some of the most interesting advancements in art including AR, VR, and NFTs, providing visitors a space to observe, learn, and enjoy. This new programming, in addition to the design and more classic mediums the show is known for, was designed with the viewers in mind, exposing people to something new and making digital art and technology more accessible. With this, the LA Art Show was the first LIVE show to join the NFT conversation.

More than 180,000 square feet of exhibition space is committed to today’s prominent galleries. These domestic and international galleries, beyond their booths, curate special exhibits that are at the forefront of the burgeoning contemporary art movement. The fair offers an extraordinary array of works and experiences in specialized sections.

LA Art Show 2021
The LA Art Show 2021 creates one of the largest international art fairs in the United States, providing an exciting, immersive, insider art experience to sponsors, their select guests and VIP clients. The show attracts an elite roster of national and international galleries, acclaimed artists, highly regarded curators, architects, design professionals, along with discerning collectors.

This innovative, exceptional cultural environment attracts executives and board members of Southern California businesses, state, county, and municipal government representatives, as well as leaders of the region’s cultural institutions. Attendees are trendsetters, influencers and alpha consumers, who seek and demand the newest and the best in all areas of their lives—art, design, food, technology and travel being specific passion points.

Some of the LA Art Show’s favorite galleries return in the 2021 edition, including Arcadia Contemporary, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, Simard Bilodeau Contemporary, and Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery from London for the lineup of Modern + Contemporary. The show once again have an international presence with the Pigment Gallery returning from Spain, In The Gallery returning from Denmark, and work from Gallery KITAI in Japan, just to name a few.

Modern + Contemporary – The largest section of programming at the LA Art Show, Modern + Contemporary exhibits the vast spectrum of contemporary painting, illustration, sculpture and more from galleries in Los Angeles, the Pacific Rim, and countries all around the world.

DIVERSEartLA – Capitalizing on the city’s position on the Pacific Rim, DIVERSEartLA is a special programming section devoted to nurturing the creative energy of international collectors, artists, curators, museums and non-profits by connecting them directly with audiences in Los Angeles. The LA Art Show donates 50,000 square feet of exhibition space to participating organizations each year as our civic engagement, and the featured work is not for sale. Overall curation by Marisa Caichiolo with individual curators from institutions around the world.

Featured Exhibitions – Expanding beyond the confines of booth spaces, Featured Exhibitions create immersive experiences to engage audiences through thought-provoking artworks, performances and other exhibitions offered by participating galleries, highlighting works that was talked about for years to come.

Roots – Honoring the voices and movements that came before, ROOTS is a dedicated exhibition space for galleries that showcase historical works and contemporary artists following in those traditions.

Project Space – Hailing from around the world, the exhibitors in Project Space showcase a broad array of ideas and talents in the form of solo exhibitions, presented by participating galleries.

Works On Paper – Works on Paper is a dedicated exhibition space for showcasing photographs and other works not on traditional canvas.

Exhibitions

Where the Streets Have No Name
Arushi Arts presents ‘Where the Streets Have No Name,’ a collection of works by emerging pop street artists from different parts of the world. Juxtaposed against intricate South East Asian artwork, the artworks are displayed next to each other to give the viewer a sense of the unique nature of techniques used while sharing the notion of ‘their streets’ as the crux.

The collection showcases artwork by Riya Chandiramani, an Indian Artist from Hong Kong; a grid of small metal street signs by Los Angeles artist, Sellout; a Ceramic Skateboard Sculpture by Miami sculptor Jenna Helfman; work by British pop artist Marty Thorton; contemporary street artist, Roger James, from Los Angeles; and emerging British artist George Weait. Through generations, artists have been inspired by their milieu and these artworks illustrate a dialogue between the artists and their respective environments.

Iconoclasts: Kilduff’s Saloon
Los Angeles-based artist John Kilduff has created an interactive installation at the fair built from paintings and cardboard sculptures to look like a neighborhood bar establishment. Attendees will have the opportunity to step into the immersive installation and order ‘drinks’ hand-painted by the artist. Kilduff will create new paintings of cocktails and specialty drinks daily. Participants will have the opportunity to order what is on tap or, when the artist is in, order custom drinks off-menu. A portion of the proceeds will go to supporting bar and venue workers who are experiencing financial hardships due to the pandemic.

Based in Los Angeles John Kilduff, aka Mr Let’s Paint, is known for his daring performance art and his television show, Let’s Paint TV. Through his show and work, Kilduff pushes his painting endurance through a series of multitasking and painting challenges to encourage audiences to embrace creativity and self-expression through life’s obstacles.

Color Fields I Michael Loew
Michael Loew used the grid-structure of Piet Mondrian as a base to experiment with possibilities of palette and to focus on the subtle transitions of tone or harmony of color relationships. He changed subjects into unique patterns of rectangles or color. As a major proponent of Abstract Expressionism and later Color Field painting, Loew produced many colorful examples, such as Blue Edge and Yellow on Yellow.

In the late 1920s Michael Loew was enrolled at the Art Student’s League and later was in France where he studied with Fernand Leger. Loew was close and longtime friends with Willem de Kooning who influenced his work. After Pearl Harbor, Loew joined the Navy and served as the battalion artist for the “Seabees” in the Pacific. His watercolors were drawn largely from his Navy work on Tinian Island. When he returned home in 1946, his painting moved quickly toward Abstraction.

It was the 1950s that brought the full development of his mature style. He studied with Hans Hoffman and cultivated his sensibility for color effects. Over the course of his life, Loew’s work was exhibited extensively in galleries and museums including: The Guggenheim and The Whitney in NY, the Dallas Museum of Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Abstract in Nature I Paik Gannomi
Korean-American abstract painter Paik Gannomi in his terse five flowing strokes produced Sonaggi (Rainstorm) in 1973, New York. Abstaining from being elaborate or superfluous in expressing a natural phenomenon, Rainstorm, he stated through bare minimum of lines and colors. In his use of line, he shares commonality with the Korean form of calligraphy art Seoye, in which a force of stroke must come alive with an inherent movement and rhythm. Artist Gannomi’s strokes add profound dynamism by characteristic embodiment of deep red within black. Ensuing space created by the lines is another trademark of his works influenced from Korean traditional art.

Paik Gannomi’ s art can be categorized as an abstract expressionism in line with Franz Klein and Jackson Pollack. Most of Paik Gannomi’s work was not consciously created with a title in mind, rather a perfunctory impression emerged from the lines and spaces. While his contemporaries back in Korea found fascination with the monochrome movement in 1970’s, he held his own forte with the unique style of aquamarine background overlayed with the flowing red on black lines. The epitome of his works came to fruition when he was awarded the Prix d’Audonne for “Paysage de Seine” at Grand Palais, Paris 1981. Previously, in 1980, he received the Mayor’s award at Palais Vincennes, Paris for “l’Automne” and “Sainte Face.”

Gravity I Andreas von Zadora-Gerlof
Zadora-Gerlof pays homage to M.C. Escher in this mind-boggling work of stainless steel. The piece was inspired by the Dutch artist’s 1952 Gravitation, which explored the impossibility of multiple sources of gravity working together on a single object. Escher manifested this theory through twelve turtles who use the star as a common shell. Represented in six colored pairs – red, orange, yellow, purple, green and blue – each turtle rests directly opposite its counterpart.

Though Escher’s creation is a physical impossibility, he presented it in a visually credible and logical way. Zadora makes the genius of Escher’s creation a reality through precisely cut pieces of stainless steel and polymer. At first glance, it appears to be a nonsensical jumble of turtle heads and limbs, though a closer inspection reveals the inherent symmetry and harmony of the design.

“The Butterfly Cry”
This installation, created from 490 ceramic petals, is inspired by the fact that butterflies have seen their habitat really reduced in an alarming way during the kingdom of the human being. Please feel free to get your cell phone close to the QR code and be ready to listen to the “butterfly cry”, when these beautiful creatures demand their turn to rule the world, to bring the benefit of balance and wellness for all the beings on our planet.

Cartoon-Digital Panel Folding Screen: Imagined Borders I Lee Lee Nam
Lee Lee Nam (b.1969) creates amalgamations of today’s high-tech environment and traditional culture. With exceptional finesse, he creates mesmerising digital and video works that juxtapose European old master paintings and traditional Asian art with modern day imagery. The artworks are overlaid and interwoven like a palimpsest, creating an image as fictitious as dreams overlapping reality.

Liminal: Martian Sun I Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves
Mixing light, sculpture and new technologies, the work of Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves questions the process of vision and deconstructs our gaze. Intertwining science and the intangible qualities of life and its philosophies, Félicie questions, shakes and deep dives into facts about the universe, translating them into mesmerizing art installations that are so astonishingly intellectual, complex and beautiful.

Her installations use a phenomenological approach to reality, they underscore the perception of time as a continuum. From audiovisual performance to land art, her research has focused on astrophysical space and natural light cycles. The visual artist works with outerspace landscapes through a ‘tele-vision’ process, where depth of field is being augmented by telescopes, rovers and astrophysical modelling.

Liminal: Martian Sun is a show that we decided to construct around the focused oeuvre of works by Félicie that intersects through different dimensions, time and space. Hovering between opposites, the artist’s works challenge the places of intervals like life and death, light and dark, near and far, reality and the spiritual among many others, driving an important part of her practice and the core of our exhibition, hence our title.

Programs
As the first live show to join the NFT craze, introducing attendees to the incredible trend in digital art, the LA Art Show has established a reputation for leading the pack. As such, visitors can expect even more eye-catching art trends.

DIVERSEartLA
The 2021 edition of DIVERSEartLA, curated by Marisa Caichiolo, focus on the presence, contributions, research and documentation of women and non- binary artists at the forefront of work at the intersection of art, science and technology represented by guest Museums, Institutions and Not-for-Profit Organizations. Science, art and technology are human attempts to understand and describe the world around us. The subjects and methods have different traditions and the intended audiences are different, but I think the motivations and goals are fundamentally the same. I think one of the most primal and innate needs of humans is to understand the world around us, and then share that understanding.

This wave began in the 1920s, when many artists aimed to create time-based visual works. Although some of the works seemed to embody the technology and innovation, much of it actually originated from the most tangible form of reality, the artist’s surrounding natural environments.

In the field of digital art in the last fifteen years, many artists have been working on materializing the digital information and new media practices by audio or visual means (such as installation works, audio-visual and performances which include technology) in order to grasp the imagination of it; while other artists are aiming to present the concept of ‘signals’ from the perspective of synesthesia: they try to visualize sound signals with the aid of machinery and therefore transform the abstract geometric images into sounds through computer operations.

DIVERSEartLA was an examination and a compilation of material, as well as an exhibition featuring the work of women and non-binary artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practices within art institutions and throughout history. We are also diving into a new period where we’ve had to deal with the breakdown of traditional relationships between the material and the immaterial.

Tiffany Trenda, a multidisciplinary performance artist, known for exploring the relationship of the female body to today’s ever-changing technologies. She is working with DIVERSEartLA to safely bring live performance to the art fair, coordinating a viewing experience for attendees via QR code. Each person can use their own smartphone to interact with her in real-time via volumetric video recording.

Art Museum of the Americas
Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) has joined with a special project curated by Fabian Goncálves, that feature a compilation of material and the work of women artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practices throughout history, as well as by women and non binary people whose forward-thinking practices are currently reshaping the field. Venezuelan artist Luis Cobelo (PILAR) was part of AMA with a performance, Yolanda Leal from Mexico present the performance Gorilla Nature and a special performance also be presented by María Veroónica San Martin.

Dignidad
Dignidad is an art installation at The National Archive of Chile based on secret telephone documents about Colonia Dignidad. Found in 2012 by the ex-settler and activist, Winfried Hempel, the audios reveal for the first time to the public conversations between Paul Schäfer and other Nazi agents in 1978. Through sculpture, sound, performance, text, and a selection of historical archives, the installation reveals a complex system of codes and transcontinental actions that culminated in crimes against minors and opponents of the Chilean civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990).

DATA | ergo sum | RELOADED
DATA | ergo sum | RELOADED is an interactive Art installation that visualizes the capability of viewing machines using Artificial Intelligence to extract data by a simple observation of visitors, created by artist Ana Marcos. Ana Marcos is a graduate in Fine Arts from Madrid University and Industrial Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. As a multidisciplinary artist, she combines different art forms like interactive installations, video, and photography, working on new ways of experimentation in the field of arts. She is the leader and co-founder of 3Dinteractive, a group of engineers and artists that seeks, through research, a deeper understanding of the relationship among art- science-technology and the public. All technology produces a change in our way of living and understanding reality.

Today, we have at our disposal complex, innovative technological environments, works based on experimentation and studies of Universities from all over the world and all that knowledge is available on the network to be shared not only by technologists, but also by artists. It is clear the momentum and relevance of that technology in general, and Artificial Intelligence in particular, is gaining in our society and, as an artist, she believes that artistic work has the obligation to explore and experiment in the field of AI. Art always makes its way into thought and therefore also into technology, and can provide other perspectives to the most innovative developments. Whether AI it is a tool or a discipline, it is – and was – a topic of work for artists. Hopefully, art also be able to influence the developments in AI.

The Symphony of Now
The San Marcos Museum of Art (MASM) from Lima, Perú bring a new media project of augmented reality by Peruvian artist Angie Bonino, titled “THE SYMPHONY OF NOW, which consists of a video installation, and interactive sound installation focusing on the Andean techno de-colonial shamanism. This world in which we live today, which has become an engulfing universal screen that traps and subjects our eyes, but that does not let us see. Because of their extreme, extraordinarily intense visibility – repetitive, hypnotizing, alienating – the power networks and their objectives of domination become invisible. And thus, unnoticed, their domination becomes inscrutable and fully irreversible.

The artist, Angie Bonino, was born in Lima (Peru), in 1974, and she has continuously travelled all over the world – she even lived and worked in Barcelona, Spain for eleven years. It should come as no surprise then that the main medium of her artistic proposals is precisely the motion pictures, specifically video and video installations. However, this does not mean that they are her only forms of expression.

Angie Bonino is an artist of our time in all senses, a multimedia artist focusing on the crossover of art and technology. After all, in addition to video, her works are also expressed in animation, digital techniques, graphic prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures. Yet, through all of this plurality of media, there remains at all times the same predominant aesthetic intention: to question the image. In Angie Bonino’s work, this questioning of the image through artworks always has a moral and political intent. Her goal is to reveal, in all the hyper-mediatic image production and transmission networks, the dissemination of the invisible, occult, power spheres and systems which determine the configuration of what she calls the image world.

Immersive Distancing
These artists address our ongoing cultural and political moment in relation to the body, memory, archival traces, and the urban landscape. Immigration, as both personal experience and socio-political reality, informs their larger body of work. These artists have previously worked in installation and sculpture, drawing heavily on family artifacts and archives as well as explorations of architectural space. Here, they approach media as a visualizing technology that brings their site-based works into an immersive narrative, while they also engage, adapt, and challenge the abstraction inherent in science, but especially digital science.

The production, formal characteristic, and content of these media works were directly impacted by Covid-19 restrictions, moving each artist to develop remote modes of working that blurred the line between production and post-production. Both artists drew upon multiple digital sources: video, photography, and audio recordings. In Last Light, Argote uses the sights and sounds of her walks across L.A. during the pandemic as the basis for a meditation on dis-ease and destruction. She turns to the foundation for all science – measurement – proposing to measure her body in relation to the scale of the city and the world, but uses the foundation for all art – the hand – as the basis for establishing scale.

In Memory Place, Abes explores three moments in her “fraying certainty” about Istanbul as it becomes an idea more than a place, visualizing this process through point cloud data and photogrammetry that transform video and photographs into 3D environments that recede from the viewer. These environments are impressionistic and partial – with gaps here and there in the scenes depicted, and with portions of imagery coming into sharper focus as they move toward the vanishing point. In both works, the fragmentary nature of the imagery is made immersive by the sound design.

Agua
Agua offers the public a space, an oasis, for healing and understanding. The work is site specific and architecturally integrated to foster a poetic awareness of water as a sacred resource for humanity while creating a moment of reflection for those who attend. Agua is a multichannel artwork combining videos of water gathered through years from nature exploration around the globe. The shifting color hues seen throughout express various states of mind and emotion, harmonizing the interactive experience physically with an internal one.

Now Art LA and Building Bridges Art Exchange have joined together as local non profit organizations to present the work Agua by artist Luciana Abait, a video projection inspired by the flood-myth motif that occurs in many cultures in which water acts a healing and re-birth tool, often referencing ideas of creation, purification and sustaining life. Agua as exhibited in downtown Los Angeles supports a call to action and underlines the importance of water as a key component to our future survival. I intend for this work to participate in opening awareness and actions surrounding environmental initiatives with depth, beauty, grace and wonder.

Girls’ Voices Now
Women’s Voices Now (WVN) is a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 non-profit organization that uses the power of film to drive positive social change that advances the rights of women and girls globally. We seek to challenge the mis- and under-representation of women by promoting films made by women, about women, for all.

Girls’ Voices Now has served 70 girls from under-resourced communities and overseen the production of their 12 short films, which have been selected and awarded in 48 film festivals, and watched by over 522,000+ online viewers thanks to our partnerships with Here Media, Kanopy, UN Women, and the UN #HeforShe Campaign. This program empowers girls and femme-identifying youth from under- resourced communities to find, develop, and use their voices for positive social change through filmmaking.

Performance: Un/Seen
Artist Tiffany Trenda presents Un/Seen, a live performance within an immersive experience using volumetric capture. It transforms in real-time depending upon the actions of the public. With new immersive experiences, we become disembodied. That is, we are physically in one space while our eyes and thoughts are experiencing another world simultaneously. Our bodies become dissociated as we shift between the simulated and the real. Furthermore, we are not immediately within the presence of another. Our presence is mediated and transported into another space that doesn’t actually exist. We are in essence, seen and unseen.

These new applications also blur the role of the user and creator by allowing both parties to change the experience. That is, the spectator is no longer a witness but a collaborator. Also, all parties are represented as avatars and this opens a narrative of, “who is this?” and “what happen?” Our roles as players in these games are ambiguous, a perfect reflection of our time with the uncertainty of our future.

Imagraphy (Documentary)
Imagraphy is a documentary where a variety of international photographers share their stories about the craft, the industry, techniques and their overall impressions of the world as seen through their lenses. Featuring: Roger Ballen, James Balog, John Batho, Peter Bialobrzeski, Michel Comte, Ralph Gibson, Greg Gorman, Henry Horenstein, Graciela Iturbide, Hiroji Kubota, Sir Derry Moore, Howard Schatz, Andres Serrano, Sandy Skoglund, Paul Watson, and Stephen Wilkes.

Rose River Memorial
The Rose River Memorial is a community art collaboration that honors and grieves the many lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Rose River Memorial aspire to create a felt rose as a symbol of grief for every life lost. The installation was a sacred space for healing, where people can connect with their own feelings and senses to experience their own grieving, individually or in a collective, as well as celebrating life and inviting humanity to celebrate new beginnings.

Seminars
Citibank is returning with Virtual Gallerist Talks, a series of in-person and live-streaming events and discussions highlighting some of the LA Art Show’s most popular galleries. Throughout the weekend Citibank hosted LA Art Show Gallerist Talks. These live conversations with the gallerists included a walkthrough of the exhibitions as well as commentary on select artworks. In a coordinated effort, there was both an in-person presence and a virtual experience, focusing on five selected galleries. This series gives viewers an in-depth look at the curation of each show, with spirited dialogue about each piece.

Charity
For the past six years, LA Art Show has been a strong and unwavering supporter of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as it leads the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. In 2021 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital remains the beneficiary, with the LA Art Show donating 15% of not only opening night tickets, but all ticket proceeds this year to its life saving mission.

Venue
The LA Art Show is strategically situated at the city’s dynamic epicenter, The LA Convention Center is Southern California’s most technologically advanced green venue, featuring soaring ceilings and ample space. Here is home to the Grammy Awards, The Grammy Museum, and an impressive entertainment complex that includes the Nokia Theatre, the Staples Center Arena, top restaurants, and The Ritz Carlton Hotel and Residences. Patrons of the arts gladly drive to Downtown L.A. for the best in Classical Music (Disney Hall), Theater (Mark Taper and Ahmanson), and Contemporary Art (MOCA, Art District).