This is the first time I've been in an exhibition with Jan van Goyen, Joseph Cornell, Eduard Vuillard and a vintage Honda motorcycle. 'Home' at El Segundo Museum of Art is something to experience! The piece above is a sculptural work of mine in vinyl and concrete that sits in the corner, seemingly inconspicuous, but in our hyper-security/false-security/privacy-destruction of a society, many guests alerted the security at the opening and many others didn't even notice it. Below is the official description of the exhibition for your reading pleasure. And click here to explore all the works in the virtual gallery on a binary level!
Experience 13: HOME – October 12, 2014 until February 1, 2015
HOME explores the way we perceive comfort within our own four walls. Whether “gemütlich” or rather cool, if you leave your door open for art, it most certainly influences your beloved place. We all have very distinct intuitions – call them “personal tastes” – about what feels right to us. Art in general can shock or inspire. It can make you feel in harmony with your surroundings or it can represent your dark side. Whether it appears to be a lurid status symbol or a silent sign of comfort, art will reveal your essence for all to see in a most personal way.
Do old masterpieces bore you to tears? Are you only interested in letting the brightness of contemporary art lighten up your home? Or would you rather ignore modern installations, dismissing them caustically as “pieces of junk”? Can your home become more fragile with the value of art, or is it part of the foundation of your eternal castle? Does art transform home into “sweet home” or do high-design kitchen accessories totally turn you off? What kind of art, for that matter, is allowed in the bathroom? Did you ever combine your own artworks from kindergarten with the ones that your children created? (And if so, have you ever compared them?) What are the pieces at home you feel most attached to? Do you think you can turn them into a piece of art merely by looking at them, or do they always stay as they are? Does any artwork in your home remind you of your grandparents? If you think art at home can possibly detach you from time, ESMoA’s new experience may be the spark that accomplishes it.
Chaotic ingredients. A dialog of gold-framed masterworks with contemporary video art installations in a cozy living room. An American photorealistic still life facing contemporary shooting range targets in a rather cool entrance hall. And artists from Golden Age Dutch painter Jan van Goyen to contemporary conceptualists Bernd and Hilla Becher, American patron of surrealism Joseph Cornell to German impressionists Max Slevogt and Max Liebermann, Nabi founder Eduard Vuillard to American photorealists Richard Estes and Ralph Going, and Swiss symbolistic painter Arnold Böcklin to young “contemporaries” Robert Seidel, Flora Kao and Cole Sternberg. Oh – the apartment-like setting just may provoke you to reconsider the art in your own place.
Paradox disposition. By now there are few taboos in contemporary art, yet it re-mains especially inappropriate to pick art with an eye toward matching the color of your sofa. Still, there is the nagging paradox that most every art collection started this way. (Though, of course, nobody ever seems to admit it…)
Start Exploration. For most people home is the first place to collect artifacts form-ing parts of your own identity. As a kid you started collecting. Almost anything from pinky shells to heart-shaped glitter stones, thorny wood sticks to smashed butter-flies. Everything – and anything – could’ve become your treasure, and the crazier it was, the better. Today we tend to synchronize our tastes with sleek and neutral arrangements or get totally lost in the constant wave of things. If chaos is the nutrient solution for development, the paradox could easily work as its trigger for creative thinking. ESMoA invites everyone to experience the firework of extraordinary artwork by feeling its inspiring spark. Cool and sweet seem to be opponents, but the HOME experience at ESMoA will show that there can be a friendly encounter – especially at home.
Los Angeles, 2014
Visit www.esmoa.org for more information on the Museum.
Image: Detail, Richard Estes, 560, 1972.