Contemporaries
by Curator Claudine Isé

From 1999 through 2003, the California Community Foundation awarded grants to 34 Southern California artists who work in all areas of the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, assemblage, drawing, installation, photography, video art and animation, dance, performance and digital media. Grantees have included both mid-career artists and younger artists who are just emerging onto the local and national scenes. The past five years of California Com-munity Foundation grantmaking in the arts saw the turn of the millennium, during which Los Angeles, already an established international center for contemporary art, has had its importance sustained by a stream of new talent emerging from the region's many top-notch fine arts programs as well as the continuing innovation of the city's established artists, who maintain a major presence on the global art scene.

One of the hallmarks of the California Community Foundation is its commitment to supporting visual artists who have themselves made a commitment to the city of Los Angeles. For some artists, this affinity is expressed through their ongoing investigation of the city's idiosyncratic urban landscape and, in turn, the ways in which the landscape impacts the individual as well as the social and political body (see, for example, Charles LaBelle's Night Moves photo-graphs, taken during numerous late-night automotive trips around Los Angeles; Robbie Conal's urban guerilla postings that literally and figuratively "target" local and national political figures with accusations of corruption; Alex Donis's paintings of LAPD officers dancing exuberantly with gang members; and Sandow Birk's faux history paintings of Los Angeles). Other artists' ties to Los Angeles are registered more obliquely — through, for example, Michael Flechtner's use of neon lights, a recognizable material signifier of the L.A. streetscape, or Willie Middlebrook's complex digital collage-paintings that map the specificities of his own locale via images of his friends and family.

Still other artists have demon-strated their commitment to this city by simply continuing to live and work here, and by acting as influential teachers and mentors to other artists: Annetta Kapon, Tran, T. Kim-Trang, Suzan Pitt and Susan Simpson, to name but a few.

It is of course difficult, if not impossible, to present a thematic overview of a large group of artists whose work may share little in common other than the fact that they have all received California Community Foundation funding during the past five years. Nevertheless, the grouping is large enough for us to attempt to tug at a few connective threads. A number of these artists, for example, are working with found materials and manipulating them in astonishing ways. Incorporating everyday objects to enlightening effect, the brand of ordinary magic practiced by these and other selected artists involves an unwavering faith in the mundane, and a desire to enchant the relics of everyday life so that viewers will have more faith in it, too. Sarah Perry, Michael C. McMillen, Lynne Aldrich, Dominique Moody, Adrian Meraz and Charles LaBelle have each utilized found materials in their work, although to very different effects. Perry, for example, uses old tires, bones, copper tubing — even burnt tortillas — to construct assemblages and sculptures that explore the mysteries of life and death, decay and regeneration, while Aldrich uses tee shirts, garden hoses, lampshades and sheets of plastic siding in sculptures that confound viewers' expectations of how such objects should behave.

Along with emphasizing the use of common materials, many of the artists gravitate towards figurative representation and the use of narrative elements. In contrast to the heavy emphasis on abstraction that characterized much of Los Angeles painting in the 1990s, nearly all of the visual arts grantees over the past five years who make paintings or drawings work primarily in a representational mode.

Ruby Osorio, Monica Majoli, Alex Donis, Diane Gamboa, Margaret Garcia, Jose Ramirez, Sandow Birk and Ann Chamberlin all make paintings of people. Sometimes, these people inhabit landscapes that are clearly imaginary, as in Osorio's erotic natural idylls and Chamberlin's surreal urban hot zones; at other times, as in Birk's postmodern take on classical history paintings, the narratives depicted teeter uneasily between truth and tabloid fiction. Garcia's and Ramirez's paintings tell stories about family and community life; Edgar Aparicio's wood relief sculptures, which draw from the history and culture of his native El Salvador, are also figurative in nature. In contrast, Donis relies on portraiture but eschews narrative altogether by placing his subjects — well-known art world mavens and pop culture figures along with anonymous police officers and gang members — against stark white backgrounds, perhaps to suggest an idealized moment of concretized identity abstracted from the ordinary confines of space and time.

This interest in narrative and representational modes continues in the work of several artists who are making tremendous strides in the field of experimental animation, and the California Community Foundation's recognition of their work has done much to highlight this under-recognized yet fruitful area of the contemporary visual arts. Suzan Pitt, Susan Simpson and Erica Cho each explore the different possibilities that animation presents, using drawing, puppetry, and mixed-media sculpture, respectively, as their starting point. The Foundation's selections have also recognized the influence of cartoons and comics on traditional fine arts such as drawing, painting and even ceramics. The wonky mechanical wonderlands in Mark Licari's works on paper, for example, owe an obvious debt to the worlds of comic strips and cartoons, as do the fairylike, anime-style sprites that populate Ruby Osorio's mysterious miniature kingdoms.

Even Cindy Kolodziejski's surreal ceramic vessels, with their Frankenstinian grafting of incongruous elements, display the formal elasticity, sense of ever-evolving possibility and visual kinetics that are typically associated with animated film rather than with the ceramic arts.

There are exceptions to these trends, of course, for happily the California Community Foundation regularly champions the type of work that eludes categorization. The works of Michael Sakamoto and Danielle Brazell, for example, equally engage with theater, performance and installation. Robbie Conal's "canvas" is the urban landscape of Los Angeles itself; his satirical posters skewering well-known political figures are erected in stealth fashion, by a team of assistants who paste them up at night. His work is ephemeral; some posters may remain up for only a few hours before being defaced or ripped down, others might last for weeks or months. Additionally, Clement Hanami's complex mixed-media installations, Kyungmi Shin's digital photographs and wallpaper, Mineko Grimmer's organic sound sculptures, Jesse Lerner's hybrid "docu-narrative" films and Tran, T. Kim-Trang's ambitious, eight-part video opus that explores the cultural tropes of blindness, together offer further examples of works that hybridize different media and conceptual approaches in ways that are provocative, fresh and intellectually rigorous. The degree to which the works of these artists serve as indicators of broader trends within the contemporary art world is subject to debate; what we can say is that they are certainly contemporaries — in their sensibilites, and in relation to one another — and that they all are interpreters and scribes of the peculiarities of our present moment.

Claudine Isé is Assistant Curator at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.