Pacific Standard Time: Weekly Update #2

Pacific Standard Time Logo


When you head over to the Pacific Standard Time website to look at the exhibitions participating in this massive event, it looks like an impressive number, spanning a wide variety of topics and styles, but you don't realize its truly colossal scope and size until you actually attempt to make a comprehensive viewing, hitting gallery after gallery and museum upon museum, immersing your mind in a flood of art and craft, concept and design, creative visions speaking anew from decades past.

It's exhausting, but totally rewarding.

Having now visited ten venues, I've seen a significant percentage of the exhibitions currently on view. Although I hope to write up my PST experience in blog posts, it's not likely that I will be able to give a comprehensive report on each show that I've visited. So, if you have any questions about a specific event, feel free to ask me by leaving a comment on this post. I'll try to provide a prompt and full answer.

Here are the shows that I've attended this week:

A+D Architecture and Design Museum:

Eames Designs: The Guest-Host Relationship

Craft and Folk Art Museum

The Alchemy of June Schwarcz: Enamel Vessels from the Forrest L. Merrill Collection

Golden State of Craft: California 1960-1985

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective

California Design, 1930-1965, "Living in a Modern Way"

Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969-1972, Revisited


Maria Nordman Filmroom: Smoke 1967-Present

Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza

LA><ART

John Outterbridge: The Rag Factory

I reviewed this show in "Torn and Tattered"

Santa Monica Museum of Art

Beatrice Wood: Career Woman - Drawings, Painting, Vessels, and Objects









Enjoy!!!

(Milestone note: I have now posted at least once a day for 100 days.)

Torn and Tattered

The Rag Factory (2011) installation by John Outterbridge at LA><ART


Rags, the word conjures up images of cheap, disposable, dirty cloth. Rags are the opposite of riches.

Rags are the thematic subject of an installation by John Outterbridge at LA><ART, entitled "The Rag Factory." Through the process of assemblage, Outterbridge constructs an environment that explores the manner in which context influences the perception of beauty and value. The humble rags are both the lowly discards of a banal consumerism and the elegant fabrications of an artistic sensibility.

The installation spans two gallery spaces of LA><ART. In Gallery One, Outterbridge has designed a hanging curtain of multicolored, knotted rags, bathed from various angles in brilliant light, a scintillating textile rainbow.

Close up of The Rag Factory installation in Gallery One

An entrancing assemblage of color and texture, Outterbridge transforms the lowly rags into an object of beauty. But a stroll into the next room dispels the glamour.