Made in LA': Hammer Museum's 2016 biennial explores history and myth
Wallpaper* on Made in L.A. 2016
Hamza Walker, tells Wallpaper* about Hammer Museum's biennial, Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only, which she curated with Aram Moshayedi.
"Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, ‘Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.’ That type of impermanence could easily sum up the provisional quality of most thematic museum surveys, which is why curators Hamza Walker and Aram Moshayedi immediately decided to eschew any notion of theme for a series of ‘monographic surveys’ when they were tasked with organising the Hammer Museum’s 2016 'Made in LA' biennial.
‘From day one, we decided to focus more on [the] structure of the exhibition and... the portion size,’ says Walker, who is director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society. ‘Instead of a buffet where it’s a little bit of this, a little bit of that to fill up the plate, we’re constricting the amount of stuff we’re putting out there.’
Where the inaugural 2012 biennial featured 60 artists, with 35 in the 2014 edition, this year’s offering, titled 'a, the, though, only', explores the work of just 26 artists, and only 15 in the main gallery spaces. To wit: Kelly Akashi’s onion like sculptures Eat Me hang from ropes, suspended by bronze casts of her hands over the courtyard; Rafa Esparza’s mud brick installation, tierra, offers an interactive experience on the mezzanine with the products of his labour and the oddities unearthed in the making of them. Minimalist poet Aram Saroyan contributed the show’s title; while Todd Gray wanders the building in the clothes of his late friend, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. ‘There are definitely chapters – and we were able to sample from all of those chapters.’"— Michael Slenske, June 27, 2016
Read the full article at the Wallpaper* website.