You See LA: April 2023
Five Things To See And Do In Los Angeles, Handpicked By Chandler McWilliams
Chandler McWilliams is an artist and professor in the department of Design Media Arts. He has studied film, photography, and political science; and completed graduate work in philosophy at The New School For Social Research in New York City. In 2013, McWilliams received an MFA in the Program in Art at the California Institute of the Arts. His work engages sculpture, text, and performance to consider ideas of ethics, language, and parenting on a dying and unjust planet.
Marta Gallery in Los Angeles. Google Images from Heidi Korsavong.
Tucked in near the intersection of Echo Park Ave. and Sunset Blvd., in a nondescript building, next door to a perpetual construction site is Marta—a small gallery dedicated to work that doesn’t fit cleanly into the categories of art, design, or craft. The current show by Jonah Takagi, titled Brut Vessels is a perfect example of this ethos. The objects themselves are strikingly odd; made of glass, but appearing to be anything but. What is clear is that they are possible only through a process of intense material experimentation. These forms could be described as vessels, but only by stretching our understanding of what a vessel is to the extreme.
Palos Verdes Art Center, Connective Threads.
On view through mid-April, the current exhibition Connective Threads curated by Carrie Burckle and Jo Lauria features work from an exciting array of contemporary southern Californian fiber artists including Fafnir Adamites, Casey Baden, Jim Bassler, Cameron Taylor-Brown, Ben Cuevas, Renata Daina, Gail Fraser, Phyllis Green, Lydia Tjioe Hall, Molly Haynes, Annette Heully, Dong Kyu Kim, Michael Koch, Jeanne Medina Le, Mary Little, Carmen Mardonez, Victoria May, Blue McRight, Diane Meyer, Dominga Opazo, Claudia Parducci, Michael F. Rohde, Gwen Samuels, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Meredith Strauss, Carol Shaw-Sutton, Regina Vorgang, and Kay Whitney.
Craft Contemporary, Strings of Desire.
A frequently seen but tragically overlooked museum across the street from the La Brea Tar Pits, Craft Contemporary focuses on contemporary art made from craft media and processes. Once known as the Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), the museum underwent a change in name and branding a few years back to better reflect their mission to engage more directly with contemporary artists. From now until May 7th, the museum is host to two stunning exhibitions. Strings of Desire features 13 artists working with/through themes of identity, fluidity, and becoming using embroidery, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The solo exhibition, Alicia Piller: Within is a site-specific installation that vibrates with questions of scale, knowledge, identity, and body. Experiencing this work is a joy of movement through the micro and macro, whole and parts.
The Los Angeles River Trail (Greenway/Bike Path). NRT Database
Life in Northeast L.A. is one of many contradictions. One of the more fruitful of these to dwell in is the beauty, calm, and persistence of non-human nature interwoven with the concrete, trash, and noise of the LA river. Too often the river is dismissed as that dry concrete bed where people in movies race cars. But the section from Atwater Village to Figueroa is nothing like those stereotypes. Wild, green, filled with birds and fish; the river is a perfect role model for the possibilities of resisting the powers of control and domination of nature.
Suay Sew Shop
Just off the river on Knox Ave is Suay Sew Shop, a “100% vertical sewing and production shop founded in 2017.” In some ways, Suay expresses the spirit of resistance that the river offers. Alongside the lovely pillows, remade clothes, and domestic textiles, Suay also accepts textile donations for their work (much of what you send to Goodwill ends up in the dumpster) and puts out a free rack of garments that are in good enough shape to still wear. Everything else becomes something else. Suay also does repairs, doing almost miraculous work restoring clothes that felt long gone. One of my favorite services is the community dye bath. You pay by the pound to get your textile dyed in one of an array of colors that rotate every month. Along with all of this, Suay is outspoken in their support of garment workers' rights, pushing for policy reforms, highlighting issues in the garment industry, and organizing weekly food distribution to criminally underpaid and exploited garment workers.
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