when art & architecture collide
aka
the dance of the old and the young

works by Thomas Houseago in outdoor space at L & M Arts, Venice, CA

Lately, there is something in the air about Los Angeles. Los Angeles is on a serious roll. It's not a city for everybody, I can understand that. But for the time being, it's my home. The light and snow-capped mountains will confuse you, or at least help you forget about the traffic for a moment. And recently, there has been a serious abundance of art & design in Los Angeles. Take a deep breathe fellow traveler, this week in Los Angeles there is a ton going on.

Thomas Houseago's "All Together Now" opened last week at the newly opened L & M Arts in Venice. Have you been to L and M Arts yet? The two galleries are delightful mind puzzles. Bricks, light, and angles all come together in the masterful buildings. wHY Architecture is behind these works, and may I suggest you spend some time in their presence?

"I wanted to create a dance between the old and the new: The old is revived by the new, and the new lives within the old," says Kulapat Yantrasast, of wHY Architecture. (read more here) There is a unity of old bricks, black sheets of glass, and the outdoor area that makes L & M Arts such a delight to visit.

Thomas Houseago, a L.A. sculptor with international attention, is showing in these 2 spaces at the moment. Large scale bronzes, cast aluminum, and redwood sculptures are both inside and on the lawn outside. In my humble opinion, Houseago is one of the most important sculptors in Los Angeles at the moment, making use of the space of the city. Referencing the past, while attempting to push it forward.

A side note: I truly wish more galleries in Los Angeles would push sculptors to make outdoor works, and show it outdoors. In a city rich with nature, our next step is to adorn our public areas with more L.A. sculptors' works. Agree or disagree?

- David John

bottle II, 2010, bronze

taken from press release:

"Houseago is known for playing a formal game, manipulating volume and relief to create tension between two and three-dimensional space. Body parts are impossibly linked together, and realistically sculpted limbs lead to drawn representations of others. This visual play gives these hulking figures a sense of fragility and awkwardness while remaining imposing and dynamic at the same time.

These works often reveal the physical marks of fabrication, with skeletons of iron bars exposed, raw edges from jigsaw cuts, and plaster and hemp slathered on the forms. They are both sensually and crudely constructed, as if their maker is also in a physical battle with these figures. In the end, he gives new life to these classic forms.

Houseago acts as cultural sponge, taking his visual cues from a disparate number of sources from tribal art to Picasso. But this vocabulary is then synthesized through a 21st century lens, and merged with rock 'n roll, science fiction, and animation. The work self-consciously references the past, but remains utterly innovative and contemporary."









go to L and M here...




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interiors riddling with art
Let's live among history, if only for tonight .









Nothing beats an interior filled with art that commands the space. Personally, living with art & antiques is a top priority. Mindless flipping through the internet this morning produced this top image of a casual loft space.
















It always shocks me into a delightful frenzy when I see important sculpture being used in interiors. It's a gamble for sure, but a gamble that we should be willing to take. Thomas Houseago is a Los Angeles sculptor that has deservedly been getting attention for many years now. His earlier shows at David Kordansky (2008) were hunks of material mutated into forms that were hard to ignore. I admit, they kinda left me weak at the knees. Has he left David Kordansky for another L.A. gallery (he seems to be missing from the roster.) ? His recent show in New York at Michael Werner, "the Moon, the Stars, the Sun" can be seen here...

bottle head, from recent show at Michael Werner
Tuf-Cal, hemp, iron rebar

"Thomas Houseago’s figurative sculptures appear physically imposing and powerful in their size and positioning yet fragmented and vulnerable in their construction. To build these works, Houseago begins with a structure of iron rods and then adds a variety of traditional sculptural materials such as plaster, hemp, and wood. Some of his works incorporate graphite or charcoal sketches of faces and anatomy on plaster and wood panels. Monstrous yet unthreatening, this work— a part-human, part-animal being—is in a transitional pose between walking and crawling, weighted on the flat expanses of its plaster hands and feet. Houseago’s combination of sculpting and drawing challenges conventional aesthetic boundaries between three-dimensionality and flatness, monumentality and spontaneity. For the artist, Baby represents a hopeful “beginning,” one that nods affectionately to the riddle about the lifecycle of humans that the Sphinx posed to Oedipus: “What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?”

taken from whitney site here..




interiors riddling with art
Let's live among history, if only for tonight .

------------------------

thomas houseago

walking

and
crawling
in
los
angeles.

Thomas Houseago: “My name is Thomas Houseago and I live and I work in Los Angeles. I’m in the Whitney Museum for the Biennial and we’ve just installed my piece here in the room so we’re still in the process, I guess, it’s still dirty, and things are still happening, and we’re not lit. I called the piece Baby because I had a very weird summer. There was enormous fires where I live up in the hills in Los Angeles. So as I was making this there was this volcanic kind of event going like on my doorstep and my wife was pregnant with what was to be my son was about to be born, and then simultaneously there was, in the studio where I was working, there was this explosion of violence – there was like a murder right outside my window. So this piece was this weird mixture of disaster and birth that was going on in my life and at the same time I was making this piece very conscious of my first sculpture ever going to New York City, which as a guy of my generation means something you know. We shipped it on a crate. They built the crate outside my studio. They had to build the crate outside the studio on my street, which is a fantastic thing because you had the shrine of the guy who was shot and the crate builders, it was like something from a Fellini movie, it was beautiful. And so they crated it on the street, in Los Angeles, with like thousands of people congregating like a music video or something and then they put the crate on the truck, drove it out here, and then, to my surprise and amazement it was already here in the room when we arrived."

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