Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Kathi Hofer and Preserve Bottle Village Committee
April 18 to June 16, 2024
Mackey Apartments Garage Top, Los Angeles, California
The gulf between the Mackey Apartments and Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village seems like a large one, and it’s where Austrian artist Kathi Hofer has chosen to plunge for her residency with the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Designed by R.M Schindler and completed in 1939, the modernist Mackey Apartments are tucked away on Cochran Avenue in the mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles. They are owned by the government of Austria and activated with public programming by the MAK Center, including the Garage Exchange: Vienna—Los Angeles program of which Hofer is a part. In turn, Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village is an endangered “folk art environment”—an artwork—on a 1/3 acre lot on Cochran Street in Simi Valley, a little over forty miles northwest of the Mackey Apartments. It was severely damaged in the Northridge earthquake of 1994 and is today stewarded by the local non-profit Preserve Bottle Village Committee.
Homing in on Prisbrey’s use of two ordinary, ubiquitous objects—the bottle and the pencil—Hofer has constructed a minimal presentation that exhibition text refers to as a “magic circle.” Single bottles recovered from collapsed Bottle Village structures line two walls of the space, held upright at roughly 45 degree angles by custom metal hooks mounted to 1:1 reproductions of the top rail of the Mackey Garage Top Gallery balustrade. Pacific Ocean Blue, or: Milk of Magnesia Blue (2022) consists of 18 pencils aligned neatly and horizontally on a wall shelf, each painted blue like the deep blue of the bottles nearby. At the center of the room is Conservation Piece, a table with two of Prisbrey’s pencil assemblages that are actively undergoing conservation by Rosa Lowinger and Christina Varvi of RLA Conservation.
There is a strange and somewhat uncomfortable dissonance in experiencing Prisbrey’s environmental artwork this way—the pleasure of so many so-called “outsider” environments feels inextricable from the process of sheer immersion, of being inside another person’s dogged dedication to their own creative vision. But then, Hofer would be foolhardy to even try to recreate Prisbrey’s singular project. Instead her approach simultaneously illuminates the very small—the ordinary objects Prisbrey chose as building blocks, her atomic units of expression—and the very large—the vast, sometimes-intersecting architectures that shape cultural exchange, creative validation, and conservation. The “magic circle” starts to make a little more sense.
Reflection: What environment, besides the entire earth, do you most want to conserve?
REVEAL: Recent Acquisitions 2020–2023 and Fahrenheit 2024
October 28, 2023 to July 21, 2024 (REVEAL) and January 20 to September 8, 2024 (Fahrenheit)
American Museum Of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Pomona, California
Maybe it is cheating to write about two different shows at the same institution in one go, but Reveal: Recent Acquisitions 2020–2023 and Fahrenheit 2024 at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) feel inseparable. The former, as its title suggests, showcases just a small portion of the institution’s permanent collection, which includes more than 13,000 ceramic objects, and the latter marks the revival of the museum’s juried show with works from 100 U.S.-based artists. While some might prematurely sneer at the institutional omnibus format, this pair of shows is not only a drool-worthy feast for ceramics aficionados (and downright ceramics dorks, of course), but it also provides an odd sort of grounding amidst the recent market appetite for the medium that has emerged in recent years (evidenced, just for example, by last year’s Clay Pop Los Angeles show at Jeffrey Deitch).
Encompassing recent gifts to the museum, Reveal spans an incredibly broad range of works, with—at the risk of sounding like a salesperson—truly something for everyone, from teapots and vessels to figurative freakery. California Boosterism souvenir plates from Vernon Kilns hang close to an exceptionally large Tree of Life in the Mexican folk tradition, just around the corner from the most heartbreakingly perfect (and tiny) Ron Nagle cup you’ve ever seen. There are Bigs I’ve heard of, like Betty Woodman, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Beatrice Wood, David Gilhooly, Robert Arneson, Claude Conover, Tony Marsh, and Peter Shire, as well as plenty of artists I’m excited to learn more about—Ruenell Foy Temps, Clayton Bailey, Porntip Sangvanich, Emily Sudd, and Val Cushing among them.
Fahrenheit 2024 has a decidedly more contemporary bent, perhaps unsurprising as it features recent works exclusively by living artists. For what it’s worth, my favorite discoveries were Josephine Mette Larsen’s Slow Cycle, Cathy Moynihan’s Peace Monument (Awaiting), Alex Lukas’s Tree Stones, and Melodie Reay’s La Cafard Me Pourchasse; Pointlessness Is Chasing Me, panel no 3, comprising a grid of “porcelain death masks of cockroaches.” I highly recommend you go pick out your own favorites. Plus, AMOCA is in a former bank complete with a vault, has the 77-foot long Millard Sheets mural Panorama of the Pomona Valley, and a pretty banging gift shop. Just go.
Reflection: What do you have that’s made of clay?