Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Lauren Bon: Concrete is Fluid
Honor Fraser Gallery, Culver City, CA
September 14 to December 14, 2024
I really like how this show smells. L.A.’s atmosphere was stuffy on the afternoon that I visited the gallery. A cool foggy morning had given way to a sunny, yet sort of gross and muggy afternoon, and the gallery’s interior seemed to absorb some of that mugginess. It was a little moist.
Concrete is Fluid smells like damp earth and still water, which is likely what the entirety of this stretch of La Cienega smelled like when it was still a wetland in pre-colonial Southern California. Inside the gallery, soil, rocks, plants, and dried slip form pathways that meander around and between two cylindrical metal towers packed with dirt. In another room, immense copper vats that once lined concrete manholes hang from the ceiling. Their texture tells of their time spent amongst air and flowing water–demarcations of water that had once trickled down the vat merge with swampy greenish-blue oxidation and iridescent neon hues.
This show warrants multiple visits. Throughout its run, the dirt will shift, the soil towers will sprout, and outside, through an act of ecological reparation called “Un-Development 3”, Honor Fraser’s asphalt parking lot will soon be dismantled to reveal a crust of soil better equipped to handle the rapidly shifting elements.
Reflection: How can I participate in an act or acts of ecological reparation in my own life?
From Soil to Sky: the Aesthetic of Nature
Ice House Arts Complex, Long Beach, CA
September 28 – November 23, 2024
At dusk on a Sunday, I traversed a decidedly haunted basement and emerged at a sweet little courtyard neighboring the gallery space at Ice House. Tucked inside a seafood packing house turned arts complex, From Soil to Sky is a tender show featuring the work of ten photographers for whom nature, in its many forms, is a muse.
Generally small in their size, the photographs call for close, intentional looking. Photos by Ho Chi Minh City-based photographer Tang A Pau see the nude body camouflaged with the tendriled branches of the Banyan tree. Elsewhere, an image by Bill Swank—from the From Here to Heaven, 1999-2023 series—printed on plexiglass and mounted in front of a window toys with the viewer’s perspective. In it, a nude body lies face down atop crumpled bed sheets. Above them, the sky opens up wide and limitless, producing the illusion of no true distinction between where the image ends and the Earth begins.
I was most struck by the way the show is in dialogue with the exhibition space. High ceilings, exposed pipes, wooden beams with rusted hardware, and machinery from the building’s historical past give way to conversations between the organic, the man made, and the confluence of both. On my way out, I bumped into an adolescent opossum. Nature is everywhere.
Reflection: Where does the body end and the sky begin?