The UCLA Hammer Museum’s newest exhibit, “Eden’s Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists,” is a heady traipse through crashing dream worlds ““ a chance to navigate cartoony book covers, drugged-up sex coves, and fungus so pervasive it eats through the walls.
And tonight, this dreamscape of artists and ideas is set to spill out of the gallery and into the museum for “Collisions: An Evening Celebrating Eden’s Edge,” an event set up by the UCLA Student Advisory Committee as part of their campaign to fill the Hammer with a brimming student population.
The committee puts on two yearly events by pulling themes from current exhibitions. Tonight’s will gather a collection of musicians, student filmmakers and visual artists (and free In-N-Out) to emphasize the exhibit’s geographic launching point: Los Angeles.
“One thing that (curator Gary Garrels) is interested in showcasing is artists creating fantastical worlds,” said Claire Benson, third-year art student and programming chairwoman of the committee, “And I think that, especially for what L.A. is right now, and that it is such a huge conglomeration of so many different things, creating an exhibition about these communities is really interesting.”
The exhibition gives every Los Angeles artist a space for work produced in the last 10 years: from the meticulous narratives of UCLA art professor Lari Pittman’s paintings, to artist Mark Bradford’s scintillating abstracts that buzz and click with urban energy, to the delicate microcosms of UCLA master of fine arts graduate Elliott Hundley.
For the organizers, the idea of Los Angeles art became a conceptual springboard for the event ““ why limit it to L.A. visual artists when every creative person around town can contribute? The result is a more varied pool of artistic forms of expression, and a chance to pull in students and friends through more student art.
“We wanted something that was more focused on students so maybe they could connect better with (the event),” said Marissa Textor, third-year art student and cochair of the committee, “We just tried to bring in as many kinds of art or culture as we could … seeing all the different possibilities, all the different ways of bringing all of L.A. art and culture into one place at one time.”
For UCLA art graduate student Joshua Aster and his band Ojo, a Latin-influenced electronic group performing tonight, it’s this mix of options that is key for the audience.
“This event is going to allow people to experience many things at once at their own time. It calls a lot for people to be involved. Who knows what’s going to move them? It may be cacophony,” he said.
And for Jacob Tonski, a Design | Media Arts graduate student and designer of a visual art performance set to be executed tonight, such a combination of artists can only lead to positive results. His piece involves a dancer conjuring up lights on a projector through her movements.
“It’s ripe with potential. … People are challenged to think differently, or you form teams with people who think alike, or you build bridges,” Tonski said.
But while the idea of artists coming together is nothing new, the Los Angeles spin complicates matters, leaving some to wonder how such a complicated city can inspire an artist.
“It’s a city that continually reveals itself,” Hundley said. “I don’t think it’s provincial. I know that there is going to be something, if I look hard enough, there will be something for me to find here always ““ an extraordinary quality.”