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To View a Plastic Flower

February 13 – April 19, 2020
Opening reception: Sunday, February 9, 2 – 5 PM

 

To View a Plastic Flower featured new video and multimedia installations that engaged themes of interconnectivity, perspectivism, and the poetics (as well as politics) of conflict.

 

The exhibition invoked Buddhist monk and antiwar activist Thích Nhất Hạnh\’s idea of “inter-being”, meaning nothing can exist by itself and everything has to “inter-be” with everything else, and is central to the exhibition’s overarching themes and inspiration for the title. The figure of the “flower” stemmed from one of Thích’s well-known sayings, suggesting that by touching a flower one also touches the clouds and rain that were necessary to manifest the flower. Yet the descriptor of “plastic”—referencing both synthetic/natural materials and the ability to be molded or changed—alters the nature of the flower. We can then approach a plastic flower as a multiplicity of possibilities and perspectives that considers past and present modes of production and consumption of mass media.

 

In keeping with this approach, the exhibition presented three discrete installations that registered the presence and absence of information, movement, and optics through each artist’s point of view set within the theater of military engagement. Abigail Raphael Collins’ experimental documentary and video installation, Out of Play, investigated the relationship between the entertainment industry and U.S. military, and the fictions constructed in the absence of information. T. Kim-Trang Tran’s three-channel video installation, Movements: Battles and Solidarity, coalesces seemingly disparate events during the early 1970s in high fashion, labor unrest, and the Vietnam War by exploring the shared sociopolitical and physical “movements.” The sculptural work in Samira Yamin’s Passing Obliquely From One Medium Into Another examined contemporary war photography by manipulating the viewership of mass media through carved optical glass. Yamin’s obfuscation of images challenged viewers to invest in new ways of seeing in order to reassemble refracted and misaligned information. These installations also offered an opportunity to consider and exercise site—whether within the civic space of Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the image magic created by Hollywood, or the greater, postmodern landscape of the United States—and the material aspects of viewing and being.

 

Together, the works in the exhibition provided a multi-dimensional interrogation of the construction, representation and limitations of knowledge through media as a means to understand our socio- and geopolitical times.

 

Abigail Raphael Collins received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA from Cooper Union, New York. Collins’ work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, including Rotterdam and Seoul. Collins currently lectures at California Institute of the Arts and lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

T. Kim-Trang Tran received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the University of Iowa. Tran’s work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, including at the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial in 2000. Tran is currently a Professor of Art at Scripps College in Claremont, CA and lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

Samira Yamin received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a dual BA in Sociology and Studio Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. Yamin’s work has been exhibited nationally including solo exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and PATRON Gallery in Chicago, and her work was recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Yamin currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

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\”Movements: Battles and Solidarity, War and Fashion Explored in the 70s by T. Kim-Trang Tran\”, Artillery, April 22, 2020[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=\”1/6\”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=\”row\” use_row_as_full_screen_section=\”no\” type=\”full_width\” text_align=\”left\” background_animation=\”none\” css_animation=\”\”][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_separator type=\”normal\” border_style=\”\”][vc_empty_space height=\”16px\”][vc_column_text]Image slider artwork captions

Abigail Raphael Collins, Out of Play: In the Box, 2019. image courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, photograph by Jeff McLane.

Abigail Raphael Collins, Out of Play installation view, 2019. image courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, photograph by Jeff McLane.

Samira Yamin, (Refractions) installation view, 2019. image courtesy of the artist and PATRON Gallery, photograph by Jeff McLane.

Samira Yamin, (Refractions) September 21, 2015-11, 2019. image courtesy of the artist and PATRON Gallery, photograph by Jeff McLane.

T. Kim-Trang Tran, Movements: Battles and Solidarity installation view, 2019. image courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, photograph by Jeff McLane.[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space height=\”16px\”][vc_separator type=\”normal\” border_style=\”\”][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=\”row\” use_row_as_full_screen_section=\”no\” type=\”full_width\” text_align=\”left\” background_animation=\”none\” css_animation=\”\”][vc_column][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][/vc_row]