Artslant-What are we afraid of?
Police and Thieves- Review Chicago Weekly
Police & Thieves
Reflections on crime and law on the
walls of HPAC by Harunobu Coryne
THE COMMAND COMES AND GOES, puncturing the quiet of the gallery every seventeenpuncturing minutes before the video, “State of Incarceration,” descends again into a less audibledecibel range.
The film is a component of “Police and Thieves,” an exhibit currently on display at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) that investigates American precepts of criminal justice. Like the exhibit, the film attempts to overturn the taken-for-granted division between right and wrong.
Excerpts from a play by the Skid Row-based theater troupe Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) appear in the film, seeking to elicit a sense of self-examination. The play depicts prison inmates and corrections officers, many of whom are played by former convicts. They prowl the aisles of a mock-up cellblock as they chide and taunt each other, exhibiting and lamenting the humiliating debasement of incarceration.
However, the film attempts to blur the role of the villain, as both inmates and guards don the same costume of black jeans and a white T-shirt. As the wielders of authority and the criminals subjected to it become gradually indistinguishable, the viewer is challenged to reconsider previous notions of justice. At times, however, the film becomes bloated, even risible (audience members are visibly chuckling are various points), its clarity and meaning diminished by occasional bouts of hyperbolic grandiosity.To put it in other words, the exhibit might be called “Police and Thieves,” but it sometimes comes across as “Cops and Robbers.”
A high point of the exhibit is Arnoldo Vargas, a California native who presents two pieces, “Notice to Appear—Defendant’s Copy” and “In Memoriam: Bike Misdemeanor Leads to Post-Injunction.” The former presents a series of 21 tickets for truancy and traffic violations, hanging below the photographic high-school portraits of the perpetrators. Among them: a new mother clutches her baby; a teen beauty flashes a magnificent smile; a young man’s defiant eyes stare out from beneath a fitted baseball cap. The faces, full of emotion, dramatically resist imposed uniformity—these are portraits, not mugshots. The composition is one of the exhibit’s more subtle achievements, as it successfully tackles vexing issues, like mass incarceration and fear of youth culture, without clubbing the viewer over the head with ham-handed anti-authoritarianism.
Not every piece in the exhibit is so successful. Amitis Motevalli’s piece,“Shohadha,” recreates the shrines devoted to Shia martyrs that reside in her home country of Iran. The 5-foot-by-9-foot installation piece depicts ten victims of policeshootings, stenciled onto paper with checkered patterns evocative of Persian tiling.Among the enshrined is Darius Pinex, whom Chicago Police Department officers shot to death during a routine traffic stop on January 7, 2011.
Unfortunately, the tragedy of her subject material is muddled by her decision to present their deaths as martyrdom, which creates the inaccurate impression that her subjects died for a cause in a purposeful act of self-sacrifice. The notion directly undermines the more compelling of the piece’s moral observations: the sheer senselessness, the total absence of purpose or reason, with which these people were killed.
“Before the Revolution,” a piece by Italian-born artist Gusmano Cesaretti, is loud yet elegant and offers one of the more effective articulations of the show’s premise. Bigger and brasher than Vargas’s “Notes,” “Revolution” assails the viewer on multiple
fronts with a polychromatic array of Christian iconography and Communist agitprop, arranged along four rows of copy paper. Interspersed among the crucifixes are fragments of a reconstructed Los Angeles—not just the barbershops and auto shops, but
also the bare-armed, tattoo-clad cadres of neighborhood gangsters flashing their chrome-plated handguns at the camera.
The piece has neither a distinct beginning nor a satisfying end. Its vibrancy and fickle juxtapositions disorient: in one picture, a mural of the Virgin Mary is menaced by the silhouettes of dangling chains, while next to it, a young woman sneaks a kiss on the cheek of her older companion, possibly her mother. Such joyous images as the latter,
interpolated with violence and urban decay, capture the piece’s—and the exhibition’s—most resonant message: no criminality exists without context.
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave. Through May 29. Monday-Thursday, 9am-
8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart
Reflections on crime and law on the
walls of HPAC by Harunobu Coryne
THE COMMAND COMES AND GOES, puncturing the quiet of the gallery every seventeenpuncturing minutes before the video, “State of Incarceration,” descends again into a less audibledecibel range.
The film is a component of “Police and Thieves,” an exhibit currently on display at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) that investigates American precepts of criminal justice. Like the exhibit, the film attempts to overturn the taken-for-granted division between right and wrong.
Excerpts from a play by the Skid Row-based theater troupe Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) appear in the film, seeking to elicit a sense of self-examination. The play depicts prison inmates and corrections officers, many of whom are played by former convicts. They prowl the aisles of a mock-up cellblock as they chide and taunt each other, exhibiting and lamenting the humiliating debasement of incarceration.
However, the film attempts to blur the role of the villain, as both inmates and guards don the same costume of black jeans and a white T-shirt. As the wielders of authority and the criminals subjected to it become gradually indistinguishable, the viewer is challenged to reconsider previous notions of justice. At times, however, the film becomes bloated, even risible (audience members are visibly chuckling are various points), its clarity and meaning diminished by occasional bouts of hyperbolic grandiosity.To put it in other words, the exhibit might be called “Police and Thieves,” but it sometimes comes across as “Cops and Robbers.”
A high point of the exhibit is Arnoldo Vargas, a California native who presents two pieces, “Notice to Appear—Defendant’s Copy” and “In Memoriam: Bike Misdemeanor Leads to Post-Injunction.” The former presents a series of 21 tickets for truancy and traffic violations, hanging below the photographic high-school portraits of the perpetrators. Among them: a new mother clutches her baby; a teen beauty flashes a magnificent smile; a young man’s defiant eyes stare out from beneath a fitted baseball cap. The faces, full of emotion, dramatically resist imposed uniformity—these are portraits, not mugshots. The composition is one of the exhibit’s more subtle achievements, as it successfully tackles vexing issues, like mass incarceration and fear of youth culture, without clubbing the viewer over the head with ham-handed anti-authoritarianism.
Not every piece in the exhibit is so successful. Amitis Motevalli’s piece,“Shohadha,” recreates the shrines devoted to Shia martyrs that reside in her home country of Iran. The 5-foot-by-9-foot installation piece depicts ten victims of policeshootings, stenciled onto paper with checkered patterns evocative of Persian tiling.Among the enshrined is Darius Pinex, whom Chicago Police Department officers shot to death during a routine traffic stop on January 7, 2011.
Unfortunately, the tragedy of her subject material is muddled by her decision to present their deaths as martyrdom, which creates the inaccurate impression that her subjects died for a cause in a purposeful act of self-sacrifice. The notion directly undermines the more compelling of the piece’s moral observations: the sheer senselessness, the total absence of purpose or reason, with which these people were killed.
“Before the Revolution,” a piece by Italian-born artist Gusmano Cesaretti, is loud yet elegant and offers one of the more effective articulations of the show’s premise. Bigger and brasher than Vargas’s “Notes,” “Revolution” assails the viewer on multiple
fronts with a polychromatic array of Christian iconography and Communist agitprop, arranged along four rows of copy paper. Interspersed among the crucifixes are fragments of a reconstructed Los Angeles—not just the barbershops and auto shops, but
also the bare-armed, tattoo-clad cadres of neighborhood gangsters flashing their chrome-plated handguns at the camera.
The piece has neither a distinct beginning nor a satisfying end. Its vibrancy and fickle juxtapositions disorient: in one picture, a mural of the Virgin Mary is menaced by the silhouettes of dangling chains, while next to it, a young woman sneaks a kiss on the cheek of her older companion, possibly her mother. Such joyous images as the latter,
interpolated with violence and urban decay, capture the piece’s—and the exhibition’s—most resonant message: no criminality exists without context.
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave. Through May 29. Monday-Thursday, 9am-
8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart
Swapmeet Chronicles
Review- Los Angeles Times
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Also reviewed: Sigmar Polke at Patrick Painter; Arnoldo Vargas at Monte Vista; group show at Western Project
By David Pagel
August 29, 2008
Unsettling beauty in a hometown
Wilmington is not the sort of place tourists flock to. Home to more oil refineries than any other city in the United States, and gateway to the world's third-largest port, it helps keep the rest of the country going, transforming billions of barrels of crude into fuels that keep consumers on the move.
What Arnoldo Vargas' Southern California hometown lacks in sightseeing highlights, though, it more than makes up for with its surreal landscape of flaring chimneys, industrial architecture and chemically saturated skies. At Monte Vista, "Welcome Wilmington" presents 26 of Vargas' modestly scaled photographs.
The crisp, documentary-style pictures, selected by guest curator Shizu Saldamando, paint a sensitive picture of a place where individuals are often dwarfed by their surroundings and seem to be incidental to the brutal rhythm of its everyday functioning. Storage tanks, burn-off stacks, security fences, concrete roadways, high-energy cables, streetlights and locomotives are the stars of these smartly composed images, which also leave a little room for joggers, a lone pigeon and a couple of street-side shrines to citizens killed in officer-involved shootings, one in March and one in April.
A big, billowy cloud sits low in the sky in the show's centerpiece, a grid of 16 photographs titled "It's a Beautiful Morning." The layout recalls movie stills. But as you scan the images, you see that Vargas has shot the cloud from four locations, traveling around it like a wary moth around a flame to approach it from as many angles as necessary. That's just what he does with his multi-image portrait of Wilmington -- circle around it as long as it takes to get beyond the obvious and to give us a glimpse of its social complexity and unsettling beauty.
Monte Vista, 5442 Monte Vista St., through Sept. 17. Open Saturdays and Sundays. www.montevistaprojects.com
http://articles.latimes.com/20
Also reviewed: Sigmar Polke at Patrick Painter; Arnoldo Vargas at Monte Vista; group show at Western Project
By David Pagel
August 29, 2008
Unsettling beauty in a hometown
Wilmington is not the sort of place tourists flock to. Home to more oil refineries than any other city in the United States, and gateway to the world's third-largest port, it helps keep the rest of the country going, transforming billions of barrels of crude into fuels that keep consumers on the move.
What Arnoldo Vargas' Southern California hometown lacks in sightseeing highlights, though, it more than makes up for with its surreal landscape of flaring chimneys, industrial architecture and chemically saturated skies. At Monte Vista, "Welcome Wilmington" presents 26 of Vargas' modestly scaled photographs.
The crisp, documentary-style pictures, selected by guest curator Shizu Saldamando, paint a sensitive picture of a place where individuals are often dwarfed by their surroundings and seem to be incidental to the brutal rhythm of its everyday functioning. Storage tanks, burn-off stacks, security fences, concrete roadways, high-energy cables, streetlights and locomotives are the stars of these smartly composed images, which also leave a little room for joggers, a lone pigeon and a couple of street-side shrines to citizens killed in officer-involved shootings, one in March and one in April.
A big, billowy cloud sits low in the sky in the show's centerpiece, a grid of 16 photographs titled "It's a Beautiful Morning." The layout recalls movie stills. But as you scan the images, you see that Vargas has shot the cloud from four locations, traveling around it like a wary moth around a flame to approach it from as many angles as necessary. That's just what he does with his multi-image portrait of Wilmington -- circle around it as long as it takes to get beyond the obvious and to give us a glimpse of its social complexity and unsettling beauty.
Monte Vista, 5442 Monte Vista St., through Sept. 17. Open Saturdays and Sundays. www.montevistaprojects.com
http://articles.latimes.com/20
