Pacific Standard Time has become one of California's most important cultural events. For this year, the organizers present a wide-ranging exhibition that explores Latin American and Latino art in Los Angeles and across Southern California. Museums, private galleries, public spaces and more are participating and its truly an incredible survey of a vital subject. We took a look at the massive calendar and picked a few highlights. To view the full schedule and get more information please visit: www.pacificstandardtime.org
-JRS
Andrea Ferreyra, Torbellino/Whirlwind . Documentation of street performance, Mexico City, January, 1993. Photo by Gabriela González. Courtesy of Andrea Ferreyra
Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico
Armory Center for the Arts
Features artists such as Taniel Morales, Andrea Ferreyra, and Elvira Santamaría, who operated in the margins, away from the widening mainstream. The exhibition explores the alternative, often clandestine art practices that emerged during this period marked by increasing violence, currency devaluation, industrial pollution, and political corruption. Against this turbulent backdrop, artists in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and elsewhere devised alternative practices and new exhibition spaces to show work that often directly engaged the politics and economics of the moment.
Hector Hernandez, Bulca , 2015. 20x30 in. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of the artist and UCR ARTSblock.
Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas
UCR ARTSblock
In a wide-ranging survey exhibition, UCR ARTSblock will bring together contemporary artists from across the Americas who have tapped into science fiction’s capacity to imagine new realities, both utopian and dystopian.
Avenue de Mayo , 1914. Unknown photographer. Gelatin silver print in Travel Albums from Paul Fleury’s Trips to Switzerland, the Middle East, India, Asia, and South America, 1896-1918. Courtesy of The Getty Research Institute
The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930
The Getty Research Institute
Drawing on the Getty Research Institute’s special collections, this exhibition proposes a visual survey of the unprecedented growth of Latin American capital cities following the seasons of independence, observing how socio-political upheavals activated major changes in the city scale and the architectural landscape. The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 examines how imported models were reinterpreted into diverse forms of re-appropriation of the national colonial and pre-Hispanic past, ushering these cities into a process of modernization.
Gerardo Velazquez. © Louis Jacinto and Coagula Curatorial. Photo Credit: Louis Jacinto.
Nervously Engendered: The Art of Gerardo Velazquez
Coagula Curatorial
The late Gerardo Velazquez was one of East L.A.’s first Chicanos to embrace punk rock. His band, Nervous Gender, combined avant-garde approaches to noise-making with the innovations of the gestating punk rock sound and scene. Nervously Engendered documents how the band’s aesthetic pioneered by Velazquez shaped how the culture at large sees queer, ethnic, and alternative "outsiders."
Alejandro Almanza Pereda - Sticks and Stones (California Decline), 2017
Outside the Garden: Alejandro Almanza Pereda
IBID Gallery
Ibid Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of Mexican artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, whose work explores the relationships and invisible links between sculptures, architectural spaces, and the spectator. The artist establishes a series of layered connections using visual aesthetics, precarious structures, and complex compositions of found objects. For this show, Almanza Pereda will engage viewers through dangerously fragile and seemly unstable structures. According to the artist, architectural structures are man-made shelters against the brutal forces of nature.
Rubén Ortiz Torres - Black Flag, 2014 (installation view)
Rubén Ortiz-Torres: White Washed America
Royale Projects
This solo exhibition highlights new works by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, including a tricked-out, hydraulic shopping cart and interactive paintings and sculptures influenced by lowrider cars, punk, anarchism, Minimalism, and the destruction and then preservation of David Alfaro Siqueiros' mural América Tropical. Born in Mexico City in 1964, Ortiz-Torres lives and works in Los Angeles and San Diego.
Gonzalo Lebrija, Unfolded Gold (Metallah), 2017,
Chingadaras Sofisticadas
Kohn Gallery
A group exhibition bringing together nine prominent artists based in Guadalajara, Mexico, whose varied practices contribute to the city’s growing cultural ascendance and international recognition. Until recently, Guadalajara was considered one of Mexico’s most traditional cities with large industries focused on textile, artisan and craft production, perhaps best known for its ceramic fabricators and studios.
David Lamelas, Time as Activity London, 2011, still from a 16mm film, 16 minutes, 46 seconds.
David Lamelas, Time as Activity
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
This exhibition features films and videos by the Argentina-born conceptual artist David Lamelas, culled from his ground-breaking and ongoing series Time as Activity, 1969–2017. These works— the first shot in Düsseldorf on 16mm film and the most recent of which streams live feeds from Athens and Berlin— investigate the durational, experiential qualities of both time and moving images.