as-is.la is an art gallery and exhibition space focusing on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on local Los Angeles history and regional culture.
All in past exhibition
Doug Edge gained attention in the 1960's with a witty and inventive body of plastic and resin sculptures. In 1972 he co-curated (along with Judy Chicago and DeWain Valentine) "The Last Plastics Show" at CalArts. This historically important show surveyed and summed up the era, though with, in hindsight, an exaggerated sense of finality.
Main Gallery: Police Culture, 2016-2018
Entry Gallery: Light Dissipaters and Season Tracers, 1968-1970
Los Angeles artist Philip Rich (1935-2017) exhibited his Pop and Surrealist-inflected paintings in a one-person show at the legendary Ferus Gallery, then directed by Irving Blum, in January of 1965. Championed by LACMA’s Betty Asher, Rich won the museum’s “New Talent Purchase Award” and participated in its “Five Younger Los Angeles Artists” exhibition later that same year.
The Los Angeles-based conceptual and narrative artist Hildegarde Duane has engaged with the products of mass media entertainment since the mid-nineteen seventies. Now, as then, she selects from among the media's archetypal characters and familiar narrative structures and inventively re-stages them in her own body of video art and photo / text stories. To this end, Duane applies a feminist politics and a slyly subversive sense of humor to her source-material, dramatically changing its original meanings in the process.
When Judy Chicago moved on to the overtly feminist installations for which she became known, young Cal-Arts graduate student Richard Amend happily occupied the on-campus spray booth installed for her use. The resulting rear-painted plexiglass abstractions were included in the 1971 Cal-Arts exhibition curated by Chicago, DeWain Valentine and Doug Edge pointedly titled, The Last Plastics Show. Several of Amend’s period pieces are presented in the entry gallery of As Is in conjunction with the main exhibition, Jim Sterritt: Drawings, 1979 to 2010.
To identify an artwork as “difficult,” confident in the belief that this word will be understood as a term of praise, not blame, is a characteristic gesture of modernist culture. Jim Starrett is a deeply committed participant in that culture, as his complex and demanding drawings at As Is attest. These small—typically measuring 8 1/2” x 11” each—densely packed artworks in ink (and sometimes graphite) on paper were executed over the course of thirty years, with a majority of the twenty six on view made during the decade of the nineteen eighties. And while they are, of course, products of their own time, the drawings refer to an even earlier set of historical events: Hitler’s Germany, the Holocaust and its attendant trauma. The imagery Starrett deploys for this purpose can be disturbing. Indeed, a related painting on view in an art museum was once defaced in an act of vandalism that was also, however misguided, an act of critical judgment. The drawings in this show are framed safely behind glass. But in what is a perhaps unexpected discovery, that same thin layer of transparent glass that protects them from us also protects, subtly but effectively, us from them.
A prominent minimalist sculptor (and amateur magician) once characterized art as a kind of “magic trick.” Employing language that is likewise as inflammatory as it is illuminating, an eminent literary scholar (and sometimes art historian) contends that art and literature operate according to the logic of the “gimmick.” Artist (and practicing architect) Brian Zamora agrees, developing these and other insights about the nature of art, illusion and technology into a striking body of work titled New Lighting Devices.
Garry Kennedy served as president of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1967 to 1990, a period when the school was closely associated with the emergence of conceptual art. Then and in the years since, the artist produced an extensive body of work that developed and amplified some of the initial insights of conceptualism in ways that can be fully appreciated perhaps only now.
Photorealism emerged in the early 1970s alongside photo-conceptualism, both employing the camera as a tool for making art. Photography has since developed from an economy of scarcity, dependent on specialized equipment and technical expertise that imposed some minimal limits on image production, to a condition of surplus or even glut, with “more pictures taken in the last year than in the prior history of photography,” as was claimed sometime after the introduction of the camera phone. In her first one-person exhibition at As Is, Takako Yamaguchi presents a body of photorealist paintings that accepts these new conditions and proceeds accordingly.
“You have to smile when you see a tow truck towing a tow truck.” Such was the off-handed response of a prominent Los Angles art critic to the highly self-referential work of photographer Matthew Brandt, one of the artists included in Tow Truck Towing a Tow Truck at As Is.
Ronald Reagan served as President of the United States from January 1981 until January 1989. Sometime in 1984, when the so-called “Reagan Era” was coming to be recognized as the political and cultural sea-change it was, Merwin Belin embarked on his Frontpages (1984 and ongoing), an artwork about that era and what has come since, and about the journalistic enterprise that defines the news and delivers it to us.