"How to Change" is a limited series for “Southland Sessions” exploring the most critical issues facing Southern California culture makers in this pivotal historical moment. Each column will explore a question posed to a range of artists and culture workers, and include recommendations to address these concerns from a practical, action-oriented perspective.
Changing Platforms?
For the third installment of “How to Change,” I asked, “How can artists bring attention to their work when the usual outlets like galleries and art fairs are inaccessible?”
Coronavirus has forced art galleries and museums to close. Art fairs are cancelled well into 2021. Deprived of venues to present their work, artists continue to create and to plan. Some are making their own platforms for art while the usual outlets are offline or hosting reduced programs. I asked Los Angeles artists and culture workers how they are getting their work and others’ out into the world while we’re all still mostly staying at home.
Peter Wu+ is the founder of EPOCH, a virtual art gallery hosting its fourth group exhibition since the start of quarantine. Unlike most online exhibitions that comprise mostly still images, EPOCH’s exhibitions have taken place in unique, fully modeled environments with atmospheric effects including daylight, water, trees and wind. Artworks have didactic labels that pop up when clicked, providing all the information one would have access to in a museum.
The gallery’s latest exhibition, Labyrinth, on view until Oct. 23, presents seven artists in a virtual, navigable art gallery that has been designed by artist Amir Nikravan based on a sixth-century CE Persian architectural glyph. Featuring works by Dorit Cypis, Lito Kattou, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Danielle Dean, Christian Ramirez and Paul Rosero Contreras, Labyrinth considers space and its absence — a chronic tension in our virtual atmosphere. Volume and flatness become metaphors for expansion and contraction, in politics as well as in our living ecological and biological systems.
Read the full article here.
