Art Spiel Picks: Downtown Los Angeles in September 2024

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Nancy Baker Cahill, Substrate Part #1: Universum, video still, project artists Shereen Moustafa, Mark Sosa, Casper Torres, and Miguel Zavala-Lopez, Central Library Video Wall, Los Angeles Central Library, Los Angeles. On view through December 2024. Video still selected by the author.

Three Downtown Lost Angeles exhibitions use data, disaster, and a shared history to explore community connections. They tap into the past, present, and imagined future to speak about class, labor, and inequity through the use of storage systems, pride of place, and what happens when things fall apart. At Gallery Luisotti’s El Cuerpo: The (Performing) Body and the Photographic Stage Chicano/a artists use themselves as subject to connect through a shared history, at the Los Angeles Central Library Nancy Baker Cahill: Substrate Part #1: Universum uses civic institutions, cultural resources, and data storage systems to forge a connection of community driven by data and at The Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA Grand exhibition Josh Kline: Climate Change community members connect to survive the aftermath of the climate crisis. 

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Josh Kline’s Greatest Emergency

Josh Kline, Unemployment, installation view, 2016

This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The second article in this series highlights the work of American artist Josh Kline.

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