The others are mostly static, until you look closely. The left image appears to be static, like a screen-grab. The videos are structurally odd, which is constructive. “Religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.” “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people,” Schulz’s Linus famously said. Schulz “Peanuts” comic strip, it’s a playful specter of suburban anxiety. Notably, the fright-night embellishment is a giant pumpkin that repeatedly pops its top to release a cheerful ghost trapped inside. Two upscale fellows in tennis whites pull weeds and trim a dead lawn, wash a dirty Toyota parked in the driveway and set up a Halloween decoration in the front yard. Their flat-screen triptych “Temporarily Embarrassed,” made in the grim aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, shows three Inland Empire houses at various price points, each being spruced up for reentry into the real estate market. (Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)Ī similar motif undergirds a quiet, multi-channel video by the duo Jeff & Gordon (artists Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko). Claudia Cano, "Rosa Hernandez - the cleaning lady," 2012-16, mixed media. So Cano/Hernandez is not merely engaged in sweeping the floor as a work of art, she’s also busy sprucing up rapacious reputations. But art is always a prime Gilded Age adornment - a generic sign of status and symbol of civilized discernment, even when unwarranted.
Hernandez, typically invisible as a behind-the-scenes worker who keeps things in order, turns up again in the galleries as an art object: a documentary photograph paired with a sculptural still life composed of a broom and dust pan. Rosa Hernandez, the cleaning lady, is artist Claudia Cano’s alter ego, a character who performed at the exhibition’s opening earlier this month. A bit uneven and ultimately somewhat sparse, the show is nonetheless a welcome attempt to parse deep connections between art and society at large. When some of the gilding gets stripped away from our New Gilded Age, defined by the concentration of income and wealth that fueled the incredible rise of the “1 percent,” what is left behind? A new show at the Torrance Art Museum has some thoughts.įor “The Gildless Age,” an apt if rather clumsy title, guest curator Denise Johnson brings together work by a dozen West Coast painters, sculptors and photographers.