All of This and Nothing – Hammer Museum Los Angeles

Evan Holloway at All of This and Nothing at the Hammer Museum

Explore the potential for art to reveal the mysterious and the magical in everyday moments. Visit the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to see ALL OF THIS AND NOTHING, a group show of more than 60 works by 14 artists, who take mundane materials and reinvent them into a new aesthetic life, thereby encouraging us to look at the world differently. Thursdays are a great day to visit the Hammer Museum, because admission is free and the museum is open late until 9pm.

All of This and Nothing is on view now through April 24th, 2011. Hammer Museum address and hours: https://hammer.ucla.edu/visit/

The exhibition features artists based in Los Angeles, Latin America and elsewhere: Karla Black, Charles Gaines, Evan Holloway, Sergej Jensen, Ian Kiaer, Jorge Macchi, Dianna Molzan, Fernando Ortega, Eileen Quinlan, Gedi Sibony, Paul Sietsema, Frances Stark, Mateo Tannatt and Kerry Tribe.

These artists work with ideas of the ephemeral, fragile nature of life, with their artworks being a reflection of that. The art is conceptual, in that its value resides more in the process of its making and the ideas behind it, rather than in the resulting object. As you explore the show, I think you will find that the wall texts provided by the museum will give you helpful insight into the artist’s process.

I am pleased to give you a small preview, and I hope you can visit in person to see the entire show:

Karla Black employs the floor of a room as her canvas, layering powdered plaster and pigment onto it, an ephemeral work that will exist only during this exhibition.

Jorge Macchi from Buenos Aires created “Vanishing Point ” especially for this exhibition, a handpainted wallpaper distorted so that the corner of the room recedes.

Charles Gaines’s audio-video-drawing piece “Manifestos” translates four 20th-century revolutionary manifestos into music.

Fernando Ortega of Mexico City lets a spider weave its web into an unstringed harp. His photographs document the beauty and small mysteries in everyday occurrences.

Los Angeles artist Kerry Tribe explores the subjective nature of memory and time in her video The Last Soviet, 2010