Kicking off the week of art fairs in Los Angeles on Wednesday was the preview for the Spring/Break Art Show, which returned for its third West Coast edition, featuring more than 50 curated mini art shows in a roomy warehouse built in 1940.
As always, there was a wide range of work on view, including some of Spring/Break’s signature over-the-top installations, all loosely adhering to the same “Hearsay: Heresy” theme as the 2021 New York show.
Take, for example, the collective Fall on Your Sword’s installation Kneel Before Dog, which features three hot dog rolling machines, their glowing heat lamps illuminating cast sculptures of the tubular meat-stuffs painted with the names of Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Stanley Tucci, and other actors.
Behind this altar to celebrity, three old-school televisions were playing mesmerizing montage of largely 1980s- and ’90s-era film clips of people eating, drinking, or preparing food, switching between the three as people interacted with the piece by stepping onto the platform and kneeling down. The entire installation, which includes a custom soundtrack composed by the group, costs $18,000; the hot dog sculptures, which each come in an edition of four in collectible storage boxes, are $300 each.
Fall on Your Sword’s Kneel Before Dog, curated by Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Artist Stuart Lantry drove the delicate motors and mechanized parts for his wall-size kinetic sculpture Me Means Meaning across the country from Philadelphia for his booth, “Autonomy, Automata and I,” curated by artist Shona McAndrew—who was herself a breakout star of Spring/Break New York in 2019.
Other large-scale works included Katrina Sánchez’s Welcome Passage, a monumental sculpture of rainbow-colored knitted yarn and fiberfill on a framework metal piping that provided a dramatic entry for her joint presentation with Allison Baker, curated by Boston’s Abigail Ogilvy Gallery.
The pairing of Baker’s tiny, colorfully surreal drawings with Sánchez’s knitted and braided fiber art was one of the fair’s most visually appealing displays.
Spring/Break has a long-standing dedication to craft and unconventional materials, but also to artists embracing new technologies—often with a twist.
Katrina Sánchez with her piece Welcome Passage, presented by Boston’s Abigail Ogilvy Gallery at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Los Angeles’s IV Gallery presented a trio of darkened rooms with large, single monitors playing videos that were also being sold as NFT art.
B.D. White digitally rendered his photorealistic animation of an astronaut in a room flooding with water, titled Everything Will Be Fine, while Sam Tuffnell used chicken noodle soup as a physical material for his strangely mesmerizing time lapse films of frozen sculptures melting and being reborn in a constant loop. Part of the inspiration was Andy Warhol’s famed soup cans, reimagined for the 21st century.
Old meets new was also the theme in the booth titled “Odd souls fall madly/the Debris riffs endlessly/into the minor Gods” from curators Ankita Mukherji and Elisabeth Smolarz, featuring intentionally over-exposed cyanotype prints from the artist duo Towers.
Contrasting the use of this old-fashioned photography technique, the artists generated their fractilized images using machine learning, training the algorithm on works from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artists want the resulting abstractions to feel like precious objects, recalling the sci-fi novel Canticle for Leibowitz, set in a post-apocalyptic future where blueprint schematics have become venerated religious relics.
Artist duo Towers (Dione Lee and Ethan Sim) with their work in “odd souls fall madly/the Debris riffs endlessly/into the minor Gods” curated by Ankita Mukherji and Elisabeth Smolarz at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“We wanted an anachronistic blend of imagery which makes it very unplaceable within the timeline of art history,” Lee told Artnet News. But even though an iPad mounted in the center of the space shows the AI at work, with an ever-changing display of morphing images, “there are no NFT versions—there’s something about the physical version which is very attractive to us.”
Another project drawing attention to the divide between computer generated imagery and tangible art objects could be found at the fair’s entrance, where artist Ya Chin Chang spent the entire preview chatting with guests via webcam, live from her studio in Hong Kong.
Ya Chin Chang video chatting from Hong Kong during the opening of Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022, where collectors could roll the dice to create a generative profile picture NFT and accompanying oil painting from her “Snackstalgia Buddy” series. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Her “Snackstalgia Buddy” series, presented by curator Queenie Wong, is a play on the wildly popular profile picture collections such as Crypto Punks and the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But instead of generating her images through the power of computing, Chang is inviting collectors to literally roll the die—it sits in a tray next to the laptop—to determine what kind of anthropomorphized food character she will sculpt, paint in oil, and then mint as an NFT on a green blockchain.
The completely analogue process also includes a rarity guide—only few buddies, for instance, will have wings or sunglasses, and it’s more desirable to have cocktail sausages as arms than the more common chocolate pocky. In the style of Bored Ape serums, collectors will also have the option of letting their profile picture evolve in the coming years, but Chang will only change the physical oil painting, while the NFT will stay static.
Ya Chin Chang , Snackstalgia Buddy #6. Courtesy of the artist.
Three of the four example “buddies” had already sold for $1,300 each, and at least three people had paid to generate their own versions for $900. But while there are 10,000 punks and apes, Chang is limiting herself to just 36 works.
“We decided,” she told Artnet News, “that I’m not code, and I will not die painting!”
See more photos from the fair below.
Artist Tyler Krasowski and curator Nora Lucia Boyd “You find yourself alone in the middle of a forest” featuring work by Krasowski and Opal Mae Ong at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Lasse Thorst in “Sinners Feast” curated by Galerie Wolfsen at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Brooke McGowen in “King Cock and the 5th Crusade” curated by Heinz Patatzki at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“The Magical World of Charles Williams” curated by New Art Projects at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Georganne Deen, CEO of Goldman Sachs on trial at The Hague in Balmain presented by curators Chris Bors and Fred Fleisher in “Dark Shadows” at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Black and Blue” with work by Hubert Neal Jr. presented by Los Angeles’s IV Gallery at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Artists and curatorrs Valery Jung Estabrook and Corey Escoto with their booth “Pump ‘n Dump” at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Valery Jung Estabrook, Tug at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Artists and curators Patrick Geske and Cody Miner with their booth “Holy Crap” at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Meg Lionel Murphy’s “Dreams of Dragons” curated by the Untitled Space, New York, at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Alexa Hoyer’s “Window Dressing” series, presented by curator Queenie Wong in “So do we remember?!!” at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Stuart Lantry Me Means Meaning in “Autonomy, Automata and I” curated by artist Shona McAndrew at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Works by R E Roberts and John Burton Harter in “The Messenger,” curated by Roberts at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Jacob Haupt and Nancy Rivera in “Remember You Will Die” Christopher Lynn, Janessa Lewis, and Malachi Wilson at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Jacob Haupt in “Remember You Will Die” Christopher Lynn, Janessa Lewis, and Malachi Wilson at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Allison Baker in “Welcome Passage,” presented by Boston’s Abigail Ogilvy Gallery at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Katrina Sánchez, Welcome Passage, presented by Boston’s Abigail Ogilvy Gallery at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Taylor McKimens: American Idols” curated by Carlton DeWoody at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Jamie Clyde in “Bang! Spit! Snag!” curated by Coco Dolle at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Jamie Clyde in “Bang! Spit! Snag!” curated by Coco Dolle at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Work by Jamie Clyde in “Bang! Spit! Snag!” curated by Coco Dolle at Spring/Break Los Angeles 2022. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Spring/Break Art Show is on view at Skylight Culver City, 5880 Adams Boulevard, Culver City Arts District, Los Angles, February 16–20, 2022.