Under a Vanishing Night
Under a Vanishing Night: New Work From L.A. | Fourteen30 Contemporary | Portland, OR | March 06 - 28, 2009
The energy within the Los Angeles art world—and the energy of the work produced beneath the city’s light-polluted “vanishing night”—is palpable. Some attribute this energy to the city’s temperate climate, others to its tug-of-war with New York. Many would agree with Ezrha Jean Black, who writes in her introduction to Richard Hertz’s new book, The Beat and the Buzz: Inside the L.A. Art World, that it is the influence of the city’s art schools and graduate art departments that makes L.A. the “contemporary Paris. ... Where the École des Beaux-Arts once dominated fashionable art and architecture at the end of the nineteenth century, at the end of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first century, L.A. dominates cutting-edge art production (and discourse) through its schools’ continuous stream of graduates.”
The artists in Under a Vanishing Night all have a connection not only to the city of Los Angeles, but also to the esteemed art departments that make the city thrive. Seminal California installation artist Richard Jackson taught Sculpture and New Forms at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1989 to 1994; he taught Kim Fisher during his tenure. Fisher, a graduate of both UCLA and Otis College of Art and Design, now teaches at the Art Center College of Design, where Brian Kennon and Natascha Snellman received their MFAs. Sayre Gomez, the most recent graduate in this diverse group, graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2008.
