New exhibits to open

Conch and Berries and, 2015-17, Lucas Blalock, archival inkjet print, 32 ½ x 40 ½ inches. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opens two new exhibits on Sunday, February 10, 2019.

In the Project Room, Maryam Jafri will have her first American museum exhibition titled “I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale” and “An Enormous Oar” with photographs by Brooklyn-based photographer Lucas Blalock.

Installation detail view of Maryam Jafri: Product Recall: An Index of Innovation. Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland 2015, Photo: Phillip Hanger.

Artist Jafri’s work features a restaging of an earlier project that combined objects, photographs and texts to reveal a selection of merchandise that was brazenly placed on the market and ultimately removed because of its questionable contents and effects.

In a display of such discontinued items as baby food for adults, medicines, and pet food from the 1960s to the present, Jafri exposes the power and greed often lurking within corporate enterprise and ostensible product innovation.

His first solo museum exhibition, Lucas Blalock exploits the gray area between documentary imagery and carefully composed formal photography to produce an inventive and distinctive body of work. He delights in taking classic large format pictures of people, interiors, dollar store products and other mundane objects and manipulating them into elegant and sometimes zany new images.

Using Photoshop and other means to alter his originals, Blalock stages theatrical compositions that combine a singular artistic vision with technical acuity.

Glass urinary devices, 2017, Patty Chang. Detail of installation of 32 handblown borosilicate glass, plastic, tape and cardboard sculptures with brass mounts on custom foam, plywood and metal table. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the arts and Bank/Mabsociety.

And on Sunday, March 17, 2019, “Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017” is an intimate, multi-dimensional chronicle composed over a period of eight years by the Los Angeles-based performance artist Patty Chang. The exhibit is a meditation on mourning, caregiving, birth, death, geopolitics, landscape and art that takes the viewer on a voyage from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China, to Fogo Island off the coast of Newfoundland, to Uzbekistan.

Configurations (Bread) 2017, Patty Chang, inkjet print, 28 x 40 inches, Courtesy the artist and Bank/Mabsociety.

Viewers will navigate through two large-scale video projections, a photographic installation displayed on explicitly designed architectural structures, and an array of hand-blown glass sculptures modeled after the plastic bottles that Chang improvised as urinary devices during her journey.

For other related events to these exhibits, see:  www.theicala.org or call 213-928-0833