Exhibitions

Organized for the Armory by Los Angeles-based independent curator Kris Kuramitsu, this exhibition highlights and contextualizes a group of artists that work in Los Angeles as well as other locations in Asia and Latin America, among them Ho Chi Minh City, Tokyo, Mumbai, Tijuana, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. 

Los Angeles is perpetually framed as a prototypical global city, an outer-edge American capital that serves as a key Pacific Rim nexus of exchange for people, goods, and ideas. Home Away explores the contours of a transnational artistic practice that is rooted in this context – the dynamism of Los Angeles in the second decade of the new millennium.

The nine artists in this exhibition have deep ties to Los Angeles, yet maintain studios and live part of their lives in cities across Asia and Latin America. While artists have always had a history of living such peripatetic lives – making homes where their inspiration leads them – the artists in this exhibition have found meaning in the relationship between multiple bases of creative operation. These artists have made a home in Los Angeles as professionals nurtured by the community of creative people in this city, yet actively maintain connections to their former homes, exploring the impact of immigration, surveillance, or trade policies on people, goods, and ideas as they move from place to place.

Home Away seeks to define the contours of different kinds of international artistic practices, simultaneously global and local, that resonate with the way that we live our daily lives in Southern California. The artist team The Propeller Group, for example, works in international collectives borne from the simultaneous conditions of global citizenship, Internet communication, and a commitment to multiple communities they call home. For Bruce Yonemoto and Haruko Tanaka, their mutual Japanese heritage and a media-soaked Southern California are rich sources of inspiration.Tanya Aguiñiga blends a keen vocabulary of modernist forms and a passion for traditional fiber and ceramic arts, maintaining close ties to communities of artists and craftspeople throughout Mexico. Video artist Michelle Dizon, born and raised in Los Angeles as part of the Philippine diaspora, focuses on subjectivity as it intersects with the histories of colonialism and its legacies of immigration, diaspora, and globalization. Neha Choksi has moved between studios in Mumbai and the US for most of her career, exploring the impact of humans on the natural environment. Camilo Ontiveros, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Yoshua Okón each explores aspects of US-Mexico trade, surveillance, matters of immigration and labor, and cultural and economic colonialism, and their effects on US and international policy.

The exhibition will include newly-commissioned works and existing works in all disciplines including painting, photography, sculpture, and video.

• Click here to view images from the exhibition on Flickr
  
  
• Neha Choksi, Project 88, Iceboat and Sky Fold, artforum.com pick, by Zeenat Nagree
  
  
• Neha Choksi, Indian Artist Explores Absence Through Presence, New York Times, by Sei Chong

• Home Away listed in LA Weekly
  
  
• Neha Choksi in "Home Away" Curated by Kris Kuramitsu @ Armory Center for the Arts

Image: Iceboat (detail) by Neha Choksi