ARTISTS
Nick Angelo: Edifice
Many ravers have a similar memory, a zeitgeist recollection of low-end pulsations traveling through space, concrete, and rock. Disorientating color lights, phase-shifting frequencies, and hallucinogens in the bloodstream are all familiar echoes. Yet, those memories are often accompanied by a persistent sense of aesthetic and even social fatigue. A gnawing sense that the scene was better before.
Entering the gallery and exhibition Edifice by Los Angeles-based artist Nick Angelo, one confronts a series of large images whose materiality touches the viewer at the subliminal smell of plastic vinyl. The smell fades over time, as it does with machine-produced printing whether on paper, canvas, or PVC sheeting 鈥� complementary to the transient musk of polyvinyl chloride (鈥渧inyl鈥�) records.
In Edifice, Angelo maps the relationships between libidinal cultural and subcultural formations and their feverish capture by finance capital and real estate. Inspired by watching from a distance the evolution of Southern California鈥檚 Coachella Festival in the late 1990s to the present, Angelo diagrams a history and its chaos, a history of hippies, rave culture, festivals, and art institutions. Three of the pieces in Edifice deploy a tension between images depicting a linear history of institutions and architectures. The images of that history are then encircled in an 鈥渋mage cloud鈥� mined from spectacle culture. A fourth banner features only a diagrammed linear narrative. Inversely, a fifth banner contains only an 鈥渋mage cloud鈥� absent any central historical schema.
Many ravers have a similar memory, a zeitgeist recollection of low-end pulsations traveling through space, concrete, and rock. Disorientating color lights, phase-shifting frequencies, and hallucinogens in the bloodstream are all familiar echoes. Yet, those memories are often accompanied by a persistent sense of aesthetic and even social fatigue. A gnawing sense that the scene was better before.
Entering the gallery and exhibition Edifice by Los Angeles-based artist Nick Angelo, one confronts a series of large images whose materiality touches the viewer at the subliminal smell of plastic vinyl. The smell fades over time, as it does with machine-produced printing whether on paper, canvas, or PVC sheeting 鈥� complementary to the transient musk of polyvinyl chloride (鈥渧inyl鈥�) records.
In Edifice, Angelo maps the relationships between libidinal cultural and subcultural formations and their feverish capture by finance capital and real estate. Inspired by watching from a distance the evolution of Southern California鈥檚 Coachella Festival in the late 1990s to the present, Angelo diagrams a history and its chaos, a history of hippies, rave culture, festivals, and art institutions. Three of the pieces in Edifice deploy a tension between images depicting a linear history of institutions and architectures. The images of that history are then encircled in an 鈥渋mage cloud鈥� mined from spectacle culture. A fourth banner features only a diagrammed linear narrative. Inversely, a fifth banner contains only an 鈥渋mage cloud鈥� absent any central historical schema.
Artists on show
Related articles
Many ravers have a similar memory, a zeitgeist recollection of low-end pulsations traveling through space, concrete, and rock.
Many ravers have a similar memory, a zeitgeist recollection of low-end pulsations traveling through space, concrete, and rock. Disorientating color lights, phase-shifting frequencies, and hallucinogens in the bloodstream are all familiar echoes.
What's on nearby
