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T MAGAZINE | THREE'S A TREND
In L.A., Female Video Artists Reign By ERICA BELLMAN NOV. 19, 2015 Video-based art is having a moment among women in Los Angeles. Three female artists with solo exhibitions on view there this fall aim to shift perceptions of the medium’s potential, using it to capture everything from Op Art-like abstractions to provocative depictions of animal life. Diana Thater, whose career-spanning show opens next week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, posits that the appeal of video for women might come from the medium’s relative newness — there are no old masters glowering from the textbook pages. “Women could enter into it without this art-historical legacy,” Thater says. “There is no male-dominated history, so there’s more freedom.” |
Magdalena Fernández
For Magdalena Fernández’s first major exhibition in the United States, the Venezuelan artist and former graphic designer has installed six geometric videos and a site-specific piece that activates MOCA’s staircase in a glowing constellation of LED lights. Manipulating movement, light and sound in her kinetic works, Fernández’s videos alludes to the flora and fauna of her native Caracas. The artist combines the formal Modernism established in her home country by Gego, Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto with an organic central reference point that’s entirely her own. “Communion between nature and abstraction allows me to imagine a Mondrian in motion when I see a macaw flying over the city, or when I listen to the rain,” Fernández says. All of the works on view are experiential and highly sensorial, inviting the viewer to be immersed in Fernández’s beautiful, abstract world.
On view through Jan. 3 at MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, moca.org.
Video documentation of Magdalena
Fernández at MOCA Pacific Design Center, October 3, 2015–January 3,
2016, courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, video by Sadie
Strangio
