Torrance Art Museum – Main Gallery
January 19 – March 9, 2019
Featured Artists: Forrest Kirk, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Narsiso Martinez, Patrick Martinez, Jaime Scholnick
LA Art Documents Co-Producer Jason Jenn also serves as the Outreach Specialist for Torrance Art Museum. Over the next few months, LAAD will be posting videos of various TAM exhibitions from the past year. The exhibition features strong works in varied mediums with a theme is as relevant now as ever as the human need to protest is universal, the artwork reflecting a variety of issues in these turbulent times.
Protest, noun centers on a select group of Los Angeles–based artists who share an urgent and political drive to engage the character of our moment through their art practices. Through their work these artists produce bodies of work that critically engage social and political currents running through our society. This social and political critique is conducted via a pronounced materiality whereby objecthood announces its structural relationship to meaning and content. The current political climate has seen civil unrest and debased interactions, particularly on social media, which have increasingly polarized our society. This exhibition attends to some of the more pressing issues for California artists: Immigration, homelessness, income inequity and justice inequality, climate change and resource allocation. The links between these aspects of contemporary life have been recognized, the need to address them immediate. What can art do to change things? If it can get people to think and then to act it has succeeded. If it highlights and uncovers, it has succeeded. If it has given voice, regardless of outcome, it has succeeded. We, each of us, must attend to the injustice in front of our very eyes. These artists do not let us avert our gaze… —Max Presneill, 2019 www.laartdocuments.com