A neon billboard reflecting on ICE raids, a Sisyphus-inspired durational performance, and a ghostly magazine stand are among the public artworks slated to debut during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles.
While art-world insiders flock to the cavernous halls of the Santa Monica Airport, Angelenos of all stripes can encounter new artworks outside the fair’s walls as part of its free public art program, developed in partnership with the Art Production Fund. This year’s edition, titled “Body & Soul,” will convene seven Los Angeles-based artists for site-specific installations that meditate on the human form. A neon sign by Patrick Martinez, though not part of the program, will be on view at the art fair’s entrance and digitally reproduced on billboards around the city throughout the week in partnership with Orange Barrel Media.
In a city grappling with the fallout of last year’s wildfires and ICE raids that created a climate of fear and anguish, Martinez and the artists participating in Frieze Projects’s public art program reflect on what creative community and care look like today. It’s a directive Christine Messineo, Frieze’s Director of Americas, emphasizes, noting that this year’s public program—which also includes youth art workshops and three prizes for emerging artists—is firmly “rooted in the city and responsive to its cultural moment.”
Martinez, whose work often invokes immigrants’ lives and the harm caused by law enforcement in Los Angeles and beyond, has imbued his traditionally commercial material, neon, with a message highlighting collective responsibility: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see,” reads the piece over the glowing image of a rose. Martinez calls for awareness of and empathy for the lives of his community members, many of whom are so often rendered socially and politically invisible.
It’s not the only piece in the program that tackles themes of memory and communal devotion. Kohshin Finley’s site-specific installation will present a series of stoneware pots as receptacles for personal and collective histories. Meanwhile, for her longest performance to date, Amanda Ross-Ho will roll a 16-foot inflatable Earth around the Airport Park Soccer Field for the duration of the fair, evoking our planet’s orbit around the sun. Finally, in a first for Frieze Projects, Kelly Wall will venture off-site to resurrect the shuttered Westwood Village Newsstand with glass magazines. The publications will slowly disappear from the newsstand throughout the week, mirroring real-life trends in journalism (a moving memorial, although we at CULTURED know print media is still alive and well.)
Artists Shana Hoehn and Polly Borland will explore the fleshy weirdness of the human form with wooden cheerleader legs and bulging pink blobs climbing seven feet tall, while Dan John Anderson will install two hulking totems of wood and stained glass. Rounding out the installations, Cosmas & Damian Brown will show his first major public art piece, a smoldering ring of fire made of six incense-stuffed ceramic heads encircling a fountain.
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