Sparrow Mart art installation opens in Los Angeles

Supermarket Shopping can be a chore, but British artist Lucy Sparrow has made the mundane task into an experience so joyful that it’s even worth waiting in line for. She’s hand-stitched over 31,000 felt-covered plush replicas of grocery store items for her whimsical Sparrow Mart art-exhibit-meets-shopping-spree at The Standard in Downtown.

On the second floor of the hotel an entire room has been transformed into a grocery playground of sorts with shelves fully stocked with felt goodies that are all for sale throughout the month of August. In the produce section, smiley and doe-eyed avocados, potatoes and watermelons fill large cardboard bins, that are, of course, also covered in felt. White gondola shelves are stocked with Reese’s Puffs and Frosted Flakes cereal boxes, Jif peanut butter jars, and KitKat and Skittles bags — all hand-painted with striking attention to detail. If that wasn’t enough, there’s even a felty ATM machine at the entrance.

Sparrow Mart Aisle

Photo via The Standard

“I decided to work with felt because I find that it’s a medium that is so synonymous with being a child,” Sparrow said in an interview with The Cut. “It’s an easy fabric to work with, it doesn’t fray, it’s available in all the colors you could possibly think of. So, I thought, I wonder if I could make an entire shop that if you’re daydreaming, it looks similar enough that you could go there thinking it was real.”

There’s an interactive component that brings childlike wonderment to many of Sparrow’s objects, like a felt-shrouded soda refrigerator with doors that open up to Coca-Cola and Snapple bottles, and a gum-ball machine that dispenses plastic capsules containing Dubble Bubble candies glimmering from its blue metallic fabric. At the overwhelmingly massive selection at the sushi glass counter, visitors get to pick out their favorite cut rolls and fill a black plastic sushi tray with the items. To add to the experience, guests can use actual shopping carts and baskets to hold their goods and line up at the check-out counter to purchase them.

Sparrow Mart shelves

Photo via The Standard

Hidden within this dizzying array of art pieces are Sparrow’s more playful and irreverent items, where she even manages to make things like alcohol bottles, Trojan condom boxes, Gas-X meds and Marlboro cigarettes cute. As an added bonus, a blue display case features Sparrow’s hand-made recreations of 1980s VHS and Betamax movie boxes like Footloose and Ghostbusters.

While the price tag of the items range from $1 to $50,000, pieces like a Twix bar will run you $35, a head of cheery cabbage for $40 and sushi at $10 a piece. If you happen to have very deep pockets, you can buy an entire seafood case filled with lobster, fish and clams for $50,000. Don’t forget to make your way to the back room behind the check-out counter to scope out some of the more expensive pieces of art, like a shopping cart filled with an assortment of grocery items and a Playboy magazine, or a Warhol-esque shadowbox of pastel-rainbow Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup cans.

Sparrow Mart Playboy

Photo by Brian Champlin / We Like L.A.

A total of 50 visitors can be in the store at once and stay for 30 minutes at a time. All it takes to get into Sparrow Mart is checking in with the hosts at the hotel lobby before heading up the escalator to the store. Since there are no reservations, keep in mind that this exhibit is first come, first served.

If all that faux food shopping gets your stomach growling, there’s a British-inspired pop-up eatery downstairs in the lobby and in the hotel’s 24/7 restaurant that coincides with the Sparrow Mart installation. Here you’ll find snackable items like a sweet-and-savory Sparrow hand pie stuffed with confit duck and acho blackberry barbecue sauce, or a New Delhi Grilled Cheese sandwiched between melted cheddar and Beemster with mango chutney. If you want to go very meta, the hotel also offers combos where you can eat the real versions of the felt creations, like a raspberry-and-blueberry pop tart, and then take its plush counterpart home. Same goes for the homemade Moon Pies and a Tapatio cocktail made with mezcal and lime.

Sparrow Mart product

Photo via The Standard

Sparrow Mart is the artist’s fifth felted show, following her New York appearance where she debuted her 8 Till Late bodega at The Standard at the Highline and sold out everything in two weeks’ time. It took Sparrow and her five-person team a full year in her “Felt Cave” studio in Essex, England to create all the pieces for this L.A. show.

Back when Sparrow had her first Cornershop installation in Bethel Green, London in 2014, she started off with just 4,000 pieces. In the ensuing years, her different exhibits have tackled subversive topics, like her sex shop installation called Madame Roxy’s Erotic Emporium that showcased didos, porn mags and sex toys. And then there was her Warmongery show that featured weapons, including guns, tanks and rocket launchers.

“I am very interested in military history and everything to do it, warfare and the grizzly events of people getting harmed. What better to turn it on its head than to use a fabric that is so innocent and childlike, it just completely messes with your head,” Sparrow told Wonderland Magazine.

Sparrow Mart is the artist’s largest installation to date. While that means that you’ll have a larger selection of items to choose from, it doesn’t mean that it’ll make it any easier deciding which adorable goods to bring back home.

Sparrow Mart is located on the second floor of The Standard hotel at 550 S. Flower St. in Downtown, and runs August 1, 2018 to August 31, 2018. The installation is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. It is closed on Mondays.

Article courtesy of We Like LA.

LACMA’s Latest Exhibit Explores 3D Art

LACMA’s latest exhibition, 3D: Double Vision is a survey of 3D art, dating as far back as 1838, when the stereoscope had just been invented by English scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone.

Sometimes, 3D images feel like the future. Not necessarily the one we will have, but the one imagined by those who lived before—the kind of future where you’d live in a silver dome and drive a hovering Trans Am. When I told this to Britt Salvesen, Head and Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints & Drawing Department, she nodded.

“I think ‘futuristic’ is a great word for [3D], and another word that I often find in the literature is ‘utopian,’” she said. “Dream of the perfect image, the perfect mode of representation of the ultimate realism. That kind of rhetoric occurs again and again. That’s sort of the frontier that image makers are always going for.”

Double Vision takes over the Art of the Americas building (where you may have seen Guillermo del Toro: At Home with the Monsters, also curated by Salvesen) and has been divided into five sections. The first serves as an introduction to 3D, while the rest move chronologically from the Victorian era to the present.

3D works via binocular vision: essentially, two eyes take the information they receive and convert it into one, volumetric image. This is also how a stereoscope works. It offers two nearly identical images, each taken from a slightly different perspective, and presents one to each eye. Your brain does the rest of the work, merging the two into a single image with depth. It doesn’t work for everyone; an estimated 5 to 15 percent of people may have stereo blindness, meaning it’s difficult for them to see 3D images the way they are intended. Yet enough people were excited by 3D imagery that the medium took off.

Peering through a stereoscope. Photo: Juliet Bennett Rylah

Salvesen was focused on the 19th century in her graduate studies, writing her doctoral dissertation on Victorian stereoscopy. She became secifically became interested in how 3D became “massively popular in a very short time.”

“I wanted to think about what was the craving that people had for the experience, and not just wanting to repeat it, but to collect and own it,” she said. “I was fascinated with that, and then kept getting curious about the next chapter. It seems like there is always a desire and an impulse towards that illusionism.”

Wheatstone’s stereoscope, which used drawings and mirrors, was cumbersome. In 1849, scientist David Brewster—inventor of the kaleidoscope–produced a more portable device which could be used to view stereocards. Stereocards featured two side-by-side images that would appear as one 3D image when viewed through the device. They became wildly popular, and Victorians would snatch them up from companies like the London Stereoscopic Company for at-home viewing. They’d immersive themselves in far-off worlds without packing a bag, a primitive harbinger of the 21st century’s consumer VR headsets.

The World’s Fair also played a large role in the growing popularity of 3D imagery. The stereoscope made an appearance at The Great Exhibition in London in 1851, supposedly enchanting Queen Victoria. The View-Master made its debut at New York’s World Fair in 1939. At that same event, auto company Chrysler revealed a short 3D film titled In Tune with Tomorrow in which a 1939 Chrysler Plymouth is assembled, seemingly by magic thanks to stop motion animation. The film was so popular that it was redone in technicolor and presented again during the fair’s second season. This was the first time many people were exposed to 3D cinema, but Hollywood would start cashing in on the gimmick in the ’50s.

Guests to 3D: Double Vision will be able to view In Tune with Tomorrow, multiple iterations of stereoscopes and dozens of stereocards, a host of 3D cinema, and several more modern illusions. Various types of 3D glasses are available throughout the exhibit space, while signage indicates which one is best for each piece. There are enough things to look at and watch that one could easily spend a couple hours inside.

As guests enter, Thomas Ruff’s 3D-ma.r.s.80 (2013) offers two large, grayscale images of Mars’ surface, the craters deepening as soon as one slips on their red and blue glasses. Nearby, artist Tristan Duke’s Platonic Solids (2015) offer hand-drawn holograms on nickel-plated coppers discs. There are five of them, and on each, a geometric figure dances and shimmers.

Tristan Duke’s Platonic Solids Photo: Juliet Bennett Rylah

Among the many stereocards depicting beautiful places and historic events, one will find a collection 19th century French Diableries. These hellish, yet humorous images depict skeletons and demons getting wild in the underworld. When backlit, the black and white images change. Eyes glow red, as light shines through tiny pinpricks. Viewers can activate the light by pressing a button on the display. (You can see some Diableries, appropriately set to Bauhaus, in this video.)

In a dark theater, a 25-minute montage of various 3D clips plays on repeat, ranging from mid-century B movies to modern film and animation. Definitely stay to see the trailer for The Maze, a 1953 horror flick in which a man breaks off his engagement after inheriting a Scottish castle from his uncle—not exactly an original conceit, but a delightful horror trope, nonetheless. His suspicious fiancée follows him to Scotland, only to experience a cavalcade of horrors inside the eponymous maze. Plastic bats and cobwebs dart out from the screen, eliciting more laughs than terror.

Other notable pieces include Simone Forti’s hologram piece Striding Crawling (1975-78), in which a holographic figure does just that, vaguely reminiscent of the desperate message Princess Leia sends to Obi Wan Kenobi in ’77’s Star Wars: A New Hope.

Then there’s the exhibit’s largest work, at least in terms of scale: Michael Snow’s sculpture, Redifice(1986). It’s a hulking, red box, about eight feet high and 20 feet long. It’s peppered with windows, some of which contain holograms, sculptures, or dioramas. Salvesen named it as one of the pieces she was most excited to display.

“It’s like if you were looking into a skyscraper,” she remarked. “It’s just so effective and fun.”

Near the conclusion of the exhibit is a series of holograms by Ed Ruscha, each one appropriately declaring it ‘the end.’ Continue down a hall with your glasses on to see Peggy Weil’s 3D Wallpaper, originally presented in 1976 and redrawn for Double Vision. Though this is sure to become the designated selfie spot, Double Vision isn’t the kind of exhibit one can simply view through other people’s photos. Many of the illusions can only be seen with the human eye, making it a truly interactive and immersive show that Instagram alone could never do justice.

3D: Double Vision is part of The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology at LACMA. See it on display in the Art of the Americas building July 15 through March 31. Visit LACMA online to keep up with exhibit-related programming, including a screening of ‘The Maze’ at Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on August 9.

Story courtesy of We Like LA.

The Broad To Revamp First Floor Gallery

The Broad will present a new, free exhibit beginning June 30, showcasing over 50 pieces from over 20 different artists. While some have been on display in the past, about half have never been seen by Broad visitors before.

A Journey That Wasn’t will feature a host of postwar and contemporary works, organized as “complex representations of time and its passage,” according to a release from the museum. Works include Sharon Lockhart’s 60-piece After Russell Lee: 1-60 (2016) photo series, which is one of 24 new pieces recently acquired by The Broad, and Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat Portrait Studio series (2005). Some artists, including Iraqi mixed-media artist Toba Khedoori and Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, will receive their Broad debut via the exhibit. This will also be the first time L.A. artist Ed Ruscha’s “Azteca/Azteca in Decline” (2007) has been shown in Los Angeles. The 27-foot-long diptych is a recreation of a mural Ruscha observed in Mexico City.

Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012. Nine channel HD video projection. The Broad Art Foundation. Commissioned by the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. © Ragnar Kjartansson; Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, 2006. Super 16 mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound. The Broad Art Foundation. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Ed Ruscha, Azteca / Azteca in Decline, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, diptych, 48 x 330 in. The Broad Art Foundation. © Ed Ruscha.

The exhibit will also see the return of Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors” (2012), which was last at The Broad two years ago. The video installation consists of nine screens, one of which features Kjartansson playing a guitar in a bathtub. He sings the line, “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” Soon, he is joined by eight other musicians, each one performing in a different area of an estate located in upstate New York. The entire piece is over an hour in length.

The exhibit derives its title from French artist Pierre Huyghe’s 2006 short film, “A Journey that Wasn’t,” taken from a trip Huyghe took to Antarctica to find a rare albino penguin. Footage from the expedition is interspersed with footage from a performance in Central Park.

A Journey That Wasn’t brings forth the rich array of artworks in the Broad collection that capture the passage of time by including artists who use devices such as rhythm, repetition, duration, artifice and appropriation to investigate and distort our perceptions, memories and emotions,” Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad, said via a release. “The exhibition provides viewers space in which to reflect on their own malleable experiences of time, illusion and memory.”

A Journey that Wasn’t opens June 30 in The Broad’s first floor galleries, and will be on display through February 2019. To see it, guests must reserve a free ticket to The Broad online, as per usual. Reservations to see Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms, of which The Broad now boasts two, must be reserved separately at kiosks inside the museum.

Article courtesy of We Like LA.

The Broad announces release date for tickets to ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’ exhibit

The Broad announces release date for tickets to Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Infinity Mirrors’ exhibit

The Broad has announced the released date for tickets to “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors.”

The exhibit is a more in-depth take on Kusama, the artist behind the “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” which is the biggest draw at The Broad.

Tickets will go on sale Friday, September 1 at 12 p.m. The exhibit will include six of Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, including:

Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field

Infinity Mirrored Room – Love Forever

Infinity Mirrored Room – All the Eternal Love I Have For The Pumpkins

Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (currently at the Broad and included in the exhibit)

Infinity Mirrored Room – Dots Obsession – Love Transformed into Dots

Infinity Mirrored Room—Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity

..and for those who would like to participate, there will also be ‘The Obliteration Room.’ Guests can cover every space of the all-white gallery with polka dot stickers!

The exhibit is making a tour across six venues in North America, which includes one stop in California. The experimental artworks will be at The Broad from October 21 to January 1, 2018.

Tickets for adults will be $25 and free for children 12 and under. On-site standby tickets for adults will be $30. Same-day general admission to The Broad’s third-floor galleries is included with the ticket purchase. Tickets can be purchased on the museum’s website.

For more details on the exhibit, click HERE.

The Broad is located at 221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles.