While physical art spaces have been temporarily closed, artists have continued to find new ways to show their work. At Occidental College (known as Oxy) in Los Angeles, the gallery Oxy Arts has reached out to local video artists, both emerging and established, to screen their work in its Streetview Video Series. Short films and videos are being shown in the gallery’s Black Box space, visible from a street-facing window on York Boulevard, through Sunday, August 16.
The series, curated by Oxy Arts Director Meldia Yesayan, kicked off by screening documentation of the fourth of July action by In Plain Sight, a collective of 80 artists that wrote urgent messages above detention centers around the United States. Yesayan shared with Hyperallergic that this is a preview to a fall group show, to be curated by the In Plain Sight team, “highlighting works from a selection of the artist cohort.”
The second week of Streetview featured videos by graduating MFA students in the Los Angeles area, including from Otis College of Art and Design and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As Yesayan put it, these students “were particularly left in a lurch without venues to screen their final work.” (On Hyperallergic, we have also been publishing a series of pieces spotlighting MFA work across both coasts.) For the MFA selections, Oxy held an open call to all Los Angeles-based MFA media arts programs and selected a total of seven projects.
Streeview’s past programming is currently available on its YouTube channel. But for those who want to venture out to Highland Park and safely see some work in-person (doesn’t that sound nice?), the gallery is currently screening (d(e)volve), by Carole Kim and Paul Chavez, through August 2. The 35-minute meditative video was born out of Kim’s “love of drawing and the micro-sensitivity of the gesture.” Then, from August 3 to 9, you can catch Breathless by Paul Pescador, a video especially commissioned for the series in which the artist reflects on his car rides through the empty roads of Los Angeles between March and May of this year. The film — which combines live-action, hand-drawn animation, and found footage — references both COVID-19 and the 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name.
In the final week of the program, from August 10 to 16, Streetview will share work from the archives of LA Freewaves, a nonprofit that provides free online access to “new, uncensored, independent media.”
When: Now through Sunday, August 16
Where: Oxy Arts on York (4757 York Boulevard, Highland Park, Los Angeles)
More info at Oxy Arts