LOS ANGELES, CA.- Praz-Delavallade is presenting Storm Before the Calm, a multimedia group exhibition opening tonight, Saturday, 17 September in Los Angeles.
“One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion,” wrote Robert Smithson in his seminal 1968 essay A Sedimentation of the Mind.“The actual disruption of the earth’s crust is at times very compelling, and seems to confirm Heraclitus’s Fragment 124, ‘The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.’” As these disruptions, far beyond any of those de-differtiations anticipated (or executed) by early land art pioneers, have increased over the decades, the confused beauty of the natural world has taken the form of what the British artist Marc Quinn has called the “toxic sublime.” As global temperatures increase, so does the disorder of the planet’s unleashed kinetic energy. We’re in a high entropy moment that is unleashing a new physical, but also metaphysical, landscape onto the planet. Artists, from the Hague School to the Florida Highwaymen to the ecological art movement that took form alongside Smithson and his contemporaries, have always responded to the earth’s weather patterns, seasons, and thermodynamic changes in real time. But how do artists concerned with landscape respond to a planet in a state of high entropy that cannot be reversed, one trapped in a political climate where, to quote Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” But when the center cannot hold we’re often left with what Mike Kelley might have called “a less elevated beauty.” And this is the concern at the center of Storm Before the Calm, a multimedia group show at Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles focused on work that embraces—without any didactical prescriptions— this entropic (geo-political) climate that is constantly reshaping itself, and somehow creeping toward equilibrium. It’s a journey into the sublime of the time, a time when tomorrow will likely be more chaotic than today.
Michael Slenske is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor and curator. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine, a contributing editor for Galerie, and has served as the editor- at-large of CULTURED and LALA and as a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times’s DesignLA, Modern Painters and Art + Auction. Slenske runs and curates the artist-led pop-up The Street & The Shop (@thestreetandtheshopla), which has been staged at Tin Flats, Frieze LA, and NeueHouse Bradbury. Slenske has also curated exhibitions at Wilding Cran Gallery, The Landing Gallery, domicile (n.), Praz-Delavallade Projects and Spring/Break Art Show.
