Hibbleton Gallery Owner on Coyote Hills, Chevron, Supervisorial Candidate Shawn Nelson, and James Lipton
Categories: Art Review
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Every once in a while, we get dispatches from community members--some good, some bad, some hackish. The following is good, and comes from a good guy: Jesse La Tour, owner of the awesome Hibbleton Gallery in Fullerton, one of the few places for art that I bother to visit. Here is his account on an issue that has gripped his hometown for years: what exactly to do with the undeveloped hills at the northern portion of the city. Read his blog here, and read the rest:
Went to a Fullerton City Council meeting last night (May 11), to decide the fate of Coyote Hills, one of the last large open spaces left in North Orange County, not yet covered with tract homes and shopping centers. The massive Chevron Corporation wants to develop the land. There were dozens of Fullerton residents standing outside with signs and buttons that said, "Save Coyote Hills."
I sat through that four hour meeting, which was half full of residents who actually live in Fullerton, mainly against the development. The other half was paid Chevron cronies, scientists and "experts" meant to give reasons why it would be in the community's best interest to have another sprawling housing development: a geologist, a wildlife specialist, a non-profit conservation group, an architect from UCI--scientists and scholars who have whored themselves out to this major corporation that doesn't give two shits about the community they will damage.
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Larry Fodor's work can be hard to defend. When people carp about "modern art," when they talk about canvases full of smears and glops and they holler, "a chimp could have painted that," they're probably thinking of art like Fodor's. Even if you're proud to call yourself an artsy-fartsy weirdo, a little of this kind of art goes a long way.
The Orange County Museum of Art's 2008 Biennial features twenty exhibits beyond the museum itself, scattered all the way from San Francisco down to Tijuana. Einar and Jamex de la Torre's "Pho’zole 2008," at South Coast Plaza's Orange Lounge, seems weirdly symbolic of the Biennial itself, offering up so many bowls of food that it would probably take the rest of your life to eat it all. The bowls are mounted on the wall, wrong way out, so the food looks like it's about to come dribbling out and land on your shoes with a wet splat. On their own and placed on a table the way a sensible person would do it, any one or two of these colorful meals might look tasty. But clustered together in one vertiginous sprawl like this, the effect is anything but appetizing. (Actually, it feels sort of like you've been swallowed by a hungry giant and you're trapped in his stomach with his last few dozen undigested meals.) As if all of this wasn't already unsettling enough, the de la Torres brothers have also included a video of people talking about food around the world; the video is embedded in the wall, and shines eerily through a pile of semi-transparent chow like the dream of a glutton sleeping off his latest binge. The food court's just a short walk away. Hungry?
Sofa, King, Cool, Travis Collinson's memorably peculiar acrylic painting, really doesn't belong in the Huntington Beach Art Center's baseball-themed art show, "2332." But then again, an argument could be made that Collinson's hapless characters would be misfits pretty much anywhere.
Roger Weik's Abstract Number 73 looks like any number of horrible things. Maybe a close-up view of a mummy's back, with jaundiced, rotting flesh peeking through the frayed, graying bandages. Or maybe it's more like some sort of a huge, nasty insect nest you'd find inside of a hollowed-out tree. If you were refurbishing an old house and you ripped open one of the walls, you might be distressed to discover something that looked a lot like this: dirty, spongy stuff covered with stringy bits of some kind of rotting fabric.
Andrew Holder seems to live in a cheery 1968 wonderland; it's as if he went to see Yellow Submarine when he was seven years old and he never left Pepperland again. His work features bright, lysergic colors and bold, flat, graphic designs... Making it all the more arresting when his stuff lurches off of the walls of the Hibbleton gallery and into the third dimension, as it does in his mounted, Trophy Deer Heads covered with what we can only describe as psychedelic tattoos. The papier mache deer have no visible eyes or mouths, but the designs crawling across their necks and faces are alive with head-trippy details. Bustling little towns play host to giant animals - a pair of geese the size of skyscrapers wander through, and nobody seems to mind. A turtle as big as a luxury yacht splashes lazily along on a winding river. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...
