Mythologies of a Sublime

Although referred to and viewed through the prism of the entertainment industry and as such, depicted as a utopia powered by dream and desire, the broader cultural context of Los Angeles, is in fact, much more difficult to grasp. The pluralism characteristic for its cultural landscape and the vivid patterns, which define the city´s manifold and simultaneously happening narratives, shape a place with many pockets. These pockets mark not only a geography of place, but also a place of simultaneously coexisting subcultures and other forms of community clusters, which are juxtaposed against one another and form the vivid cultural pallet, so characteristic for the city´s scape. It is a place of opposition and paradox, a place where dream is intertwined with reality, where reality is powered by fiction, where reality and fiction, in fact, coexist and narrate a type of a contemporary mythology.

The exhibition brings together works by a group of artists, whose practice directly or indirectly, engages with this mythology, through a conceptualization of the interior. Rather than a motive of representation however, the interior here functions as a point of departure, a possibility of narrating a spatio-psychological space that is suggestive of a type of a contemporary utopia. By highlighting some of the attributes and stereotypes of contemporary culture(s), the exhibition builds up on small seemingly isolated fictions, blurring the lines between the real and the imaginary, between representation and abstraction, between interpretation and depiction, while drawing up on the idea of a contemporary sublime.