Drive: LA
Scheiss Auto
by Manfred Zylla
1993
acrylic on brown paper
1910 6th Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90018
Welcome all!
The gallery is open Thursday to Saturday from 12 – 6 pm.
Now on view:
Drive: LA
LA is traffic, roads, and automobiles.
Some people HATE cars.
Some people love’em.
And some people don’t even have ‘em.
Whatever you feel about driving in LA, for the average person, roads are the connections to life. They connect everyone to everything, linking us to each other and to the city itself.
Can we balance anti-pollution activists against speed racers?
And where does that leave the people who have to walk everywhere?
Featuring work by
Manfred Zylla
Chris Sullivan
Zeina Baltagi
Drive: LA
Scheiss Auto 1
by Manfred Zylla
1993
acrylic on brown paper
Manfred Zylla's work is about the risk we run when we let the ideals of environmentalists curdle into dark absurdity.
Painted in 1993 Munich, for an anti-pollution demonstration during a period of militant activism with the German Green Party, his laughing self-portraits seem to challenge us all these years later:
We knew what to do about climate change back in 1993.
We just didn't want to do any of it.
And now that California is burning down around us, why cry about it now?
Roads
by Chris Sullivan
2016-18
asphalt, road marking paint, reflective glass microspheres on canvas
In Sullivan’s work, the roads themselves become cultural artifacts.
The artist examines the ephemeral nature of public roadways, transforming them into carpets that physically bring the outside in, weaving bold lines through space, and activating walls with reflective road markings and racing streaks of light.
His work explores the thinness of our shared social agreement that a little line of paint means millions can commute in relative safety.
More thrillingly, he asks, what happens when that line goes wrong?
Red and Yellow 2
by Zeina Baltagi
2020
photo print on gator board
Zeina Baltagi’s work acknowledges the ubiquity of liquor stores when you don’t have a car to get around.
Often dismissed as lurid, tacky and ugly, she brings them into focus as signposts to the weary pedestrian saying: “Here is where you go to get clean.”
Her work illuminates a vast cultural divide that wrestles with issues of colonization, class and cleanliness.
Turns out, it all comes down to how you read a liquor store sign.
Study
by Jacques Lipschitz
1936
gouache on brown paper
