LA Art Show: Vellum LA & DIVERSEartLA Make a Splash

“As we’ve been exploring spaces over the course of COVID, I was thinking about how artists are exploring these imaginative spaces, escaping reality, and the tools they’re using to create these spaces and how things like the metaverse and the digital world inform the imagination,” Velicescu tells Art & Object. “The show is ten different artists, their tools are different, a photographer, animator, generative artist, all working with different tools to interpret this.”

In November, another NFT by Beeple sold for $28.9 million, and works by CryptoPunk 4156 have sold in the $7-10 million range. “The idea that something like that could sell for that amount of money definitely shook the traditional art world and forced them to pay attention to something that they had brushed off previously,” notes Velicescu, whose buyers tend to be from the tech world. “Artworks that are compelling and have something to say will stand the test of time and will persevere in this process.”

Technology is a principal component in the show’s other showcase, DIVERSEartLA, a program of immersive experiences spotlighting environmental issues. “I think of the whole project as a way to start rethinking how we connect to our planet, to save our planet and our future in different ways,” says DIVERSEartLA curator Marisa Caichiolo who paired art museums with their scientific counterparts for the program. “The partnerships bring a lot of dimension to the curatorial statement and to the work itself.”

Interspersed throughout the convention hall’s entryway, The Sign is a site-specific installation by Swen Leer, a series of freeway signs made by the people who make the real thing. It addresses those who are idle in the face of global catastrophe with slogans like “Your children WILL hate you – eventually” and “Your Lifestyle Fucked the Others.”

In an enclosed room with a mirrored floor, Our Turn to Change by Andrea Juan and Gabriel Penedo Diego is a video installation that surrounds the viewer. Its subject is the slow dissolution of the poles amid climate change, massive glaciers disintegrating drop by drop. Portions of the footage were shot by the artists during interventions carried out in the region.

Recognizing Skid Row As A Neighborhood: Skid Row Cooling Resources offers a cooling system for itinerants, some of whom succumb to heat during LA’s brutal summers. Curated by Max Presneill, Memorial to the Future is a large-scale brutalist structure housing monitors showing images related to environmental issues.

In the state of Jalisco, Mexico, rivers are drying up, putting local communities and tribes at risk. The Other Waterfall & Chapala Also Drops Itself by Claudia Rodriguez is a video and textile installation addressing the environmental crisis using drought imagery and a large suspended fishing net. For The Earth's Fruits, Guillermo Anselmo Vezzosi curated a sculptural tree made from discarded cans, a subtle metaphor for reuse and recycling.

“Each of the museums and institutions involved here bring a lot of dimension to the curatorial statement of the work itself,” says Caichiolo about teaming with organizations that are new to the artworld like Museum of Environmental Science, Museum of Nature and Science Antonio Serrano of Entre Rios Argentina and The Museum of Nature of Cantabria Spain.

Vellum LA and DIVERSEartLA share the goal of broadening the conversation around art, redefining what has value and who gets to call themselves artists. “At the end of the day, art is subjective,” offers Velicescu. “What did naysayers say when contemporary art came around? ‘I can do that.’ Well, do it then. A lot of people are scared by change, and are threatened by the fact that someone can make money off something like this. People were shocked when the dadaist came around, the surrealists. I see this as something that’s disrupting the space and a lot of people won’t like that. We’ll see what the history books have to say about this movement.”