dayoutlast: "Painting In Place" (Part 1 of 2) by LAND @ Farmers and Merchants Bank, Downtown Los Angeles

dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

--Justin Lowman

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

"Painting In Place" (Part 1 of 2) by LAND @ Farmers and Merchants Bank, Downtown Los Angeles

A quick survey of this very ambitious show, at least in theoretical terms, left me wondering about the results (and certainly I was not surprisingly beleaguered by my inability to fully navigate and study the situation. After all, it was opening night, and things filled in quickly). Said disclaimer implies that I will return for a more careful investigation and report at a later date. In the meantime, below are some images of work that I felt took the premise of the show (paintings engaged with a sense of place) in a direction that I had hoped for, especially given the idiosyncratic nature of the site, a bank ruin. I suppose it would be too easy to jab with terms like "bank art" or "bankable art." On the other hand, I'm suspecting there to be some "paintings" here to be "banked on" literally as they court inter-dimensional reception, i.e. time displacement, flow, and currency.