My sister was in town this past weekend, and while looking for something to do on Saturday night, I stumbled onto this post about weekend art gallery opening receptions in LA on art.blogging.la (abLA). We had spent our day sampling some of LA’s finest: a pre-noon lunchtime hotdog at Pink’s followed immediately by guacamole and margaritas on the patio at El Coyote…all of which led us to feeling a bit dragged down by evening. Committed to showing my sister the cultural side of LA (not that Pink’s and El Coyote aren’t LA culture at its finest too!), I flipped through the listings on the abLA site and chose a show opening at the Tropico de Nopal gallery in neighboring Echo Park (1665 Beverly Blvd to be exact).
The reception was for the first gallery show for LA-based artist Arturo Romo. The show, entitled "Echoing Chingazos in the Echo Chamber", featured an ecclectic array of art on display — from free standing sculpture to sketch studies of body parts to furniture arrangement to painting to a short video clip of a man walking around LA wearing rabbit ears (which were also proudly on display in their cardboard sculpted glory).
However, as a media geek, the part of the show that impressed me most was Romo’s artistic take on the notion of open/shared content. Many of his drawings or posters included a photocopied counterpart which attendees could take and collect. One whole wall included sketch drawings of a cat and a man talking about the nature of postmodernism, etc. See here, here and here. (I believe that the cat was officially named El Gato but I might be making that up). Under each mounted drawing hung a mounted notepad; on each page of the notepad there was a photocopy of the drawing above it. On the side of the wall, Romo had hung a note saying "Please carefully take a copy". One of the copies that I took featured El Gato saying, "Why is a replica, transmuted in medium, more appealing than an original?"
My favorite piece of the show may be this drawing of El Gato, or it might be a full reproduction of a telephone-pole style political poster with a header reading "Crystal Brilliance Manifesta" which beseeches to its readers to take on and produce guerilla forms of art. I greatly admired the poster by itself, with its nice typography and detailed text explaining "the new muralism", "the new street photography" and "the new poster-making tradition" (which is "not new in trechnique nor approach" and which, among other things, read, "Be furiously present as the poster maker / distributor, and become fairly intoxicated by the act. Keep collections on hand, never let them appreciate in value — and put them up! Transform your posters into gifts — give them away generously.") But then I looked down and noticed a stack of about 150 posters with a sign reading "Please take one". And I did! Thanks Mr. Romo. I admire your open content vision. Good luck with the rest of your exhibition.
