Contravention to perceived realities is a tried and true Los Angeles staple. It is a city that was founded on alternate metaphors and narratives. In Contraventions, Los Angeles based artists create multi disciplinary work countering the expected and banal. Meg Madison’s black and white photographic diptychs show two unrelated scenes from disparate locations, such as Berlin and Los Angeles. The viewer cannot fight the urge to create harmonious narratives. Mike Mollett, a performance artist and sculptor, founded the L.A. MUDPEOPLE, a tribe that chooses to live a simpler slower existence, a meditative one, amid the surrounding urban tumult. His sculptures reuse local ground materials , earth, mud, bone, steel, detritus and garbage. He places them in pristine environments that belie and/or emphasize their modest beginnings. Neal Taylor creates abstracted, velvety baroque sublimations of moisture and sex . Jason Locklyer’s photographs, drawings, and films have the feel of the wide spaces of Los Angeles, and intermixes these mediums with a mixture of humour and ominousness. Is it environmental catastrophe or just Hollywood? Abel Alejandre’s woodcuts and drawings originated in the streets and graffiti, and still have the feeling of deep humanity mixed with grit. The work is at once delicate and painstakingly rendered, and rough hewn. They remind us as much of the ancient Maya as the contemporary Los Angeleno. Martin Gantman’s photographs and “events” are at once a serious and tongue and cheek commentary of people, places, and things. They have a dead pan quality to them, challenging the viewer to ignore references and layers. Mei Xian Qiu’s inter and intra cultural melange create fantastical notions of self, society and future perfects. Elaine Park’s ephemeral sculptures are puzzles that can be altered continuously.

In all the works in the exhibition, there is always the sense of a changed or more intensified reality. They are new narratives from a city that shapes the real through the unreal.

Trans Angeles, a crossover experimentation from Southern California – curated by Peter Frank. Opening April 12, 2014 at the Wilhelm Morgner Haus Kunstmuseum in Soest, Germany.

Featuring Fatemeh Burnes, Cosimo Cavallaro, Gisela Colón, Gronk, KuBO, Maya Mercer, Kirk Pedersen, Mei Xian Qui, Katsuhisa Sakai, John White, Jae Hwa Yoo, Zadik Zadikian. Los Angeles has become recognized as a world hub of artistic activity. Long a center of art practice and education – more important on the American scene than any other center besides New York – L.A. secured its place in world art over the past two decades, and now produces young art stars and “re-discovered” veteran experimentalists widely respected in the international discourse.

One of the characteristics of the Los Angeles art scene making it so internationally vital is the willingness of its artists to experiment – indeed, to maintain a tradition of experimentation and unorthodox practice that goes back at least a half-century. And one of the most significant factors here is the easy transition Los Angeles-area artists make between concepts, disciplines, even styles. We in the art world have come to accept that artistic production is distinguished by sensibility rather than by style or even discipline; but in L.A. interdisciplinary practice is almost presumed, collegiality spills over readily into collaboration, and a single artist’s oeuvre can so often comprise artworks that are parallel or even hybrid. Similarly, the lives of the artists themselves are fluid and multi-layered. Many come from other places, and many others go back and forth between them. Many transit between identities and life conditions. Many make their living far from the studio but bring into the studio what they learn on the outside.

“Trans-Angeles” thus demonstrates the inner as well as outer “globality” of the southern California artist. He or she can practice, or build on practices, associated with Los Angeles. She or he can also reflect the peculiarities of the climate, the terrain, or even the local industries (Hollywood not least). But in his or her metamorphic notions of artistic practice, all this becomes part of something bigger, a sense of the world – not just L.A. itself – as a site of transformation, translation, and even transcendence.

Miami Project 2013,  Art Basel Miami,  Kopeikin Gallery