LACMA

M C 181 RUBEN OCHOA From the inside of a delivery van to commercial billboards and freeway walls, Ruben Ochoa's work occupies some of the most mundane sites while being infused with an innovative perspective. In 2001 he began CLASS: C by transforming a beige 1985 Chevy van (once used to deliver tortillas for his family's restaurant) into a mobile art gallery, complete with pristine white walls, faux wood floors, and adjustable track lighting. These traveling exhibitions, which Ochoa and other artists curate and "deliver" to neighborhoods not often exposed to contemporary art, have ranged from installations of two-dimensional works in the van's interior to bumper sticker exhibitions curated by other artists and curators on its exterior; in one instance, a massive nylon sculpture was rolled out and inflated on the sidewalk to engulf the space surrounding the van. An enduring undercurrent in all of Ochoa's work is a concern with geography, gentrification, and the bifurcation of the city's neighborhoods by the ubiquitous freeway system. The extensive freeway system Los Angeles relies upon has transformed the city by creating physical barriers that separate communities and redefine public space. Ochoa is keenly aware that car culture is so ingrained in the Los Angeles psyche that both the freeway and the car act as an additional site of personal space, one which is simultaneously both semiprivate and public. In 2004 Ochoa's collabo- ration with Marco Rios produced Rigor Motors, works that melded the distinctly Southern California aesthetic of custom car culture and finish fetish art of the 1960s into customized coffins that imagine the deceased remaining in their driving position for eternity. In a series of drawings and digitally rendered photographs titled Freeway Wall Extractions, Ochoa imagined scenes in which a concrete slab of freeway wall had been removed from its original site and set down in the streets of suburban neigh- borhoods. This visual disruption mirrored the effect that freeway expansions have historically had on a number of low-income, ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles. In a 2006 gallery show, he created a scale model of a concrete freeway wall angled to fit into the confines of the building. The massive installation—designed to allow viewers to walk around the fabricated walls in order to see them as hollow—served as a reminder of the space that such walls occupy (both physically and metaphori- cally) in our environment. Unlike an earlier generation of artists who physically altered built environments to draw the viewer's attention to how they perceive space, Ochoa is interested not in the authenticity of the object he presents, but rather in calling our attention to our surroundings and the way we experience the urban environment. His most recent and ambitious project, which he calls a "public insertion," is Extracted. Working with the approval of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), Ochoa obtained public permits to create a site- specific work simulating the extraction of a section of freeway divider wall to reveal the natural landscape beyond. To that end, he utilized a specialized wallpaper technique that would allow him to paste up a landscape facade over the wall rather than removing part of the wall itself. Extracted draws attention to the world beyond the insular experience of traveling in a car; if someone driving by happens to glance over and see that the wall has been graffitied so that the paint appears to hover in thin air in front of the (false) landscape, it only adds to Extracted's playful effect. Ochoa's dynamic attempts to draw viewers out of their everyday experiences by altering their ordinary surroundings are at once playful and subversive. He challenges us to recon- sider the way in which we interact with the city and all of its permutations by illuminating aspects of it that are hidden in plain sight.— MICHELE URTON

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