LACMA

81 The ranks of this exhibition are populated with tricksters, shape-shifters, doppelgangers, ventriloquists, and personas—real presences, but ones known primarily by indirect, oblique, or camouflaged presentation. These artists reveal an abiding preoccupation with all manner of transformation, including the repurposing of the commonplace visual milieus of billboard and print advertising, television, movies, and video games; the "hijacking" of commercial trademarks and branded products upon which the artists piggyback their own selected content; the elaborate "trans- mogrification" or morphing of familiar workaday objects into bizarre or fantastical forms; a fascination with imposture or the inauthentic, exhibited in the production of counterfeit, surrogate, and false objects that appear to be one thing but are in fact quite different from what they seem; and a strong tendency to produce hybridized, benignly monstrous objects that conjoin forms from disparate sources. Again and again, they present one reality in the guise, pose, or body of another. Metaphor— an image or object intended to stand for something else: something different, some- thing besides, something other—is the essence of their art. The artists deploy a variety of distinctly related strategies. There are some who are "visionary" artists whose self-appointed mission is to make visible what is already part of the city or the culture but that is unseen or unheeded by society at large. Christina Fernandez, for example, documents traces and evidence of vanished human presences in the city. Her photographs of lavanderías, or laundromats, with their brightly lit interiors abound with washing machines, dryers, dispensers, and other paraphernalia. Yet these places, often bustling with activity and sociability, in Fernandez's images are here deserted, like ghost towns, almost derelict, with doors and windows defaced by spray-painted or acid-etched graffiti. Another series, Sereno, presents a spacious park surrounded by Los Angeles's dense urban sprawl; as in her lavanderías, these public parklands are deserted, with the stray debris of earlier gatherings or the burned-out remains of a picnic barbecue offering the only evidence that people were there. Fernandez proffers a vision of a city apparently depopulated yet haunted by telltale signs of habitation. Houston-based Delilah Montoya takes her camera to some of the most truly remote and dangerous areas of the Southwestern deserts where people risk their lives—and indeed many die— crossing illegally into the United States. Her photographs of migrant campsites in the desert and the unmanned water and shelter stations, set up by the volunteer group Humane Borders to help prevent the loss of life during these crossings, reveal the existence of unseen populations moving through unknown and perilous places. In her elaborate three-dimensional cutout constructions, Nicola López compels the viewer to contemplate her vision of a savage future of urban apocalypse in which American cities are snarled in an impossibly dense congestion of buildings, traffic, refuse, pollution, and people. López's art contributes a powerful sculptural expression to the modern tradition of dystopian imaginings, which range from Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis (1927) and George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four • Alejandro Diaz, Breakfast Tacos at Tiffany's, 2003

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