LACMA

prankster. Rojas's cryptic writings—in the form of tracts, brochures, and pamphlets bearing absurd advice and musings on subjects ranging from home remedies to natural and supernatural wonders to contemporary art—turn up inexplicably on convenience store shelves, in botanicas, or tacked to telephone poles throughout East Los Angeles. The effect of these various artistic interventions and sightings of the previously unseen is to "haunt" public spaces with evidence of other, sometimes hidden, meanings and agendas. To make their work, de la Loza, Ortiz, Romo, and other likeminded mavericks essentially decamp from the art world, liberating their work from its prescribed role within the established fine art infrastructure and "activat- ing" non-art spaces and places by introducing alien content into both the world and the viewer's perception of daily life. They call upon the nonbeholder to see—or at least to be on the lookout for—the invisible, cuing the unsuspecting spectator that there is more going on in the world than meets the eye. Another creative method and mind-set that recurs frequently in this exhibition is repurposing—a kind of conceptual hijacking in the name of art. In repurposing, the artist may exploit an existing object or image or mode of work or even a histor- ical fact in a manner totally alien to the original intent or meaning, thus bleaching away old content and context and replacing it with new, unanticipated, content. For example, Jason Villegas pirates corporate logos and trademarks, such as the smiling alligator famous on Lacoste sportswear, which he treats as characters—and not always as friendly or benign ones—in bizarre narratives that he paints directly on the wall or as video cartoons. Shizu Saldamando works in arte paño, a genre of prison art in which inmates draw stylized ballpoint-pen portraits of family members and girlfriends on cotton handkerchiefs or napkins. In prison cells these keepsakes are prisoners' direct expressions of ties to the outside and to home, and they might have a nearly votive purpose in the imagination of their makers. But Saldamando employs the mode to make portraits of alternative music stars such as Morrissey or Robert Smith of the Cure, thereby piggybacking a layer of pop culture content on an idiom of underground, outsider art. In complicating her take on fan culture, Saldamando invokes yet another layer of content: she implicitly casts these musicians and their devotees alike in the role of prisoners, as if subjugated to the looming domain of mainstream culture. Household appliances such as blenders or coffeemakers rendered as soft vinyl sculptures might recall Claes Oldenburg's comical pop art soft sculptures. But Margarita Cabrera makes effigies of commonplace home appliances that are usually fabricated from parts manufactured in a variety of industrialized nations but assembled in Mexican maquiladoras, or assembly-line factories, where hand labor is especially cheap. Cabrera removes all the non-Mexican-made parts, replacing them with surrogates that she hand-stitches from vinyl material. Cabrera's appliances may look playful; unlike Oldenburg's droopy playthings, however, Cabrera's appliances are 85 • Shizu Saldamando, Morrissey, 2005

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