The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs recently debuted its new exhibition, To View a Plastic Flower, at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, which runs until April 19, 2020. Central to the exhibition’s title and themes, To View a Plastic Flower, is Buddhist monk and antiwar activist Thích Nhất Hạnh’s idea of “inter-being,” meaning nothing can exist by itself, instead, everything has to “inter-be.” The figure of the flower stems from one of Thích’s well-known sayings, which suggests that by touching a flower one also touches the clouds and rain that were necessary to manifest the flower. Viewed through the lens of a plastic flower, the works in the exhibition provide a multi-dimensional interrogation of the construction, representation, and limitations of knowledge through media as a means to understand our socio- and geopolitical times. To View a Plastic Flower presents 3 discrete installations that register the presence and absence of information, movement, and optics through each artist’s point of view set within the theater of military engagement. Abigail Raphael Collins’ experimental documentary and video installation, Out of Play, the sculptural work in Samira Yamin’s Passing Obliquely From One Medium Into Another (examining war photography) and T. Kim-Trang Tran’s three-channel video installation projected on hand-embroidered screens, exploring seemingly disparate events of the early 1970s. LAMAG is located at 4800 Hollywood Blvd. www.lamag.org
Photo Credits:
1)Abigail Raphael Collins Out of Play - Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photograph by Jeff McLane
2)Samira Yamin Refractions - Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photograph by Jeff McLane
