Lost in LACMA's new galleries, a serene still life serves as a compass
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Much has been written about the experience of aimlessness in the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, but it is another thing to experience it firsthand.The meandering floor plan, with its rooms of various sizes and orientations alongside their resulting passageways and corners, demands that you wander, not map, your perusal of the galleries.
As a result, a visitor can easily feel disoriented, or in my case, a touch deconstructed.A little depersonalized, if you will.Fortuitously, I was there to meet with multidisciplinary artist Stephanie Shih, whose photo-based compositions have the opposite effect, grounding the viewer in their personhood and experience.
Her still lifes are made both beautiful and meaningful through their intentional arrangement of specific food, florals and ephemera, touching on diasporic understandings of self, Western and European appropriations of the “exotic” and the juxtaposition of the natural with the fabricated.In other words, to view a Shih piece is to collaborate with the artist on reconstructing or, in some cases, reclaiming an understanding of place and self.We were talking about, and in front of, Shih’s new piece, “梅國 (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo),” which was not only commissioned by LACMA, but created in a temporary studio Shih constructed within the gallery itself over the course of two weeks late last year.
The image features two ceramic vessels, one slightly in front of the other, within a traditional still life scene.The background jar stands alone, while the piece in the foreground overflows with a rainbow of plants, flowers, fruit, chamoy candies, gummies and a single real butterfly.
To get to the small but sunny corridor that houses the work, one might make a few indirect turns and cross the gallery containing Andreas Gursky’s “Ocean” series.Flanked by four wall-size photographs of vast, overhead per...