Green Living

Kim Abeles’s first piece that could be labeled “environmental” was her 1983 series of photographs attempting to capture a clear view of the San Gabriel Mountains from where she lived in Downtown L.A., one not obstructed by hovering smog. She had her first studio on Broadway in 1979, and was one of the original residents of the Santa Fe art colony. She has lived Downtown ever since constructing pieces that engage the environment, making tangible the abstract. That’s when she wasn’t fighting a formaldehyde-spewing factory.

It’s not surprising for someone who once lived in a grain silo in Ohio penning a book titled Crafts, Cookery, and Country Living and grew up in Pittsburgh haunted by photos of a steel industry town veiled by a cloud of air pollution.

Always with a keen eye on her surroundings, two of her environmental series manifest L.A. environs in powerful ways: Signs of Life includes the installation “Looking for Paradise (One Tree for each Tree Downtown),” an aerial view of our former city center with three-feet tall, spindly trees representing each actual tree in the city—and it turns out there aren’t very many down there, save for the ones around City Hall and other visitor hubs.

Viewing The Smog Collectors series just might make your throat itch. Abeles has literally collected smog (that stuff that we think is in everybody else’s neighborhood) in fascinating patterns using simply a surface, a stencil and the air we breathe, the “invisible” made visible. The result is charcoal particles that form idealized American landscapes (oh, the irony) or the faces of our presidents—the worse the environmental record, the longer his portrait had to collect darker and darker dust.

You can see Abeles’s work for yourself at two shows this spring:

Location Studies at the Torrance Art Museum will be up through April 25th. 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance, 90503.  Website: www.torranceartmuseum.com.

And Abeles will be part of the group show, Sustainability, at Woodbury Hollywood from March 28 – May 9. 7500 Glenoaks Boulevard, Burbank, 91510. Website: www.woodbury.com.
For more environmentally-themed art online, check out www.greenmuseum.org.

Tags: art los angeles, environmental art, environmental installations, Green Living In L.A., Green Los Angeles, Kim Abeles, signs of life, smog collector