by Alessandra Bellavita (Editor), Trinie Dalton (Editor), Samantha Frank (Editor)
Featuring the work of 14 Los Angeles artists, the exhibition Wasteland and its accompanying catalogue are inspired by the unlikely meeting, in the city of Paris, of the LA-as-cultural-wasteland myth with T.S. Eliot's modernist poem "The Waste Land." Concerns Eliot would have recognized--the search for connection, the uncertainty of the future, the poetics of despair--play out in new and recent works by artists such as Edgar Arceneaux, Math Bass, Mark Bradford, Sam Falls, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Ry Rocklen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Shannon Ebner and Erika Vogt. The works are organized in two parallel exhibitions in two very different venues in Paris, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the Mona Bismarck American Center.