John Humble & Zoopsia

By chance I ended up at the Getty on a lazy Sunday afternoon to see the last day of the John Humble exhibit, 'A Place in the Sun', not to be confused with 'Burnt by the Sun'. Being a native Angelenos and having grown up in the South Bay, I felt compelled to go.

Shown here is '178th Street at Manhattan Place, Torrance', September 20, 1979. It is always fascinating when an artist depicts those elements that we take as commonplace and juxtaposes them in such a way as to produce a new understanding and situating it in a larger urban context so as to encourage new meanings that we otherwise would not have considered. There is a strange beauty to some of his pictures, an almost Hopper-esque quality.

Another exhibition, albeit small one, was 'Zoopsia', by Tim Hawkinson. Zoopsia means 'the visual hallucination of animals'. Hawkinson again takes ordinary objects, either their representation or seemingly unrelated to it, and constructs new works from them. One of them, 'Bat', was interesting. He reused plastic bags from Radio Shack to make this black bat. 'Materials are meaning: the sound waves that fuel Radio Shack revenues are vehicles of self-perception, the sonar with which a bat locates itself in relation to the world'.

Couldn't help but take a picture of this rather interesting piece of artwork, called 'Delusions of Grandeur' by the surrealist Rene Magritte, 1967. Hm...thoughts, anyone?