LOS ANGELES — The seventh iteration of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition showcasing artists working within the higher Los Angeles space, accommodates few surprises. The curators’ self described “no-methodology methodology” ends in a scattered exhibition that feels bland and curatorially unimaginative.
Regardless of this, the present accommodates some robust work, particularly in instances the place the artists have been given their very own rooms — for instance, Hannah Hur’s beautiful five-panel set up “Suspension” (2025), put in in a vault-like gallery. Every painted panel consists of a grid of faint white traces dotted with white flower-like patterns. The interplay between the grid and the flower motif creates a way of spatial confusion when viewing the work. This impact is just enhanced by the room’s structure: The traces within the cement flooring and the curved shadows solid from a panel, which seems to be floating in midair, turn out to be an important a part of the viewing expertise. Hur’s quiet work transforms one’s notion of each the viewer’s bodily area and the areas she creates inside every portray.
Na Mira disorients histories and mythologies in “Sugungga (Howdy)” (2025).” The work references a Korean allegory wherein a sick dragon king attempting to treatment itself lures and is subsequently tricked by a rabbit. Two movies are projected onto reverse sides of a holographic glass — one filmed in a cab driving across the exterior perimeter of a walled former navy constructing, constructed by the Japanese military and later used as a US navy base, and the opposite exhibiting an inflatable rabbit sculpture within the grounds. These projections collapse inside and outdoors. They solid ghostly shifting shadows and distorted imagery across the room and onto different viewers. The story of Korea’s occupiers is actually embodied by this one constructing, and the work’s complicated boundaries solid the viewer as each sufferer and complicit co-conspirator, as each inside and outdoors methods of energy.
One other standout is an assemblage by Gabriela Ruiz comprised of cartoonishly painted screaming faces, a surveillance digital camera that shows the viewer on a display, and an LED streetlamp. This piece completely embodies our fraught relationship with know-how, whereby we willingly permit ourselves to be surveilled by social media platforms beneath the guise of connecting with others. These platforms have additionally manipulated and broken our thought patterns, siloing us into our personal personalised echo chambers and flattening commerce, memes, life milestones, and horrifying information clips right into a single bland stream of content material vying for our consideration. The work is appropriately titled “Collective Scream” (2025).
Different highlights embody Amanda Ross-Ho’s hilarious and poignant outsized replicas of her father’s residential nursing dwelling door adorned with seasonal decorations, Carl Cheng’s singular erosion machines, and Patrick Martinez’s set up of a ruined and graffiti’d cinderblock construction, “Battle of the Metropolis on Hearth” (2025).
With out a clear curatorial thesis, Made in L.A. reverts to the default modus operandi of enormous museum group exhibitions, which is so as to add legitimacy and cultural capital to artists who’ve already been vetted by the market or different establishments. At the same time as a relative newcomer to Los Angeles (I moved right here about 5 years in the past), most of the artists included are already acquainted to me and have been exhibiting usually all through the town. I’d like to see the following Made in L.A. go “off menu” somewhat extra.
Made in L.A. 2025 continues on the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles) by means of March 1, 2026. The exhibition was organized by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow.
