Latest and Greatest: New Works at the Laguna Art Museum 091225

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Latest and Greatest: New Works at the Laguna Art Museum now on view

By MARRIE STONE

Some of my favorite museum shows don’t have big themes or overarching messages. While I enjoy a deep dive into a particular genre, or an artist’s retrospective, I sometimes lose focus on the individual artworks in these exhibitions. The theme often sets a mood, and that mood stays relatively consistent.

What I find fun are experiences where I don’t know what will come next. Eclectic shows that offer up a range of subject matters, mediums, time periods and artists. Shows that allow me to whipsaw through a range of emotions. Such is the case with Laguna Art Museum’s (LAM) current Latest and Greatest – a selection of nearly 50 pieces from their permanent collection. Here, conceptual artist Analla Saban’s 2017 Pressed Paint diptych sits alongside impressionist painter Elmer Wachtel’s San Gabriel Valley from the late 1800s/early 1900s. John Frost’s 1922 oil painting of a desert hangs beside Patrick Wilson’s 2020 hard-edged abstraction Time and Place.

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Photos by Jeff Rovner

(L-R) Patrick Wilson’s 2020 “Time and Place” and John Frost’s 1922 “The Flowering Desert”

“The grouping is quite eclectic,” said Executive Director Julie Perlin Lee. “For me, it is what I love most about being in the gallery. I am energized by the endless ways in which artists express themselves and react to the world around us. It’s sometimes straight-forward but, more often than not, surprising and curious, in a great way.”

The exhibition includes new acquisitions that LAM rotates into the gallery roughly every six months. “These works are proposed as gifts that I first review and then advance, or not, to our Collection Committee,” Lee said. “It ensures the proposed donations fit the mission of the museum and help strengthen core areas of the collection, which contains more than 6,000 works of art from all types of mediums.”

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Nearly 50 of LAM’s roughly 6,000 pieces of their permanent collection are on display in a rotating exhibition

If pressed to chunk the work (however inadequate and overly generalized), I found myself drawn into four loose categories: California nostalgia, evolving technology, social commentary and pure whimsy. At least eight works represent this first category (works from the late 19th century to mid-20th century), most of them classic oils in gilded frames depicting seaside landscapes, deserts and unblemished hillsides. This grouping includes Laguna’s artistic icons like Roger Kuntz and Alexander Tihol Ignatiev, and other notables like William Hahn and Edwin Deakin.

“Deakin’s painting of luminous grapes reminds me of the rich agricultural and viniculture of California,” Lee said. “That aside, it’s just pretty to look at.”

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Edwin Deakin’s “Study from Nature (Grapes), 1922

Traditionalists will find plenty of pieces to admire. But for those, like me, who enjoy edgy contemporary art that incorporates a dose of social commentary – including our sometimes fraught relationship with technology – this show will sing. Here are just a few of the incredible works and their backstories now on display.

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View Tony Oursler’s 1998 video installation “Half (Brain).” Stick around for a roughly five-minute looped audio/visual treat.

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Functional Migration by Bret Price (1982)

The exhibition opens with Bret Price’s 1982 piece, Functional Migration. Today, Price works as a contemporary sculptor of monumental steel. But back in the early ‘80s, he was just getting his start. Throughout his career, Price has explored the challenges of raw material against the forces of nature, first in clay and later in steel. His current work reaches heights of 35 feet and weighs up to 7.5 tons.

Functional Migration was influenced by Price’s interaction with the late Paul Brock, Dean of the Art School at Cal Arts in Valencia where he received his MFA. “His opinion was that if a piece was functional, it wasn’t ‘fine art,’” Price said. “That train of thought inspired a body of work that was made of many functional entities, and the resulting compositions rendered every piece completely nonfunctional.”

This piece was made by first throwing the platter on the potter’s wheel that Price bisque fired to red heat. The process left the clay porous but, at the same time, it wouldn’t dissolve in water. The platter was then filled with water. Price placed different pieces of dry, but unfired, clay into the water. “These functional pieces would subsequently start to dissolve and, when the composition looked right, I would remove the water and allow the composition to dry.” A subsequent firing and glazing glued the entire piece together.

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Bret Price’s “Functional Migration” (1982)

M93 Galactic Cluster in Puppis by Russell Crotty (2005)

As a serious amateur astronomer, Russell Crotty has studied the night sky for decades. Armed with primarily pencils and ink, Crotty uses his own collection of telescopes (with occasional visits to professional observatories) to faithfully document the cosmos. He’s made important observational contributions to accredited astronomy organizations such as NASA and the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers.

“In the early 2000s, I had an observatory with an excellent 10-inch telescope in the Santa Monica mountains,” Crotty said. “I observed M93 from that location. Doing small positional sketches at the telescope, I would later create larger versions of these observations in the studio. I have always used ballpoint pens with permanent ink for the dark backgrounds in the drawings. The circular motif is meant to mimic the field of view at the eyepiece of the telescope. The constellation Puppis resides in a rich part of the Winter Milky Way above the southern horizon in February.”

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Russell Crotty’s “M93 Galactic Cluster in Puppis” (2005)

Rites of Passage by Jamex and Einar de la Torre (2014)

Rites of Passage, a 63-inch lenticular light panel, is based on a photograph of the U.S./Mexico border that brothers Jamex and Einar de la Torre took near the Tijuana airport. Notice the long lines of dolls, religious figures and fragments of historical paintings they’ve added to the work. White-robed angelic figures on the Mexican side transform into formless mounds of meat in the United States.

In the foreground, a group of religious figures wearing vestments guard a special entrance. “That’s Sentri,” Einar told the L.A. Times in 2015, referring to the special Customs and Border Protection program that was used to allow authorized individuals to easily travel across the border. “The border is so misunderstood. It’s more than a caricature for so many people. It’s seen as a line that stops people from crossing. But the border is a very dynamic place.”

The de la Torre brothers, born in Guadalajara, were educated in Orange County and Long Beach. They spent a lot of time on the border. In Trump’s 2025 America, Rites of Passage takes on a grave new meaning. Eleven years after its creation, Einar’s observation still rings true: “You can be in heaven wherever you are, as long as you have money.”

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Lenticular light panel “Rites of Passage” by brothers Jamex de la Torre and Einar de la Torre (2014). Lenticular works rely on a rippled, plasticized coating to achieve a three-dimensional effect, and are therefore impossible to faithfully photograph. They’re best viewed in person.

First Salvo by F. Scott Hess (1991)

Figurative and conceptual artist F. Scott Hess has been described as a “New Old Master.” Specializing in scenes created from everyday life, Hess adds fantastical and allegorical elements, infusing his pieces with his own brand of symbolism and satire.

“I always want tension in my work,” he told Interlocutor Interviews in 2021. “I didn’t want the painting to be pretty or decorative. I didn’t want it to please. I really wanted to make my viewer feel a little uncomfortable.”

Hess said his ideal viewer is a person who studies the art on the museum’s wall and, later, finds themselves unable to get the image out of their head. “You might not understand why you are hooked, but your thoughts have been impacted, and you have felt the painting deeply,” Hess said.

Art critic Donald Kuspit once said, “Hess uses profane realism to represent the sacred moments of life, for he knows we live in a profane world with little or no sense of the sacred, let alone of the sacredness of art.”

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F. Scott Hess’ “First Salvo” (1981)

Unseen Wind/Dedication by Edward Biberman

Edward Biberman was considered one of California’s great modernist painters from the post-WWII period. In 1968, he published Time and Circumstance: Forty Years of Painting, a book that detailed his life and works.

One passage sheds light on the piece now hanging in LAM. Biberman wrote, “By the late 1930s all of us looked with fear and foreboding at a world which was careening toward a holocaust. Mussolini’s dive bombers were cutting down the spear-carrying soldiers of Ethiopia: Spain was wracked by civil war and the silence of most of the world; and Picasso, outraged by the destruction of a Spanish town by German Stukas, became one of an increasing number of artists who felt impelled to protest directly through their art. And Guernica became a household word. Concentration camps, a foretaste of the genocide to come, were filling, and Hitler was preparing his march across Europe.”

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Edward Biberman’s “Unseen Wind/Dedication”

Other pieces in this collection are pure whimsy. Textile artist Channing Hansen’s 6-Manifold (2017) incorporates the wool from several alpacas. He generously provides the names of each animal in his information card – Hattie, Maggie, Pierson, Beatrix and Derek (to name just a few). Jay McCafferty, who passed in 2021, used a magnifying glass to burn holes in paper for his large-scale collage in Muladera. And car enthusiasts will enjoy street artist Craig Stecyk’s 1978 installation Fish Tale, with its witty storyboard.

“I love having a space with such an awesome span of time and creativity to consume,” said Lee. “I hope others will find the space playful, and everyone will find something they like.”