SAN JOSE, CA.- Featuring exhibitions by Carl Cheng and Amia Yokoyama, as well as a newly commissioned mural by Zoe Walsh—all of whom live and work in Los Angeles—this ICA LA season considers the way artists are reshaping and reimagining our relationships to nature, to technology, and to one another.
In the main galleries is Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, the first in-depth survey of this pioneering Los Angeles artist’s six-decade career. Following presentations at The Contemporary Austin, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Bonnefanten, Maastricht, and Museum Tinguely, Basel, the exhibition concludes its international tour at ICA LA in a fitting homecoming for Cheng, who has been living and working in the city for the majority of his career. The exhibition also recalls the museum’s own institutional history, featuring work that was presented in the artist's 1998 exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Bringing together over 50 artworks and archival materials, Nature Never Loses traces Cheng’s longstanding investigations of environmental change, technological systems, and humanity’s attempts to shape and control the natural world. ICA LA will further mark the exhibition’s Los Angeles presentation with a newly commissioned work that amplifies and extends the artist's enduring engagements with water as a sculptural material.
Extending these questions of transformation and materiality, ICA LA’s Project Room showcases Amia Yokoyama: Our Strange Hollows, the artist's first institutional solo exhibition including sculptures, holograms, and animations, that explore the subjects of metamorphosis, hybridity, and the unstable boundaries of the body, the earth, and time itself. On ICA LA’s 7th Street faade, Zoe Walsh debuts a new site-specific mural titled Gathering, which draws from queer archives, Los Angeles ecologies, and the artist’s own community to imagine landscapes as spaces of intimacy, connection, and possibility.
Also opening this fall, in the Annex Gallery, ICA LA’s Agency of Assets Youth Fellows present Grounding Bodies, Casting Dreams, a project developed in collaboration with current artists in residence Saewon Oh and C. Ryu of Hwa Records. Rooted in Korean diasporic traditions and land-based learning, Grounding Bodies, Casting Dreams invites youth, artists, and visitors to collectively build a Dol Top 돌탑 stone tower as an evolving gesture of protection and a vessel for imagining the future. The ICA LA Bookshelf Residency with Semiotext(e) has been extended through Sunday, November 1, after which we will welcome the Bay Area experimental publishing studio, Sming Sming Books, as our next Bookshelf Resident.
