LOS ANGELES.- Since its launch in 2005, MOCA Focus has featured challenging new works and diverse practices, including sculpture, installation, photography, painting, new media, and experimental video. In addition to being the first solo museum exhibition for most of the artists, each exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first monographic catalogue, including images of the artist’s works and a major scholarly essay by the exhibition curator. MOCA Focus: Lisa Lapinski, The Fret and its Variants is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue from June 26 through August 25, 2008.

“Los Angeles is now the center of contemporary art production in the United States,” said MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. “The MOCA Focus exhibitions are an important gauge of what’s happening right now in our city, casting a spotlight on exciting art that is being made by emerging L.A. artists.” In the last three years, MOCA Focus has served as the first museum exhibition and catalogue for artists Jennifer Bornstein, Lecia Dole-Recio, Alexandra Grant, Karl Haendel, Florian Maier-Aichen, Matthew Monahan, and Eric Wesley.

MOCA Focus: Lisa Lapinski, The Fret and its Variants features an installation of new and recent work by this Los Angeles–based artist, including sculptures, photographs, drawings on wallpaper, and painting. Titled in reference to the decorative patterns or “frets” that have been essential components of architectural ornament since ancient times, Lapinski’s exhibition encompasses a range of interweaving materials, styles, and subject matter. Throughout her work, formal and material aspects—from woodworking to graphic design—become leaping-off points for narratives spanning art history, modern advertising, poetry, and philosophy.

At the center of Lapinski’s MOCA Focus installation, organized by MOCA Associate Curator Bennett Simpson, is a new, large-scale sculpture entitled Monty Python Precedes Dungeons and Dragons (2008). Fantastical title aside, the work resembles a burnished walnut fence, variously adorned with framed imagery, geometric protrusions, quasi-religious iconography, and a gamut of patterning and decorative motifs. A contrast of styles and modes—from Shaker-like precision carpentry to graphical allusions to early 20th-century expressionist works by Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky—informs this sculpture’s meditation on qualities of abstraction and symbolism.

A trio of sculptures from 2001, Mosque of Sankoré, Mosque of Boré, and Mosque of Mopti, suggest squat, rough-hewn models of Islamic sacred architecture. Precarious and idiosyncratic, the works are made from slabs of glue-stiffened layered wallpaper, with prickly sticks emanating from all sides. Lapinski has stated
that the objects are loosely derived from 19th-century photographs of Harar, a forlorn trading post in what is now Ethiopia that was frequently visited by symbolist poet-turned-wandering entrepreneur Arthur Rimbaud. The three sculptures were accessioned into MOCA’s permanent collection in 2001 and selected by Lapinski to appear in her current exhibition.

A number of drawings on wallpaper and photographs round out the exhibition. Lapinski has often turned to drawing to explore traditional sculptural issues of scale and geometry. Here, layered wallpaper grounds provide ready-made patterns on which the artist alternately draws, prints, and collages. The works’ texture and graphic abundance rhyme with the formal concerns of Lapinski’s three-dimensional work. In her large photograph Untitled (2008), one sees Lapinski pushing at the boundaries of her chosen mediums. A Patrick Nagel-esque drawing of a bikini model, all 1980s fantasia kitsch, is enframed by a patterned cinder-block structure situated, among cacti and palms, in the verdant yard of a Spanish-style stucco home. The play of materials and signs—New Wave, Bauhaus, preternatural California—epitomizes Lapinski’s unique and playful practice.

Lisa Lapinski was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1967 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2000 and her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1990. Solo exhibitions of Lapinski’s work have been presented at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Johann König, Berlin; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. Her work has been featured internationally in numerous group exhibitions, including Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles (2001).