Youth Quake
Deanna Templeton, Jaclyn, Death Metal, Huntington Beach, California, 2017, is part of a larger installation by the artist at OCMA. (Deanna Templeton / Gallery FIFTY ONE)
Step into the first-floor gallery at the Orange County Museum of Art and you are greeted by a bright pink room featuring photographs of teen girls by Huntington Beach artist Deanna Templeton. In one image, a blonde shows off a safety pin in one nostril; in another, we see the extended arm of a girl in a bikini, showing off a beaded name bracelet that reads, “BITCH.”
Some of the girls maintain a facade of confidence, others appear more unsure — young women in that awkward transition from childhood to adulthood. Presented alongside the images are excerpts from Templeton’s own teenage diaries, in which she dutifully recorded the bands she had seen, the boys she had crushes on, the friends she was frustrated with, and the state of her weight. Her entry for New Year’s Eve 1985 captures the angst: “If the rest of my life is like this, I’m better off dead.”
What She Said, as Templeton’s project is titled, was published as a book in 2021, and I’ve long appreciated it for how it conveys the fraught emotional roller coaster that is girlish adolescence. At OCMA, it struck just the right note as the opening act for the museum’s 2025 California Biennial, Desperate, Scared, But Social, which takes as its theme the charged nature of late adolescence and early adulthood.
An installation view of Templeton's What She Said. (Simon Klein / OCMA)
It’s a concept that gives crackle and pop to the often staid biennial format. Instead, we have Templeton’s unfiltered, diaristic observations: “February 8th 1986. Electric Koolaide at Safari Sams. They sucked.”
(The band’s name, for the record, is generally spelled Electric Cool-Aide. But whatever — the installation still lands like a jolt.)
The biennial’s core exhibition is small — featuring work by 12 artists that explore themes of adolescence or works by established artists created when they were adolescents. Near the entrance, you’ll find elaborate maps of imagined cities that painter Joey Terrill began creating as a teen, wry pieces that reflect a queer Chicano point of view. Deeper in the show, you’ll find a suite of small paintings made by Laura Owens when she was in high school, including a trapezoidal canvas that shows an uninspired row of lockers and a drinking fountain. It’s a work that is prescient of the quotidian imagery that would preoccupy her later on.
Joey Terrill, Lambrinis Bar and Grill, 1969-ongoing, from Los Diablos, the artist's drawings of imagined cities. (Ortuzar Projects and Marc Selwyn Fine Art)
Nearby, you’ll find a remarkable 30-minute film by Stanya Kahn that shows small bands of teens surviving in a future world beset by some unexplained tragedy. It contains not a word of dialogue; its story instead unfurls through gestures and facial expressions, capturing the remarkable ways adolescents can become fiercely protective of one another.
Overall, the theme couldn’t be more on point at a time in which feelings of intense uncertainty aren’t just the province of adolescents. But OCMA’s show loses power by trying to stuff too many ideas into too small a space.
Also included as part of the biennial are a pair of shows-within-shows. The more intriguing of these is Piece of Me, which was organized by the members of the Orange County Young Curators program, which brings together teens from around the county to learn about curatorial practice. Together, the group selected nine works from the museum’s collection that explore ideas of self-perception and identity. This includes a photographic series by Ed Templeton (husband of Deanna) that shows kids trying to look cool while smoking, as well as a sprawling installation that gathers ephemera related to the OC riot grrrl band Emily’s Sassy Lime. This includes stuffed animals, towers of old cassettes, and math notes repurposed as show flyers. It took me right back to the cluttered rooms of my old high school friends.
The selection of works is astute, and I adore that the process involved area teens. But the biennial’s curators — Courtenay Finn, Christopher Y. Lew, and Lauren Leving — then went and added another show-within-a-show: a series of paintings from the Gardena High School Art Collection. That historic collection, assembled between 1919-1956, was led by students. It’s a great story about the ways in which teens have been engaged with art in SoCal for well over a century. But the staid portraits and landscapes, which are wedged into the middle of the biennial, feel as if they’ve parachuted in from another universe. The display desperately needed its own space — something OCMA’s badly designed first-floor galleries simply do not have.
A still from Stanya Kahn's No Go Backs, 2020. (Stanya Kahn)
Ultimately, I wish the curators had fleshed out the core exhibition rather than serving up so many curatorial turduckens. Charlie White, who had a single image on view in Piece of Me, has done remarkable photographic studies of teenagers. And LA painter Shizu Saldamando’s portraits of her friends at concerts buzz with the energy of young adulthood. This is a rich subject!
If I had to describe the show in my teen diary, I’d go with, “June 21. Good art show at OCMA. But where was the rest of it?”
Desperate, Scared, But Social, is on view at the Orange County Museum of Art through January 4th; ocma.art.
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Notes from the Bench
OCMA's benches captured the biennial's youthful vibe. (Carolina A. Miranda)
As you may know, I have a mini-obsession with museum benches. So I do want to highlight OCMA’s biennial benches — equipped with musical listening stations and wrapped in upholstery evocative of punk zines. A+
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