MAPPING THE REALM
Abram Kahn, Untitled 61 (2022), at Tierra del Sol Gallery. (Abram Kahn / Tierra del Sol Gallery)
Enter Tierra del Sol’s West Hollywood gallery, and you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve stepped into a model shop. At the entrance sits a table-top reproduction of Hogwarts Castle. On a long shelf just beyond are similarly small-scaled objects: fire trucks, school buses, lowriders, and traffic lights. At one end of the space, you’ll find a ghostly doll house; on the other, a two-foot-tall rendering of Mount Rushmore crafted out of ceramic.
Look closely, however, and it quickly becomes clear that this is no model shop. Behind Hogwarts, you’ll find a pair of 2006 lithographs by the famed Ed Ruscha, showing the Hollywood sign in various states of decay. And placed discreetly on a rear wall is a satirical drawing created by the late Pippa Garner, the LA conceptualist known for hilarious diagrammatic drawings that lampooned consumer culture. Model World, as this absorbing exhibition is titled, is like plunging into an unreal version of the world around us, a world that is perhaps made more intelligible by being shrunk down to size.
Curated by Elliott Hundley, an LA artist known for producing large-scale pieces that fuse painting with assemblage and collage, the show brings together work by 32 artists from all walks of life: some completely unknown, some very blue chip — all making interesting work. The exhibition is part of an ongoing series organized by Tierra del Sol that invites artists to organize shows at the gallery, which functions as the exhibition arm of the Tierra del Sol Foundation, a not-for-profit that works with adults with developmental disabilities.
David Romero, 165th Street W, 2019. (David Romero / Tierra del Sol Gallery)
Model World is the first such show to incorporate outside artists into the mix. And Hundley’s deft curation smashes the imagined boundaries between “outsider” and other artists. More significantly, it’s just damn compelling — revelling in the uncanny nature of miniatures while exploring concepts like mapping, and what landscape might reveal about an individual life.
Hundley’s framework was inspired, in part, by the work of David Romero, a Tierra del Sol artist who frequently draws the intersections he transits and makes small sculptures of traffic lights. “He is doing drawings of his life around the city,” says Hundley. “It’s like an autobiographical mapping. … They are such beautiful and nuanced and inventive drawings.”
The show presents nearly two dozen of these in the main gallery: brightly rendered on paper, they capture mundane aspects of the California landscape in vivid ways. In one, a Union 76 gas station sits before emerald green hills; in another, a grassy area is rendered in gentle pink. On a ledge below are the artist’s traffic light sculptures, which are crafted out of humble materials like tape and painted paper, presented alongside ceramic sculptures of vehicles by a range of other artists, including Sucy Ayala, Angel Rodriguez, Abram Kahn, and Jory Drew. Altogether, it’s a fanciful view of the ways in which Angelenos navigate urban space.
Ellen Schafer, Starter House (Fisher Price), 2024. (Carolina A. Miranda)
From there, the show expands to include both micro and macro views of the places we inhabit — often, in ways that toy with scale. A 2024 sculpture by Ellen Schafer takes on domestic space, recreating a small Fisher-Price toy house out of cast foam and orange pigment. Like many of the works in the show, it evokes play and, indirectly, control. Play, notes Hundley, is a way of bringing order to the “unknowable nature of reality.”
Elsewhere, Vincent Blair creates teetering, tilting paintings that show deep affection for the city, including a brightly colored work capturing the facade of the TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Nearby, a wild collage by Lauren Halsey takes the concept of the world we inhabit to interplanetary levels, combining images of Egyptian temples and lush gardens with P-Funk’s Mothership.
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A detail of Lauren Halsey's Untitled, 2023. (Lauren Halsey / David Kordansky Gallery)
Model World conflates our world with invented worlds — see that Hogwarts castle (also created by Rodriguez). But ultimately, it’s a meditation on how people come together in our messy shared spaces: our homes, the streets, the country, the world. Within that messiness, there is tension, but also joy and camaraderie — which, as of late, has been in too short supply.
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Model City is on view through March 1st at Tierra del Sol Gallery; tierradelsolgallery.org.
