Escape – Route at the Laguna Art Museum: Luciana Abait’s exhibition offers a hopeful and nostalgic journey through the American West
By MARRIE STONE
As the curtain closes on 2023, it might finally be safe to say some silver linings emerged from the pandemic. Interesting art, for one. Historians, of course, can contextualize what happened to us. Scientists are certainly still studying it. But artists – maybe better than anyone – continue to interpret the impact of that event from every psychological angle. Those surreal days defied description. They’re better left to visual representation, symbolism and the subconscious mind.
Another often overlooked advantage was the hyper-local focus the pandemic forced upon us all. “There’s beauty in your own backyard,” as the saying goes. Those days imposed that realization. We discovered wonder in the details, instead of the world at large. Others of us took to the open road. For some, road trips were the nostalgic 20th century adventures we left behind in childhood. But the pandemic put us back in touch with our own domestic landscapes.
Argentinean artist Luciana Abait’s exhibition Escape – Route is very much pandemic-born. In late 2020, during the second lock-down, the Los Angeles-based artist took her camera and her family and set out to explore the Southwest. “I knew I would see beautiful landscapes,” she said. “But I was totally overwhelmed.”
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Photo by Josefina Capdepont
“Escape – Route,” by Luciana Abait, is on display at the Laguna Art Museum through March 8
Abait took thousands of images – enough for at least three solo shows. The first of those installations happened at the Helms Bakery District in Culver City, only a month after her return. Road Trip: Projecting Possibilities (2021) contained 24 still images transferred to video that were projected onto an outdoor storefront on a repeated loop (12 feet x 30 feet). “It created a trippy, science fiction [sensation] that took viewers on an out-of-this-world journey,” Abait said. “Since we couldn’t travel physically, the idea was to travel with our minds and our imaginations.”
Abait brought that same installation – along with an accompanying photographic and sculptural exhibition – to the Laguna Art Museum (LAM) this fall. Now through March 8, viewers can join her on a road trip through California, Nevada and Arizona that’s at once beautiful, nostalgic and hopeful, but also a reminder of the fragility of our planet and all we stand to lose.
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
An image from Luciana Abait’s “Road Trip” (a video montage of 24 still images)
Ascend the stairs to LAM’s second floor. Even before you reach the top, your road trip is already underway. You’ll encounter one of the artist’s signature digital collage sculptures. Abait created a mass of world maps, their geographies jumbled and reassembled into something unrecognizable, yet resonant.
The Maps That Failed Us (2018 – 2023) reorders our chaotic world. The Middle East sits alongside Canada. Namibia is near Texas. There are no borders in Abait’s version of Earth. Whether you see a mountain, a cresting wave or a melting iceberg (Abait had all three in mind), you’ll imagine nature in all her majesty, fragility and scale.
“[I wanted to represent a] world that has changed beyond recognition,” Abait said. “I’m also talking about immigration and the difficulty that immigrants find when they’re trying to go into a new land.”
Abait emigrated to the U.S. from Buenos Aires in 1997 at the age of 26 and has lived in Los Angeles since 2005. Immigration plays a large role in much of her work.
“The whole map can also look like a deflated world. A metaphor for all the changes and challenges,” she said. Abait molded the sculpture to make a commentary on environmental justice and the populations most affected by climate change.
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