“Lowlifes” project for “Lifes” Exhibition at the Hammer Museum (2022)

See ArtForum interview about “Lowlifes” HERE.

See Hammer Channel video feature on “Lowlifes” HERE.

See Hammer exhibition trailer incorporating “Lowlifes” drawings HERE.

“Lifes” was an expansive and experimental group show curated by Aram Moshayedi with curatorial assistant Nicholas Barlow at the Hammer Museum in 2022. Moshayedi commissioned four original texts from four writers and these were used to seed the entire show.

My project for the exhibition was sited in the public-facing materials for the show. I gathered together a group of characters from my previous exhibitions, works and projects. Collectively they formed a sort of multiplicitous hypeman for the show. 

The characters I create in my work are typically derived one way or another from some cultural or commercial service. This could be selling toilet paper or entertainment made to fulfill (or sell) some (perceived) collective fantasy need. Often my projects imagine the characters having escaped or trying to escape from the labor of such roles. So it was ironic that they were re-inscribed as advertising materials. To lighten the work I imagined them doing, I fantasized them doing it on their own terms, with a sense of refusal, inconsistency and irreverence. Of course, ultimately all of the works had to pass muster with the museum, raising the question whether any work made within an institution can actually ever be free of the cultural, financial and ideological interests upon which that institution exists. 

I created drawings of a group of characters performing and refusing to perform within a virtual space that was represented by an empty architectural grid. The drawings, made specifically for this purpose, were the only materials that were used to publicize the exhibition, even though the show itself contained sculptural, installation and performance works that bore no resemblance to the publicity materials.

This virtual space and its imaginary inhabitants embodied among other things the potentiality of the show. It anticipated the show coming into being before it opened. And for the duration of the show as the materials continued to exist in the world outside the museum—digital and physical—my project was like an alternate universe version of the work inside the galleries, that existed beyond the museum walls, throughout the city.

While developing the project I imagined this scrappy crew as being called forth from their different contexts in a way similar to the epic battle scenes in a Marvel movie, where characters from different storylines are brought together in a spectacular display of the magnitude of the Marvel Universe. There had been a seeming proliferation of Marvel materials across screens large and small during the couple of years preceding my work on this project. My kids and I had come to call this omnipresent cultural takeover as Marvel Fucking Universe. Hence during the development of my own scrappy version of a world-(un)takeover, my project’s private working title became Mummy’s Fucking Universe. 

Eventually the name of the project became “the Lowlifes”, to reflect its relation to the exhibition “Lifes”, the affect of the characters and their formally casual presentation (sketchy line drawings made variously with charcoal, sharpie or iPad), as well as the cultural value hierarchies that exist in notions of “art” vs “marketing”.

New drawings were made for each of the different sites - museum printed materials, the museum website, emailed announcements, art journals and magazines (digital and print), online advertisements and digital banners, and physical light pole banners and bus stops around LA. 

On the courtyard-facing walls of the galleries containing the “Lifes” exhibition at the museum, we printed a wall sized version of the perspective grid, a virtual space of potential that wrapped the galleries containing the show.

The exhibition catalog did not contain any imagery of the works exhibited in the galleries. Instead, the four commissioned texts were given, alongside an edited archive of over a year’s worth of correspondence between the curators and the many artists involved in the show. 

I was invited by the curators to make a visual intervention in this book. Following the theme of the parallel but interconnected worlds of the materials inside the galleries and my

“Lowlifes” project beyond the museum walls, I chose to create a set of marginalia for the book. Working in character as each of “the Lowlifes”, I made drawings around the texts that were inspired both by the sub-textual commentary characteristic of medieval marginalia, and the doodles found in middle school textbooks. 

There were also five double page spreads, a kind of “admin reveal” of the authors of the graffiti, showing the characters hanging out in their own virtual space. The five scenes show a loose narrative of a breakdown of order and polite behavior.