LAMOA DS#3 presents Brian Khek: Consolidated Blue Gum
September 9—October 21, 2017
Commonwealth and Council

 Many of the Riverside colonists are “eddicated, intellectooal cusses,” as an envious San Bernardino farmer termed them. Many of them are invalids, who have a little property, so that they are not obliged to work with their own hands; most of them are a combination of ill-health, intellectuality, and comfortable circumstances. Orange culture is eminently adapted to their condition and circumstances. They can sit on the verandas of their pretty cottages—the refined essences of abstract existences—inhaling the pure air of the equal climate, reading novels or abstruse works of philosophy, according to their mental activity, from day to day, and waiting from year to year for their oranges to grow.

—John Codman, The Round Trip by Way of Panama (New York, 1879), 56.

Consolidated Blue Gum probes at the history of the eucalyptus in California. An invasive species, a fire hazard, or even a “water-guzzling alien”, eucalyptus has sparked often xenophobic or racist discourse from the early days of its arrival in the 1850s. Today, the debate remains heated and complex, touching on everything from environmentalism to boosterism to housing issues.

LAMOA DS #3 becomes at once a segregated landscape and an archive, with three different strains of eucalyptus framed by manmade material and a vitrine.

Brian Khek (b.1989, Chicago; lives and works in Los Angeles) received a BFA with an Emphasis on Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work responds to time, regionalism, and technology. Khek has shown at Gallery Steinsland Berliner. Stockholm, SE; Shoot the Lobster, New York City, NY; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA; and Martos Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Some presentations and panels include 89+ at DLD13, Munich, DE organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets. Khek is also a member of the collective Miami-Dutch.

This is the second of three LAMOA DS#3 exhibitions organized by Ana Iwataki in 2017.

Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), an experimental exhibition space founded by Alice Könitz in 2012, is a “platform for an organic institution that lives through participation.” LAMOA was featured in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A. 2014” and won the Mohn Award for artistic excellence. Brian Khek’s Consolidated Blue Gum is the sixth exhibition in LAMOA DS#3 at Commonwealth and Council.

Consolidated Blue Gum Nos. 1-3, 2017
Eucalyptus bark, eucalyptus leaves, manila folders, hanging folders
Dimensions variable