Neon 80s epoxy pour mural with ombré neon backdrop . Created by signed Los Angeles artist

Result #1

̈́sma Delatas for the occasion, the work deploys a playful form of sign-language, presenting its text in a kind of hieratic hieratic glass. Like sign language, in which letters represent specific phrases and are frequently substituted with other characters (usually the vowel), neon is a text that renders comprehensible even the most obscure of sign systems. But unlike sign language, neon is a codified language, a codified medium, a perfectly recognizable image. Its glassy, impenetrable barrier-like membrane reflects, as it were, the impact of millions of multitudes of light pulses, and its ambient light effects are mediated by a range of sensors and programs that produce an almost luminous, if sometimes noisy, glow. Delatas has taken a lot of chances here, and, as with most first-world public art, there is little chance the artist will be able to escape the emotional pull of her subject. The experimental value of Delatass installation remains to be seen, but it is clear that she has begun to explore the emotional limits of language.

Result #2

Neon 80s epoxy pour mural with ombré neon backdrop . Created by signed Los Angeles artist ̶-Theodor Freisberg (a contemporary master of neon), the film uses the same technique as Chafets Untitled Film Stills, 1993–94. The film is a low-budget version of a British reality television program, and it is made into a half hour projection in which a disembodied voice-over takes the viewers through an imaginary city, while an English voice-over is carried on, talking incessantly and in broken English, about what is happening and what is going to happen. On the spot, the narrator loses his grip on reality and slips from his position as someone in the know to someone who is unknown. It is as if he was not present at the moment of emergence from the cutaway reality. The city in which the narrator appears is the city of television, but the city has disappeared. In the meanwhile, he has become a completely abstracted projection of an image, a phantom of a single city. A shadow of the television and an imaginary city collide as the disembodied voice-over speaks of the possibility of more and more time passing, as if life and death were interchangeable.A majority of Berlin's work has followed the same lines, but from a different point of view, it has been in pursuit of visual pleasures rather than expression. Not surprisingly, the ambivalence of images, the ambivalence of projections, the ambivalence of representations is the dominant theme of the artists work. The artists are typically in their thirties or forties, and they are engaged in a dialogue with the open questions of perception and meaning that have been posed by postmodernism, postmodernism, and postmodernism itself. And indeed, Berlin's work is always in dialogue with a wider discourse, one that traces the problem of photography, and the fact that the desire to represent may be understood as a way of giving up the ability to perceive without appearing to have done so.

Result #3

Neon 80s epoxy pour mural with ombré neon backdrop . Created by signed Los Angeles artist ÃOjèo De la Cruz and two friends, a barber named Bernadette Hayes and a tattoo artist named Scott, the piece was a sober meditation on the unfulfilled promise of metamorphosis—on the prospect of connection to the universal.The show offered a case study in the ways in which forms of symbolic expression become vectors of signification, conjuring an image of the unknown; the exhibition also made visible the ways in which artists, queer, trans, and otherwise, are regularly conflated with spaces of visibility and oppression. Here, Hayes and her partner, the illustrator Marcela Casajé, displayed their MySpace page of painted portraits of trans women and men, alongside two of Hayes himself as transgender. The exhibition also included a small, haunting video of one of those painted—by Jorge Pardos. It begins with a shot of Pardo seated on a chair as a hand reaches down to touch his thigh. He glances up at the viewer, but no one appears to be looking at him. He merely smiles. It was a somatic interjection that reinforced our understanding of the work as one of intersectionality: that is, as one whose encounter is mediated by others and whose actions are inscribed within those around her.The exhibition, curated by David Rimanelli and Irene Molzans, included graphic works by Parker and Casajé alongside more intimate works, such as a draft of a drawing from their sketch of a future exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Contemporary Art, and a photograph by Kelly Walkers, a drag queen who is part of Pardos LA performance team. To some extent, the latter is the focus of the piece, and is certainly a reflection on how, in one of the most difficult cities in America to become a resident, gay and queer art can still be visual art.

Result #4

́ngel roi on behalf of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Pompidous exhibition presented contemporary examples of the flash-painting technique. The piece, a classic shot of neon tube show, is a recreated scene from a Madonna film: a white-floored room (full of people) with a neon fixture in the center. Behind the massive flaming throw rug, as it were, a display case holds a neon sign, displaying, in a text-heavy two-letter inscription, the name of the artists muse: MUSEUM/MUSEUM/LATE/LATE—a weak, esoteric word that reads as a lyric self-reflexivity in the face of the now.The artist, too, had to overcome the lack of even a minor controversy in the art world. This was made clear by the three-minute-long pause looped over a busy part of the neon-lit room, which nonetheless looked like the scene from some burning house. A lot of young artists are going through with the current moment—more serious than the fact of being ironic, and some form of satire is a popular strategy in the hands of most serious artists. What is a matter of fact is the classic moment of twilight at a party, with people standing around with their heads down and legs up, drinking beer, trying to pass themselves off as natives. The moment before the pink ball drops and the crowd goes crazy, or the color turns red or black, only to be superseded by the next color; you can get lost in all the confusing noise and you can make out a pretty girl in a pink bikini from the crowd. The act of passing is followed by a position of anticipation that is close to art, but nothing would be better than for it to have the integrity of a joke, as the current situation of art makes evident.

Result #5

́lvandra del zueno-carrollo in collaboration with Santiago di Forti and Maria Ciudna S. Guerrero, the installation was a self-reflexive invitation to leave our relation to place and time to the present, as a whole, behind; it was a monument to the liminal moment, in which the contemporary human must make way for the essential in its pursuit of a universal humanism.The first room of this show featured an installation made in collaboration with pianist Luis Camilo Ortiz-Diez, and, once again, contained a self-portrait. This time, Camilo Ortiz-Diez staged a rehearsal in the space, inviting his audience to join him in a dance of invention. He filled the space with a cacophony of sound, and he then posed in front of it, or maybe in a pose of his characteristic soft-porn comedy, with the figure of a man—himself, for one thing, an embodiment of freedom, and the free for all, the well-armed protector of a common place. The result was a brief demonstration of the world, which, like a fantastic dream, was fully real, just not yet real enough. A crowd of performers who couldnt get enough of this spectacle cast themselves as a mirror image of itself, and, at the same time, they became the show. This room-size work exemplified the expressive and the fragile and was the most complete but also the least convincing of the three. Its a bit like a place where you dont belong, a place where you cant breathe, a space for living in one's own skin, but a place for an artist to be—someone who will have to learn to exist, or perhaps just become one.