Beyond Eden: Urban Indie Art in Paradise

Building on the overwhelming response to last year’s East of Eden locals-centric art fair, the organizers broaden the scope of this year’s much-anticipated sequel. They made great strides in codifying the invaluable contribution of LA’s East Side to the overall flavor of the city’s visual culture—and now with this year’s Beyond Eden, they prepare to take stock of that flavor across the entire spectrum of LA’s independent gallery scene. Analogous to that term as it’s used in the music world, independent or indie is as much if not more a state of mind and taste—a lifestyle, an identity—as it is a business level.

This year the geography is conceptual and aesthetic, not literal. Participating galleries represent the most popular voices in the “new mainstream,” from Bergamot Station to Mid-Wilshire to West LA—Copro, Carmichael, Subliminal Projects, Black Maria, Thinkspace. At Beyond Eden the whole genealogy of galleries where this kind of work is most associated, nurtured and celebrated, all present their take on the no-name genre, and with 15 galleries side by side, the project is the perfect place for DIY scholars to work out their own definition of what the indie art world looks like now. LA is where everything starts; every trend is exported from the west coast. What was Helter Skelter here 15 years ago is the most mainstream thing imaginable these days. It’s all over the newspapers and big glossy monthlies, in the biggest galleries, on high-end clothing lines and vodka bottles, and museums around the world..

LA is a stage for emergence into the international art scene. More artists live and work here from around the nation and globe than any other global art center—at least it certainly feels that way. Maybe it’s the schools. Maybe it’s the film money, or the sunshine. Maybe it’s the illusion of eternal youth. The answer is not likley to be either simple or finite, but the question is certainly worth asking. Curious art-world minds want to know—what is it about LA that makes it so unique? Well, Beyond Eden is a great place to start.

Narrative, figurative, poetic, even mythological at times, the indie LA art style is edgy and illustration-based, drawing on street-art forms like tagging and posting, with a taste for the vintage, for the seducing of the innocent, the facing down of monsters, the mastery of nature. It’s part surrealism, it’s omnivorous when it comes to source material, it’s cinematic, sci-fi inflected, rebel-embracing. It’s romantic sometimes, often beautiful to a point of vertigo. It’s all that and occasionally none of it. And now this loose affiliation of independent, alternative, post-Brow, avant-Brow, pop surrealist, urban romantics—whatever you want to call them is okay as long as it’s clearly outside the boundaries of the high-end, forbidding, over-priced, white-box fortress stereotype.

—Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2009