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Whether it's Apple's iPad, a new building or the latest fashion, California's artists and designers have left their mark on the world. Perhaps that's why museums around Southern California indulge in celebrating the local talent. Later this year at the Orange County Museum of Art, the California Biennial makes a comeback. But this week marked a separate biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.
The fourth annual California Design Biennial, Action/Reaction, brings together a group of California designers from various fields: industrial design, fashion, graphic, transportation and lastly, architecture, which was a newly introduced category this year.
Unlike years past where the show was juried, this year it was curated by experts such as Frances Anderton of Dwell magazine and KCRW, Louise Sandhaus from California Institute of the Arts and freelance design journalist Alissa Walker, whose works appear in GOOD Magazine, among others. Curators focused on on how designers are responding to current economic, political, and environmental challenges.
Also opening this week at PMCA were two other exhibitions. Megan Geckler's 3-D optical installation, Every move you make, every step you take, is made from assembled from thousands of strands of multicolored flagging tape and takes up a whole gallery room inside the museum. In the back, Desire: Six Los Angeles Artists seeks to "exemplify the contemporary landscape of desire in the City of Angels, a city known for commodifiying sex through its various entertainment industries," as the museum explains. Also worth checking out is the museum's store, which is one of the better ones around.
All of the exhibits run through October 31st.