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Chain Letter Confidential

"Open Studios on steroids."

That's what a friend said it sounded like, when I tried to describe in words the art at the Chain Letter  show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery.  LA Weekly calls it "Artmaggeddon" in a nice summary of what went down at Santa Monica's Bergamot Station last weekend.  [Update:  More reviews! LA Times, Huffington Post, Art21 Blog, KCRW]

I.  Waiting to Install:  installation of work was scheduled to take place from 10am to 6pm on Friday 7/22, the day before the opening.  (Click any photo for full size/slide show.)

Above: First in line, arrived at 7am, three hours early.  We got there a little after 8am.  After the drive down, we spent the preceding evening organizing and consolidating the art and paperwork of our baker's dozen of artists into four cardboard boxes, partially seen below (foreground) not too far from the front of the line (the white wall). 

Looking rearward from our spot:

More art in line

II.  Staking the claim:  mad rush to claim and hold onto space.   We grabbed a spot near the entrance, were quickly hemmed in.

A photoshopped auto-merged panorama (hence the two-faced man), click to enlarge:

We finished installing around 11:30am.  By now the gallery was packed with art, and yet the line wrapped around the parking lot. 

On our way out, we noticed that LAPD had set up traffic controls to block the road to incoming traffic.  Even though Wayne (the husband of Shoshana) opened up two additional unused gallery spaces elsewhere in Bergamot Center, we heard that the gallery stopped accepting work around 4:30pm, since there was simply no more room, and those still in line or arriving later were turned away.  The Weekly says they topped out just below 1,600 pieces.

Recess

After installing, we checked out some galleries in the Culver City Arts District, but not before tasty ramen at Santouka (Centinela @ Venice).

Missed Nao, who was performing up in SF at The LAB that weekend.  Below: Gregory Hernandez at Emma Gray HQ, and the video room at Blum & Poe

Em's Artist Cafe, with Ai Weiwei trading cards

The next day went to Art in the Streets  at MOCA Geffen

And then on to Bergamot Station for the Santa Monica Art Museum and of course, the opening of Chain Letter.  Truly awe inspiring video work:  Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining at SMAM.  Pics from their website, two large screens on opposite walls of the viewing room:

Try to imagine the following in beautiful hi-rez 3-D on the huge screen above:

III.  Chain Letter:  The Show

As one might expect, the curators had taken liberties to move stuff around, leaving much of our work displaced by a computer in a tequila-filled plexi case on a pedestal.

Here's a shaky HD video tour of main gallery before the crowds arrived. 

[ Watch in HD on vimeo, non-hd below ]

Another panorama of the main gallery (from far left corner in previous panorama):

Smaller second gallery in Shoshana Wayne:

Pictures of some of the art in one of the two overflow galleries, F1:

Hope this gives you an idea of what it's like.  More available at the Chain Letter LA website.