Art Production Fund Curates Frieze Projects with Greg Ito, Lita Albuquerque and More
Eight innovative artists created site-specific, interactive public work for Frieze Projects at Frieze Los Angeles—engaging with ideas of home, landscape, and even sky.
By Bethany Suarez
Photo by Casey Kelbaugh, courtesy of Frieze and CKA.
Pioneering Land Art and Light & Space artist Lita Albuquerque, known for her work in the 1960s and ’70s, presents Turbulence, featuring a boulder coated in ultramarine blue atop decomposed granite. The piece reflects on the fleeting connection between humanity and nature, with blue serving as a link between earth and cosmos, transforming light into matter.
WHITEWALL: What space, place, landscape, or memory inspired your project?
LITA ALBUQUERQUE: The inspiration for Turbulence came right after the fires, looking for the perfect boulder. On multiple trips to the quarry in the high desert about four hours outside of LA, going down into the bowels of the earth, surrounded by tonnage of what surrounded me, I began to think about the mass of the earth, the weight of the entire planet, how it inverts into weight being inconsequential when it is suspended in space and the cosmos. I was thinking about the quarry and taking a piece of stone out of the mountain and it being a rock and how it transitions from that into sculpture- I remain interested and perplexed in this liminal space between these matters of being that create a territory where the sublime can enter.
WW: What is your relationship with the city of Los Angeles?
LA: My relationship to the city of Los Angeles is intertwined with growing up as a child in a similar landscape in Carthage, Tunisia, in North Africa, where the land and the landscape had a powerful imprint on me. I experience Los Angeles as a garden city embraced by the mountains on one side, and the ocean on the other, with the openness to the desert beyond. That kind of geography is what inspires me to do works on the land. My relationship with the city of Los Angeles then extends out to the many years living here, starting in the seventies and the art scene that was happening in Venice – the circle grew bigger as I started teaching and most notably on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design, where I experienced decades of young artists developing and becoming part of the community. So, on one hand, it is the nature I am in relation with, and the other with the art community that is ever growing and evolving.
WW: As this is a public project, what do you hope viewers, participants, visitors experience?
LA: I am excited anytime an ephemeral work of mine can be experienced by the public, and Turbulence commissioned by Art Production Fund at Frieze was certainly a moment for the public to be able to experience a work that is at once ephemeral and permanent, a sculpture that weighs a deceiving 6000 pounds, yet with a simple ephemeral gesture, transforms into weightlessness. In the past, my works were done in remote sites around the world, and only a handful of people got to be with them and most now only know of them through photographs, so to be able to be there and receive viewer’s responses has been a real reward. I feel that Turbulence participated in the process of its own making and existing with the public itself and in so doing engaged the viewer in a reciprocal dance.