TWO ART EXHIBITIONS CAPTURE LIFE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

TWO ART EXHIBITIONS CAPTURE LIFE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

(Los Angeles, California – October 2, 2014) Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) in partnership with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs announces two new art installations at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) that reveal and re-interpret many facets of L.A.’s influential culture and urban geography through sculpture, painting, and mixed-media works. Gateway to the Sun, a collaborative installation by artists Jamison Carter and Margaret Griffith and guest curated by Elizabeta Betinski, is on view for the public in Terminal 3, Arrivals Hallway, through January 2015. Clothesline Lanes, a solo exhibition by Leigh Salgado and guest curated by Juliet Rosati Bello, is on view for ticketed passengers in the Tom Bradley International Terminal, Customs Hallway, Arrivals Level, through January 2015. In both exhibitions, the artworks on display emphasize and illuminate defining features of Southern California’s environs.

Gateway to the Sun is a site-specific installation featuring artists Jamison Carter and Margaret Griffith, a couple based in Los Angeles in what is their first artistic collaboration. Griffith’s delicate metal and paper sculptures, resembling front-yard gates, interact with Carter’s painted expanses and intensely colored sculptures. On the main walls of the corridor, Carter’s massive painted field of black is punctuated by a bright, geometric sculpture, creating a graphic contrast of color and shape.  Nearby, two display cases feature additional sculptures by Carter, the artworks bursting with color. One display case is set in front of a wall of eye-popping stripes and contains a tumultuous arrangement of thin colored sticks, as if a rainbow had been captured and splintered apart. The other case displays a sculpture composed of bright yellow, stacked wooden slats, Carter’s minimalist and striking interpretation of the sun and its rays. Griffith’s sculptures reference the ornamental gates found in her Highland Park neighborhood, but after she shapes, twists, forms and hangs the gates, they are transformed into exquisite structures belying the rigidity and order of the original gates. Griffith’s gates traverse Carter’s dramatically painted black landscape and hover cloud-like around Carter’s vivid sun sculpture in one of the display cases. Paired together in this installation, the artworks interact and reference ideas of opposites—light and darkness, rigidity and fluidity, permanence and transience—as well as seeing the magic in the everyday world around us.

Clothesline Lanes is an exhibition of Leigh Salgado’s series of ten site-specific artworks that reference Los Angeles’ geographic and cultural diversity. Salgado’s interest in women’s clothing, fabric, patterns, and memories take her to locations of intriguing beauty and fascination. Her ornately sculpted and painted paper drawings are influenced by distinctive women’s clothing items, such as the bathing suits of Pacific Coast Highway, couture fashion of Rodeo Drive, Quinceañera dresses of Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, the thrift stores of Fairfax Boulevard’s Little Ethiopia, and the saris of Pioneer Boulevard in Little India. Cutting and burning tools are used to eviscerate the negative space between the lines in Salgado’s acrylic drawings, while the resulting textures and shadows highlight the three-dimensionality of her work. For this series, Salgado chose to focus on locations that reflect diverse parts of the Southern California experience, ones which we may all see but do not necessarily experience.

About Los Angeles World Airports Art Program

Initiated in 1990, the purpose of the LAWA Art Program is to provide opportunities for educational, entertaining, and enriching cultural experiences for the traveling public at LAX and LA/Ontario International Airports and the LAX FlyAway® bus terminal.

The program showcases local and regional artists through temporary exhibitions and permanent public art installations, which enhance and humanize the overall travel experience for millions every year. For additional information, please visitwww.lawa.org.

About Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)

            LAX is the sixth busiest airport in the world and third in the United States.  LAX offers 680 daily flights to 96 cities in the U.S. and 933 weekly nonstop flights to 57 cities in 34 countries on 59 commercial air carriers.  LAX ranks 14th in the world and fifth in the U.S. in air cargo tonnage processed, with over 1.9 million tons of air cargo valued at over $86.9 billion.  An economic study in 2011 reported that operations at LAX generated 294,400 jobs in Los Angeles County with labor income of $13.6 billion and economic output of more than $39.7 billion.  This activity added $2.5 billion to local and state revenues.  LAX is part of a system of three Southern California airports – along with LA/Ontario International and Van Nuys general aviation – that are owned and operated by Los Angeles World Airports, a proprietary department of the City of Los Angeles that receives no funding from the City’s general fund.

            As a covered entity under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the City of Los Angeles does not discriminate on the basis of disability and, upon request, will provide reasonable accommodation to ensure equal access to its programs, services, and activities.  Alternative formats in large print, braille, audio, and other forms (if possible) will be provided upon request.