Meulensteen

In 2011, Meulensteen presented a "nocturnal" survey of the Los Angeles art scene. Artist Zach Harris, in his curatorial debut, takes his cue from "Midnight at Malibu", a song written in the 1950s by his L.A.-based musician grandfather Victor Harris. The show eschews the superficial ethos and image-obsessed culture that typically satirize the place in order to render a deeper, darker side of the City of Angels. Landscape abstraction, beach assemblage, Chet Baker, Greek mythology and the psychedelic experience all haunt the content of the exhibition. In Harris’ words: "This exhibition cannot be said to represent the general trends or usual suspects of the entire Los Angeles art scene. Apart from seeking out artists whose work fit the mood of the show (which disqualified many good ones), I sought out those who have developed particularly personal, idiosyncratic visual languages and whose artwork, like night itself, exudes a sense of interiority and depth. These artists are not Sunday painters or high-production, assistant-laden blue-chipsters. The “Midnight at Malibu” artists might be said to fall into the category of art-house, B-movie die-hards." The show runs the gamut from the immediate world of sensual forms to the literal heights of abstraction. They include paint as psychoactive substance (Brian Fahlstrom), second-hand funk (David Miller), objects hanging by a thread (Sarah Cain) shadowy truths of Plato’s Cave (J.P. Munroe, Mary Weatherford), blue Martian sunsets (Emilie Halpern), marginal painterly pursuits (Rebecca Morris), two owls lost in love (Mari Eastman), memories of abstract sandcastles (Paul Heyer), vivid nocturnes (Portia Hein), Beatle manifestos (Tam Van Tram), and stoned pagans embedded in the matrix (George Herms).

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