In an effort to find comfort and connectedness through art, architecture, and design, Helms Bakery District in partnership with the Culver City Arts Foundation, is launching Projecting Possibilities, a video installation featuring a new artist each week for 52 weeks, an entire year of rotating digital art exhibitions to celebrate, nourish, support, and promote artists.
That’s one of the most appealing features of “We Are Here / HereWe Are.” The serendipity of art encounters in public places is embedded in ordinary experience. Going into art museums and galleries is certainly gratifying, but these works thrive beyond institutions or the marketplace Certainly, some works can be taxing. Next to the driveway into an abandoned parking garage on a Sherman Oaks side street, Labkhand Olfatmanesh translates a conundrum about natural and social pressures that women encounter. Her installation features a dozen fluid-filled plastic bags, all tied up in a tree with yards of twine. A bag at the top, just out of reach, holds a baby doll, while another at the base is empty, flattened and held down on the ground by a rock. Within the installation’s plain reference to a tree of life, a subtle intimation of violence echoes in the context of abstention fromelevated motherhood. The tree, unsurprisingly, is an evergreen.