LACMA Reveals 5 New AR Monuments
Rashaad Newsome and Alison Saar are among the artists participating in the latest edition of LACMA and SnapChat's Monumental Perspectives programme.
Rubén Ortiz Torres, Dead Heads (2023). Lincoln Park (3529 N. Mission Road, Los Angeles, CA 90031). Augmented Reality, Snap Lens. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Beginning today, SnapChat users can visit five Augmented Reality monuments located across Los Angeles.
The AR artworks, designed by Victoria Fu, Yassi Mazandi, Rashaad Newsome, Alison Saar, and Rubén Ortiz Torres, are the third and final instalment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's (LACMA) Monumental Perspectives Initiative (2020–2023).
Artists were invited to create works on the Snap Lens platform that trace personal lineages to reveal 'throughlines' in present-day Los Angeles communities.
'In bringing collective ancestral memories to life, this cohort of artists challenges us to examine the individual and communal legacies we are leaving today and how we are shaping the future of Los Angeles,' said LACMA CEO and Director Michael Govan.
Victoria Fu's 1871 commemorates the largely forgotten Chinese Massacre of 1871. The artist presents an inverted monument, a shapeshifting tomb-like portal in the ground, that stands in for a physical monument that is absent.
The work can be viewed at the Los Angeles State Historic park, a mile from the site of the original incident and close to the city's present-day Chinatown.
On Santa Monica Beach, visitors can activate Rise, Alison Saar's shrine to remember Black, Brown, and Indigenous women whose bodies have been colonised and commodified.
The goddess Yemaya—patron spirit of women and the sea in the Yoruba religion—blows a conch shell amidst the swarms of catfish cowries, doves, and shells, calling women to resist those restricting their freedom and productive rights.
Digitally located in front of LACMA's Resnick Pavilion, Yassi Mazandi's The Thirty Birds, considers climate displacement through the lens of Persian poet Farid al-Din 'Attar's Conference of the Birds (c. 1177). (Mazandi's existing bronze sculpture at the site, Language of the Birds (2022), depicts the poem's 100 birds who set out in search of the mythical creature the Simurgh.)
Newsome's work in Exposition Park echoes a spirit of perpetual regeneration in Black culture, while in Lincoln Park ,Rubén Ortiz Torres's Dead Heads respond to the theft of sculptures of important Mexican historical figures from the area.
All works can also be viewed on LACMA's website.
LACMA will hold a free open house event on 10 September for visitors to experience the new AR monuments alongside Collections I and II, which feature artists such as Glenn Kaino, and Kang Seung Lee. —[O]
