Guest Blogger: Shelley Holcomb of Curate LA
11.2.2020
At a moment when we are spending most of our free time locked indoors, it might feel like it’s a bit more challenging to view art like we’re used to in museums and galleries. The good news is that we live in a city where the weather permits us to still check out murals and public art year round. And, lucky for us, we have places like ROW DTLA supporting creatives and maintaining their mission to bring art for the surrounding community to enjoy.
ROW DTLA has two new murals by LA-based artists Abel Macias and ROW’s Call For Artists Winner Adrian Kay Wong that you can feel good about experiencing outside your COVID-safe bubbles. The new murals are both large-scale and full of color, drawing inspiration from the beautiful city of Los Angeles. Bringing the spaces where they are housed to life, both murals are creating alternative worlds for the viewer to escape into—and we all know we can use a little dose of escapism from our daily lives right about now.
Abel Macias’s mural located in the Building 3 Breezeway that connects Dock St. and The Narrows, is an immersive, multi-surface experience immediately transporting you to a familiar, yet other-worldly place. Influenced by the landscape that surrounds Los Angeles, California’s pink-glowing sunsets, and the alien-like rocks we see in Joshua tree, Macias draws inspiration from nature.
Born in Mexico, Macias says of the mural, “I'm very drawn to landscapes and I think I'm relating it back to just my upbringing. Mexico is very much the same landscape as California and Los Angeles, I mean, it pretty much was Mexico, so that childhood visual memory is sort of coming out now.”
Adrian Kay Wong’s mural located on The Narrows, is what we might all be experiencing right now: a detailed look at the everyday objects we are getting to know so intimately as we spend more time than usual in our domestic worlds. Yet, Wong’s mural is a romanization of these seemingly insignificant items. Before painting the mural, Wong spent time photographing every detail of the space and many objects you will see make a delightful appearance in the work—a designer chair, the plants and flowers in the lobby and even the subtle light coming in from the back window.
According to Wong, “The inanimate objects have their own methods of storytelling, almost like they’re an icon that we can recognize, serving the function of a central figure in the work. The more you spend time in a certain space, the more you start to notice and understand the objects that are in your life.”
Plan your visit to see these two new murals, plus several others across the property—there’s always 2 hours parking free, so no need to feel rushed.