Hollywood hotel owner invites artists to create a pop-culture Sistine Chapel
A Los Angeles hotel invited artists to decorate its ceiling in a pop-culture salute to mums
It's past 9pm, and Kim Fisher's neck is killing her.
For the last hour, the artist has been standing on a stepladder near a bar counter, craning her face to the black ceiling where she is drawing her mother in hot hair rollers. Her back is arched at an awkward angle, and her drawing arm is crooked like a slender giraffe neck above her body. She's not alone. More than a dozen artists look equally uncomfortable perched on ladders and stools across the room, chalk in hand, sketching stories about their mums.
"I spent endless hours watching my mum go through the ritual of putting hot rollers in her hair," says Fisher, who was featured in the Hammer Museum's "Made in LA 2014" biennial. "It made such a lasting impression on me."
A circus of established and up-and-coming artists from Los Angeles, New York and abroad has descended on the soon-to-open Mama Shelter hotel in Hollywood, where owner Benjamin Trigano has asked them to treat his ceiling like a pop-culture Sistine Chapel. The artists, including young abstract painter Alex Becerra, Greek-born provocateur Despina Stokou, Vienna-based painter Alex Ruthner (who had a sell-out exhibition at a London gallery last summer) and surrealist video artist and painter Pearl Hsiung (part of the Hammer's 2012 biennial), have been gathering in groups of 20 to 30 for the past month to eat pizza, drink beer and contribute a piece of family history to the growing artistic statement.
Photographers Alex Prager (featured in a 2010 Museum of Modern Art exhibition) and Matthew Brandt (part of the Getty Museum's current show "Light, Paper, Process") are creating imagery for the hotel's elevators; French fashion photographer and video director Jean-Baptiste Mondino and LA artist Andrew Bush are shooting material for the bar; and Matthew Brannon designed the neon sign that will perch atop the six-storey hotel's roof at the corner of Selma and Wilcox Avenues.
There are so many cool artists in LA right now, and it feels good to gather to do something weird
Trigano, also owner and curator of M+B Gallery in West Hollywood and grandson of Club Med developer Gilbert Trigano, is heading up the US expansion of his family's French boutique hotel chain. And even though he didn't necessarily set out to do it, art is fast becoming the Mama Shelter hotel's signature motif.