‘New In Town?’ leaves you hungry to create–and eat candy

EDITH ABEYTA’S MYTHICAL BEAST SWEET SHOPPE

An exhibit has to believe in itself before it can win over the audience, and “New In Town?”, up now at Angels Gate Cultural Center, is a very convincing show. These artists—new arrivals to Angels Gate’s studio artist program—seem to have a buoyant self-confidence about them, and it’s infectious.

Sure, they’re dealing in beach trash, toys you can’t play with and penny candy—now selling for around 50 cents—but after seeing what they do with it, you’ll walk out of here ready to make some art yourself.

Start with the candy, because it’s so, so sweet: Edith Abeyta’s multimedia installation Mythical Beast Sweet Shoppe, where your unofficial host is a frilly pink unicorn—represented on pink tote bags and pink purses—and sometimes looks like one of those Tijuana zebra-burros without the stripes. (But happy, without the whole painted slave-creature thing nagging at you.)

Abeyta stocks her shop with unicorn note paper and wrapping paper and candies familiar and strange: three of the -head variety (Lemon, Grape or Cherry), plus Yum Yum Candy Cones, Jaw Busters, haw flakes, C. Howard’s Scented Gum and something called BB Bats. (Maybe it finds you in the dark.) It comes off only half like a commercial business—but with way more heart than your average downtrodden candy store.

Sierra Brown, a San Pedro resident whose Cal State Long Beach graduate thesis project focused on her finding modes of human-powered transportation, offers up Flotsam Jetsam, which I caught recently at CSULB’s University Art Museum minus the video.

It’s a raft made from discarded rubber balls she collected at Los Cerritos and Bolsa Chica wetlands—and a bikini, a bathing cap and a miniskirt, also made from the balls. The video shows her finding them (discreetly nude), then wearing her ensemble and paddling the raft from the Los Cerritos Wetlands to the open ocean.

How sad: The wetlands look all surrounded by smokestacks and oil wells. Only her raft seems to offer a way out—one of the best uses for detritus since biodiesel.

Okay, enough deep thinking. On to the truly arty: Chris James’ surfboard, a video, and the piece itself: a sculpture made to resemble a surfboard by dismantling a surfboard—an impressive-sounding late-’70s Al Merrick Tri-plane Hull that’s been stripped and reglassed.

“I wanted to know if you can make a sculpture of something out of itself,” James writes in the piece’s explanation. Turns out you can—but I think we’d all like to see him test it in the green room.

Then there’s Jocelyn Foye’s . . . and she rode it bareback!, an apparently exact copy of a saddle, in urethane and stainless steel (ouch!), installed jutting out from the wall. How salacious! Foye says it’s “the literal collision of sport and sculpture,” which sort of makes sense. (So does hearing that she’s inspired by the LA Derby Dolls—roller derby is all about collisions.)

Had enough mixed-media? There’s more coolness. In Footlace Drip Painting, Kendell Carter resurrects those fat, primary-colored shoelaces that no self-respecting B-boy would be caught without in the early-’80s. (Unlaced, of course.) Carter uses them like paint, simply suspending them like long drips of color against soft, burlap-colored canvases.

And elsewhere, in Footlace Chandelier 2, he hangs them from a lit, modern chandelier, muting the crystal and gold with extended lines of primary hues that absorb all but a tiny bit of the light.

They’re a great idea for a medium—and one you wouldn’t be surprised to find hanging in Run’s House next season.

Whose house? Yes.

NEW IN TOWN? STUDIO ARTISTS 2007-2008 ANGELS GATE CULTURAL CENTER | 3601 S GAFFEY ST | SAN PEDRO 90731 | 310.519.0936 | ANGELSGATEART.ORG | OPEN TUES-FRI 10AM-5PM | THROUGH AUG 24

Tags: angels gate cultural center, new in town, San Pedro, visual art