VISUAL ARTS

For its 50th anniversary, the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is showcasing its permanent collection in a series of twelve installations, each lasting between two and six weeks. To stimulate discussion within the museum’s audience around the works’ historical and aesthetic meanings, more than fifty works by twenty-four artists who are included in OCMA’s collection will be juxtaposed in combinations that run against the grain of their typical generational and/or stylistic affinities. Artists familiar from the 1960s are contrasted with those who have emerged over the past ten years, painters are paired with video artists, abstraction gets re-joined with representation, and conceptual art pioneers will meet their post-conceptual successors. Featured artists include Joan Brown, Joe Goode, Walead Beshty, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Ray, Chris Burden, Daniel J. Martinez, John McCracken, and Lewis Baltz, among others. The rotations will run February 29 through December 30, 2012.

Expanding upon the definition of assemblage as an accumulation of fragmented elements comes is the underlying premise of this pairing of Herms (b. 1935) one of southern California pioneering modernists and a longtime creator of Dada-inflected sculptures and pictures, with Reiss (b. 1929), who, despite his background as a painter, created in the 1970s and 1980s a series of miniature box sculptures depicting scenes from everyday life. While the oeuvres of the two men do not at first glance reveal obvious similarities, their shared interest in the artwork as a microcosm of the outer world, literally overflowing with an abundance of meaningful details, suggests a deeper link between these disparate practices.