La Mancha Gallery · Exhibition · 2009

Five Excursions of Love
in Los Angeles

February 14 – March 1, 2009 · Mid-City Arts Gallery, Los Angeles

Curatorial Statement

Love as a Lens for Reading Los Angeles

Five Excursions of Love in Los Angeles was conceived as both a Valentine's Day provocation and a curatorial argument: that love is not a feeling removed from place. In Los Angeles, love is shaped by the city — by its distances, its mythology, its working people, its loneliness, its relentless hunger for reinvention.

Five artists — working in photography, drawing, printmaking, painting, and video — were invited to take entirely different journeys into that territory. Each excursion was singular in approach and medium. Collectively, they formed a portrait of a city seen through the fullest, most unguarded human lens available to us.

The exhibition opened February 14th, 2009 at Mid-City Arts Gallery on Pico Boulevard — a space that had lived as a record store, then as a graffiti gallery where spray cans lined the shelves and the streets spoke through the walls. That layered history was not incidental. It was the room itself demonstrating how culture moves through Los Angeles: restless, accumulative, always becoming something else.

"Each artist took a different journey into love. Los Angeles was always the deeper subject."

— Omar Holguin, Curator

Featured Artists

Five Voices, Five Excursions

Photography · Video Art

Baron Norris

Norris mapped love at its edges — informed by Edward Hopper's isolation, Wong Kar Wai's contemplative melancholy, and the fatalism of classic film noir. His digital print Always Yours and nine-piece gelatin silver series Long Ride To Nowhere traced the private distances between people. Three video installations — Influence, Interference, and Navigating The Void — gave the exhibition its most immersive dimension.

Drawing · Conceptual

Juan Thorp

Thorp approached love as a conceptual act — a willingness to look at familiar structures until they reveal something stranger underneath. His acrylic works on paper Organ Wheel and Apparatus playfully deconstructed the mechanics of the world, prompting viewers to question the architecture of their own realities.

Photography · Digital Fine Art

Natalie Franco

Franco pushed the exhibition into cinematic territory, fusing documentary instinct with fantasy. Her digital fine prints Dark Home and Wired Night inhabit a primordial genre of her own invention — a whimsical color field where human behavior turns unexpected and staged imagery feels simultaneously discovered. She crossed the line between the real and the imagined and planted her flag on the other side.

Painting · Oil on Wood Panel · Milan, Italy

Silvio Sangiorgi

The exhibition's sole international contributor, Sangiorgi submitted his work from Milan — two large oil paintings on wood panel, Driade and Diva, portraits of everyday working-class figures rendered with classical gravity. His distance gave his vision a quality of witness that felt rare in the room. He saw Los Angeles the way only an outsider fully committed to looking can — not as backdrop, but as subject.

Printmaking · Drypoint

Stephanie Mercado

Mercado closed the exhibition with its sharpest edge. Her drypoint prints The Tea Party and The Silence Between Us inhabit a world of dark-eyed caricatures existing in psychological timelessness. Drawing from circus culture as a metaphor for life, her archetypal figures are grotesque, eerie, and precise — portraits not of love's tenderness, but of love's theater. The absurdity, the performance, the silence underneath. Whimsical on the surface. Ruthless in the subtext.

Exhibition Details

Program Information

Exhibition Title

Five Excursions of Love in Los Angeles

Exhibition Type

Group Exhibition · Five Artists

Opening Reception

February 14, 2009

Exhibition Dates

February 14 – March 1, 2009

Venue

Mid-City Arts Gallery
5113 West Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019

Curator

Omar Holguin
La Mancha Gallery

Media

Photography, Digital Fine Art, Drypoint Printmaking, Acrylic on Paper, Oil on Wood Panel, Video Art Installation

Music

DJ Lord Ron

Key Highlights

An Evening to Remember

Attendance

Hundreds of art aficionados attended the Valentine's Day opening reception, making it one of La Mancha Gallery's most celebrated early events.

Notable Attendees

World-renowned artists and muralists including RETNA, Suriya, Saner, and The Phantom Street Artist were among those present — figures whose own work had long shaped the visual language of Los Angeles.

International Reach

Milan-based painter Silvio Sangiorgi submitted work from Italy — marking one of La Mancha Gallery's earliest international collaborations and establishing the gallery's reach beyond Los Angeles from its first years.

Venue History

Mid-City Arts Gallery on Pico Boulevard carried its own storied history — born as record store 33 1/3, reborn as a graffiti gallery where spray cans lined the shelves. The venue's layered identity made it a natural home for an exhibition exploring the many faces of love in Los Angeles.

Video Art

Baron Norris contributed three video art installations — Influence, Interference, and Navigating The Void — giving the exhibition a multimedia dimension that extended the program's emotional range well beyond the walls.

Works Exhibited