NICHE.LA AND LOUNGE 441
453 S. Spring St. #443
August 11–September 8
 | Adam Phillips, still from Bitey Castle, 2004. |
A new generation of young creators has emerged that operates not from a deep contemplation of Duchamp, Beuys, Foucault, or Baudrillard, but from Dungeons and Dragons figurines, ‘80s "mythic" heavy-metal album covers, cyberpunk paperback art, and the kind of paintings of Vikings and missile-breasted Amazons found on the side of VW vans. Niche.LA and Lounge 441's "Digital World: Oz" features the gently dissolving images of the flabbergasting Charli Siebert, described in the press materials as a self-taught "23-year-old digital artist from Huntington Beach, CA." Siebert's independence from art-school cant is gratifying in itself, but her frosted, distressed, tactile-but-ethereal images are the real thing—Goth and sci-fi kitsch ossified into beaux-arts stateliness. Her porny, morbid figures hover in a state of being pitched somewhere between photorealism and PhotoShop artifice, as if a family of Joel-Peter Witkin ghouls had invented their own video game to live in. Siebert made the bizarre choice of airing these deathly figurines in a screening room where they are accompanied by what sounds like faint Billie Holiday songs; they also appear on a swanky plasma screen and in a clutchable portfolio. The transition from the dreamlike to the tactile seems a deliberate strategy. The curators, Nic Cha Kim and Jason Waters, are admirably committed to the joining point of digital tech and Romantic idealism and to the revivification of downtown LA as a cultural hub. The dessert course is provided by the Flash artist Adam Phillips, whose dazzling Hitchhiker is like a splatter movie for four-year-olds.
—Matthew Wilder
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