Ruben Ochoa @ LACMA
Rohin Guha
August 07, 2008
"Man, you don't tell someone you're a bad driver," a guy wearing gold chains and enough product in his hair to re-spark the Great Chicago Fire once advised me. So, let's say that if I ended up in a fender-bender on the eastbound side of the 10 in LA, it'd be because of Ruben Ochoa -- not because of how jumpy I tend to get when someone cuts ahead of me on the highway without signaling. A couple of years ago, Ochoa affixed large landscape photographs to a concrete wall that bordered the 10 for a project entitled "Extracted"; he created the illusion that pieces of the wall had been removed, revealing the hills behind it. But his intent wasn't to deceive, but simply to inspire.
For one of their current shows, the LA County Museum of Art is featuring those sections of Ochoa’s wall, complete with graffiti-laden concrete. In its “Phantom Sightings” exhibition (closing September), the installations are recast as sculptures. But these large slabs of pretty concrete make up only a small portion of the ethnography being conveyed through works at the exhibition. Through Ochoa’s makeshift sculptures and the works of 30 other artists, ”Phantom Sightings” tracks the Chicano artistic emergence, tracing its origins back to the 1960s. While this landmark exhibition finally sets a precedent for Chicano art, hopefully Ochoa’s influence will make it possible for anyone to toss aside the easel and canvas once in a while to create literal street art.
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