“Drawing its title from a dream encounter I had with Joe Pesci, Like a City

begins not with a map but with an orientation, with a moment in time, a

truth in turn of phrase, a facade. The fabric of Los Angeles is designed and

upkept by the people inside of it, in the way that Hollywood is a city

within the city built on fiction. As a place, it is as real as it is made

up, constructed by casts and sets, those who build them, and those who grow

and sell the food on the verdant landscapes that cradle the county. The line

between reality and reality in its own image is thin.

Like a City opens within a scene: Liz Taylor’s chandelier, a blue couch,

white carpet, fresh tulips, Elvis Presley’s bowling trophy. Across from the

couch, a film, The Caretaker by Amalia Irons, plays on loop. The film

follows Louis, the caretaker of an old Hollywood Hills mansion, who, after

hearing the news of his boss’s death, has a nervous breakdown and a

house party.

Acknowledging the labor and illusion that scaffold the city’s economy of

images and imagination, Leona Johnson, a production designer by trade,

brings a sculptural installation of utility poles and suspended wires into

the main gallery space. Within Johnson’s homage to LA’s physical landscape

and ode to her career working in the film industry, hangs a photograph by

Douglas Kirkland of French actress and singer Jeanne Moreau, on the set of

the Alex Mazursky film Alex in Wonderland; soldiers, smoke, and Musso &

Frank’s prominently featured in the background. It’s a record of Hollywood

Boulevard’s past in cultural memory and form.

The work presented in Like a City continuously extends our attention to reperformance, translation, and Los Angeles’ history. Drawing from the

imaginary archive of Hollywood Boulevard, David Horvitz engages the legacy

of Paul de Longpré, the French painter who traded three canvases for three

plots of land in 1899, now Hollywood & Cahuenga. In a reimagined gesture,

Horvitz paints California poppies and sells them on the corner, at the site

of de Longpré’s former estate. The documentation and residue of this act,

photographs, postcards, and three paintings, are exhibited together as an

ode to the de Longpré and his Hollywood Boulevard transaction.

Carlos Agredano presents a parasol acquired in a roadside exchange, sunfaded and weather-marked, its surface holding the detritus of the city and

visually articulating the palimpsest of pollution the street vendors are

subjected to daily. Pulling from Carlos’ statement about his work,

“Historically, Mexican and Chinese immigrants were the first people to begin

street vending in California around the mid 1800s. Since as early as 1870,

the state of California has tried to restrict vending.” This work examines

the continued history of structural and physical racial violence against

immigrant communities within the city. Anais Franco’s ceramic works

reference the legacy of Japanese American strawberry farmers who cultivated

the majority of California’s strawberries, before being forcibly removed

during World War II. Her use of organic motifs and porous surfaces evokes

the way memory seeps into land and material in absentia.

The exhibition also includes The Undesirables, a grid of pencil-drawn

portraits of the Manson girls by John Tottenham, presented like a call sheet

or forensic study, as well as a rare drawing by Judee Sill, the late

psychedelic baroque folk musician—an image of a bird in flight, never before

exhibited, pulled from the archive of her collaborator Tommy Peltier.

What emerges across Like a City is not a singular view of Los Angeles, but a

composite: part fable, part record, part mise-en-scène. The works here hold

multi-focal tempos and timelines, leaning on fiction to clarify fact, on

infrastructure to frame the monumentally illogical, ahistorical intimacy

that ties Los Angeles together.”

- Sophie Appel