With the crush of mid and late career artists far outnumbering the opportunities that galleries and museums have to represent their work and ideas, Temporary Space LA (TSLA) is a new venture in Los Angeles that serves a burgeoning baby boomer constituency with what it hopes will be comprehensive, self help strategies. TSLA will exhibit the art of mid-career and late-career artists, with particular emphasis upon artists who have been under-appreciated, both critically and economically, by the art establishment. They opened with a flourish in the mid-Wilshire district with a dynamic survey exhibit of the work of painter Richard Shelton this past March.
TSLA hopes to present the complete archives of selected artists through exhibitions and digital applications. Their mission is to enable rich and unfiltered interaction with an artist’s entire body of work, and to make purchasing the art simple and fast. The emphasis on the digital application is critical, not only ensuring an archival legacy of the artist’s full body of work and ideas, but making their practice understandable to collectors who will need to understand the full scope of the artist’s career in making choices about acquiring works from the artist. They do this with a new computer app, named appropriately the Temporary Space App, focusing primarily on the artist’s archival timeline. It is a complete digital archive first and foremost – but it also provides a deeper engagement with the artist through sketch overlays (augmented reality features), related ephemera, written descriptions, art recognition which provides a direct connection to other series works – and most importantly it provides a means to directly connect with the artist.
TSLA took form when Richard Shelton, an artist who has been active in the art world for the past 50 years, began thinking about TSLA five years ago. Three years ago he teamed up with fellow artist Stacie Meyer and together they began thinking about alternative approaches to the current gallery model. In the past year Stacie Meyer put together a team of art professionals, which includes Melissa Urcan, Julie Yamashito, and Alex Nano, to help realize the concepts they theorized might add to the Los Angeles art community in a positive fashion.
The program consists of several key strategies. It intends to be mobile, a roaming facility. It will be open for two exhibitions in Los Angeles through November 2015, and then it will move to a new location in Downtown Los Angeles for 2016. Future Temporary Space locations for 2017 – 2020 in additional cities are actively being discussed. In addition to the exhibitions is a robust program of film, lectures and discussions, providing an alternative platform for dialogue for those very same artists whose work has not received the exposure TSLA feels it deserves. The artists are selected by the staff of the organization, and so far the scheduled shows after Richard Shelton are Margaret Nielsen and Scott Grieger, opening July 18 through October 24.