LOS ANGELES — The seventh iteration of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition showcasing artists working within the higher Los Angeles space, comprises few surprises. The curators’ self described “no-methodology methodology” leads to a scattered exhibition that feels bland and curatorially unimaginative.
Regardless of this, the present comprises some robust work, particularly in instances the place the artists have been given their very own rooms — for instance, Hannah Hur’s attractive five-panel set up “Suspension” (2025), put in in a vault-like gallery. Every painted panel consists of a grid of faint white traces dotted with white flower-like patterns. The interplay between the grid and the flower motif creates a way of spatial confusion when viewing the work. This impact is just enhanced by the room’s structure: The traces within the cement flooring and the curved shadows forged from a panel, which seems to be floating in midair, change into an important a part of the viewing expertise. Hur’s quiet work transforms one’s notion of each the viewer’s bodily house and the areas she creates inside every portray.
Na Mira disorients histories and mythologies in “Sugungga (Howdy)” (2025).” The work references a Korean allegory wherein a sick dragon king making an attempt to remedy itself lures and is subsequently tricked by a rabbit. Two movies are projected onto reverse sides of a holographic glass — one filmed in a cab driving across the outdoors perimeter of a walled former army constructing, constructed by the Japanese military and later used as a US army base, and the opposite exhibiting an inflatable rabbit sculpture inside the grounds. These projections collapse inside and out of doors. They forged ghostly shifting shadows and distorted imagery across the room and onto different viewers. The story of Korea’s occupiers is actually embodied by this one constructing, and the work’s complicated boundaries forged the viewer as each sufferer and complicit co-conspirator, as each inside and out of doors methods of energy.
One other standout is an assemblage by Gabriela Ruiz comprised of cartoonishly painted screaming faces, a surveillance digital camera that shows the viewer on a display screen, and an LED streetlamp. This piece completely embodies our fraught relationship with expertise, whereby we willingly enable ourselves to be surveilled by social media platforms underneath the guise of connecting with others. These platforms have additionally manipulated and broken our thought patterns, siloing us into our personal customized echo chambers and flattening commerce, memes, life milestones, and horrifying information clips right into a single bland stream of content material vying for our consideration. The work is appropriately titled “Collective Scream” (2025).
Different highlights embrace Amanda Ross-Ho’s hilarious and poignant outsized replicas of her father’s residential nursing dwelling door adorned with seasonal decorations, Carl Cheng’s singular erosion machines, and Patrick Martinez’s set up of a ruined and graffiti’d cinderblock construction, “Battle of the Metropolis on Fireplace” (2025).
And not using a clear curatorial thesis, Made in L.A. reverts to the default modus operandi of enormous museum group exhibitions, which is so as to add legitimacy and cultural capital to artists who’ve already been vetted by the market or different establishments. Whilst a relative newcomer to Los Angeles (I moved right here about 5 years in the past), most of the artists included are already acquainted to me and have been exhibiting commonly all through town. I’d like to see the subsequent Made in L.A. go “off menu” slightly extra.
Made in L.A. 2025 continues on the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles) via March 1, 2026. The exhibition was organized by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow.
