Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa

Inaugurating the first permanent African Art Gallery at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) are masterworks of Luba, one of the most influential kingdoms in pre-colonial Central Africa history.

Curated by LACMA's Consulting Curator for African Art, and Professor of World Arts and Culture at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Dr. Mary Nooter Roberts, the exhibit features rare sculptures seldom seen in the U.S., and for the first time in Los Angeles.

On display are Luba rulers' regalia and emblems such as the caryatid thrones, scepters, an anthropomorphic bowstand, a ceremonial ax, water pipes and a royal cup symbolizing the king’s authority, and integral in shaping Luba kingdom’s powers and expansion.

Luba transmitted the kingship rules and regulations and chiefdoms’ history, through the Lukasa Memory Board (from a Southern California private collection). Made of wood, metal, and colored beads, Lukasa's visually complex configurations can be decoded, and its use was often accompanied by recitations, dances, and songs.

Thematically organized, the exhibit provides a glimpse into the complex gendering of authority in Luba culture. The art reflects a deliberate ambiguity of gender, especially during enthronement rites, stemming from the belief that only the body of a woman is strong enough to hold a spirit as powerful as the king. As magnets for the spirits and protectors of the kingship, females were considered important in upholding the seat of power.

As a mark of cultural identity and beauty, women were portrayed with elaborate hairstyles, as well as bearing complex, raised, body scarification patterns, which accumulated over time and read as text, telling the woman's life story.

In addition, intricately carved wooden anthropomorphic headrests, viewed as conduits of dreams, functioned as cooling pillows as well as protected hair styles.

One of the exhibit highlights is the iconic Male Mask, thought to represent the founding hero of Luba, on loan for the first time by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Made of carved wood, it portrays a serene man with a bird perched between buffalo horns, noted curator Nooter Roberts, a symbol of great restraint and discretion.

Additional agents of empowerment on display include works used for healing and protection as well as objects of divination and transformation. 

Animal horns or head cavities filled with herbal medicine and other healing substances empowered the figures to deflect malevolent forces, increase personal strength, and promote the community.

Power figures of the spirit world, pairs of male and female Nkisi, have their heads directed backwards, signaling that spirits are all seeing, in all directions.

Luba's aesthetics and royal precepts influenced the art of surrounding regions. Here, one of the most famous pieces is the Bowl-Bearing Figure showing an elderly woman with an elongated face, holding a bowl. As a powerful divination figure she possesses the ability to bring transformation and healing. 

Depicting twin guardian spirits with long, clutching legs and beautiful faces, is the one of a kind, Kiteya Royal Bowl with a lid, the only displayed object not made by a single piece of wood.

In addition, commemorative works displayed here are sculptures of a Hermaphrodite Figure and Buffalo Mask.

Complementing the pre-colonial art is the contemporary installation by Luba artist Aimé Mpane, Congo, Shadow of the Shadow (2005), representing a strong male figure made of 4,652 matchsticks, casting a shadow on the wall. The installation, borrowed from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, expresses the paradox of human strength, fragility, as well as a spirit of courage and resilience.

A five-minute video produced by Agnes Stauber, provides a further glimpse into Luba royal practices and include archival portraits of chiefs and artists.

This exhibit reverberates Luba masterworks' elegance and beauty, a legacy to this artistic tradition.

The exhibit runs through January 5, 2014, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Hammer Building, Level 3, located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. For more information call (323) 857-6000 or visit http://www.lacma.org/

The Conjuring

Rather than implementing the CGI norm in the horror/thriller genre, director James Wan's (Saw, Insidious) latest feature, with script by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes, effectively uses classic, low budget techniques to create unexpected, gore free, edge of the seat jolts.

Set in 1970 Rhode Island the feature is taken from the most disturbing case in the Warrens files where Carolyn (Lili Taylor ) and Roger Perron (Ron Livingston) move into their new house in the countryside with their five daughters. Soon strange, unexplained phenomena occur with increasing intensity, leading them to seek help from the renowned, husband and wife paranormal specialists, demonologist Ed (Patrick Wilson) and clairvoyant Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga).

Superb performances are delivered by the talented cast. In particular, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga form a good team, in their compassionate and believable portrayal, while Lili Taylor excels in her most challenging role as Carolyn Perron.

DP John Leonetti's clever use of handheld cameras add to the unsettling undertones and, along with Kirk Morri's smart editing and Joseph Bishara's intense score, build the chilling mood, delivering a good scary ride.

Pacific Rim

Known for approaching simple premises with complex creativity in design and style, Oscar^® nominated, director Guillermo Del Toro's latest sci-fi blockbuster resurrects the classic kaiju monster feature.

The script by Travis Beacham and Del Toro, based on Beacham's story, features 250 feet high Kaiju monsters emerging from the Pacific coastline, causing massive destruction and taking many lives. Humanity's last hope for survival are the Jaegers, massive robots controlled by two pilots whose minds are synched through a neural bridge, enabling them to share memories and experiences.

Portraying the characters, is an international cast. Idris Elca plays the role of the no-nonsense marshal Stacker Pentecost, the driving force behind the multinational Jaeger program, overseeing lead Jaeger co-pilots, hero Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Oscar^® nominee Rinko Kikuchi). Providing the well interspersed comic relief are Charlie Day as the eccentric scientist Dr. Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman as his lead technician Herman Gottlieb. Stealing the show is Hannibal Chau as Ron Perlman, a flashy and shady black market Kaijus part vendor.

Top notch special effects with spectacular audio and visual fight sequences mark this feature, most effectively visualized in IMAX 3D. Captivating are the richly detailed CGI water scenes of engaging sea battles during swirling storms and water torrents.

The epic showdown delivers in the action front and will please genre aficionados with contagious enthusiasm.

James Turrell: A Retrospective

Art experienced through the senses is the theme of the latest exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The first major exhibition in the U.S. in nearly thirty years, James Turrell: A Retrospective, spans 50 years of the light and space artist's entire career, from the mid 60's to the present. Exploring human perception, the artworks include early light projections, holograms, as well as selections from his work in progress in the high desert of Arizona, the Roden Crater.

Los Angeles native Turrell, who celebrated his 70th birthday this past June, uses light as a sculptural tool, narrowing the differentiation between the imaginary and the visual in a sensory vacuum, where viewer perception becomes part of the work.

Approximately 50 art pieces, many of which built on site, are shown in 33,000 square feet of LACMA's two campus venues, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and the Resnick Pavilion.

BCAM focuses on Turrell's early works in which geometric light is projected into a darkened space, as with the iconic Afrum (1966) where a white cube appears to float in the room's corner. Also featured are Shallow Space, a large room challenging the viewer's depth perception, and Cross Corner Projection in which light is projected to suggest weight and mass. 

Magnatron, an entrance in the shape of an old TV screen, is followed by three full scale installations: the Key Lime, where the illusion of tangible walls are created through light and architecture, the Wide Glass, a temporal element to Turrell's light-based installation, and St. Elmo's Breath, a construction appearing to be a flat surface when in actuality it is light emitted from a bottomless cavity in the wall.

Featured at the Resnick Pavilion is Turrell's most expansive installation of Roden Crater works consisting of models, mixed-media drawings, photographs, holograms, and other documents from the 1980s to the present.
Three immersive light installations occupy the remainder of Resnick. Plunging the spectator in intense lights of changing color, is the 5,000 square foot Ganzfeld exhibit, designed to eliminate the viewer's depth perception. Dark Matters is a 10 minute immersion in a dark room with a minimally perceivable trace of light. 

In Perceptual Cell, a 12 minutes light immersion in a spherical chamber with a sliding bed, gives the impression of lying in space and experiencing, in Turrell's words, “behind the eyes seeing”. 

Perceptual Cell can accommodate only one person at a time, or three per hour, and therefore requires advance reservation at www.lacma.org/Turrell or by phone at 323-857-6010, or onsite at LACMA's Ticket Office. Perceptual Cell is sold out until August.

Turrell's experiential art can be appreciated without a docent or program, and requires slow viewing for full enjoyment.

LACMA recommends 90 minutes to see the exhibit, however, due to limited capacity, be prepared to experience waiting periods.

The retrospective at LACMA is complemented by the concurrent James Turrell exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York. Additional Turrell exhibitions on view this year include the Academy of Art Museum, Easton and Villa Panza, Varese, Italy.

The exhibit runs through April 6, 2014, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) level 2, and Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. For more information call (323) 857-6000 or visit www.lacma.org

Following its run at LACMA, James Turrell: A Retrospective travels to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (June 1-October 18, 2014) and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra (December 2014-April 2015)