Coping with paradise

Ochi is pleased to present Coping with paradise, a group exhibition featuring works by Brody Albert, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Billy Al Bengston, Claire Colette, Devin Farrand, Kim Fisher, Langley Fox, Sam Francis, Erik Frydenborg, Hely Omar González, James Herman, David Jien, David Korty, Jake Kean Mayman, Laurie Nye, Claudia Parducci, Helen Pashgian, Nevena Prijic, Ed Ruscha, Ben Sanders, Devon Tsuno, and Brian Wills. The exhibition will be on view at Ochi, located at 119 Lewis Street in Ketchum, Idaho from November 8, 2024 through January 24, 2025.

Coping with paradise brings together a cohort of twenty-four Los Angeles-based artists whose work embodies aesthetic sensibilities informed by a certain spirit of possibility. The exhibition borrows its title from art critic Dave Hickey’s namesake essay, which contextualizes the work of Peter Alexander by the environment within which it was made—Southern California. Hickey discusses the challenge of creating art in a place as seductive as Los Angeles, describing the city as a “full world”—a place with endless stimuli, new industrial technologies, and “a dazzling, particulate atmosphere of bouncing light that declares its own presence as clearly as the objects in its embrace declare their own”¹. Surrounded by dreamy weather alongside the vast, sprawling, urban landscape, the artists who would later be designated as Light and Space faced the challenges of conveying something about the spectacle of Los Angeles without simulating or illustrating its parts. The resulting aesthetic elements emerged in response to an artificiality imposed by paradise as well as new mindsets born of it.

Ochi in Sun Valley, Idaho has exhibited works by Southern California-based artists since its inception in the 1980s. Despite Sun Valley’s lack of coastline, both locales share a mythological gateway mentality, providing access to overwhelming, undeniable encounters with the physical world. A plethora of sensory experiences and visual splendor borders on overload in both places—perfect golden hour gradient sunsets reflecting off beaches are anchored by palm tree-lined streets in Los Angeles just as imaginary extensions of Sun Valley’s perfect powdery slopes all appear to orient themselves towards the gallery building. Designed and built by Denis and Roberta Ochi in the early 1990s, the cavernous exhibition space surrounded by mountains would prove impossible to resist for several Light and Space artists well into their careers. Ochi presented solo exhibitions by Helen Pashgian, Peter Alexander, Ed Ruscha and others throughout the 90s—each serving as an anchor point within Coping with paradise.

Witnessed through the eyes of two generations of the Ochi family, artists drawn to such “full worlds” are keener to welcome adventure, err on the side of experimentation, and embrace a philosophical outlook that demands experience from beauty. Coping with paradise assembles a group operating under conditions similar to what Hickey describes—these artists create perceptually engaging works across a range of unexpected media and prioritize the sensory and the symbolic, allowing their work to embody and transcend physical surroundings. Generative and expansive in regard to the legacy of this slice of art and gallery history, Coping with Paradise exists in and represents a “full world”.