Rising from the ashes: as Los Angeles rebuilds after the wildfires, a Del Vaz Projects exhibition features subversive new ecologies
Hannah Sage Kay, The Art Newspaper
February 2025
The sky turned orange last month in Los Angeles. Like in the late artist Derek Jarman’s short film, Journey to Avebury (1971), it was as if a coloured gel had been placed over our eyes. “Was the glow in Jarman’s video evocative of the gilded hue of Elizabethan England?” asks Jay Ezra Nayssan, the founder of Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica. “Or symptomatic of the arsenic-heavy smog of post-war industrialised London?” This is the question that Jarman leaves unanswered, and one that recurs—when looking up at a vibrant, pollution-induced sunset or a dense grey cloud that could be either rain or smoke—in our present eco-political climate.
Jarman, alongside Ana Mendieta and P. Staff, are featured in Earthshaker, the inaugural exhibition of Del Vaz Projects’ second decade and its most ambitious to date. The show is accompanied by an eponymous art book with essays by Eva Hayward, McKenzie Wark and Maxi Wallenhorst, in addition to a city-wide screening programme at institutions such as the Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. […]