Wienholt Projects is pleased to present California Love, a group exhibition of 13 LA-based artists, curated by artist Preston Douglas Boyer. The exhibition is on view May 17th through May 30th, 2024.

“Now let me welcome everybody to the Wild Wild West” – Dr. Dre 

California represents expansion, manifestation and abundance—a contemporary Babylon. Since the gold rush, California has fostered (for better and worse) romanticized notions of what it can offer, providing a cultural aura that is as attractive as it is ill-defined. Here, social, political and economic realms clash as much as the landscape, like the Santa Monica Mountains abruptly turning into the never ending Pacific Ocean. Forces which are seemingly in opposition not only survive, but thrive in harmony. 

These clashing contradictory forces have endlessly motivated artists here, cultivating space for entirely new genres of expression to flourish throughout the decades from the Light and Space movement to West Coast hip-hop. California is the world’s primary exporter of culture through the entertainment industry. Its artists are aware of this fact and have invented a way of seeing, reshaping what Jean Baudrillard once described as California’s “energy of the simulacrum” into a visual language of cultural commentary. It is both the bonafide Wild West, and a fiction. 

California Love opens up space for artists whose work should have a larger platform, younger artists on the cusp of breakthrough, tattoo artists and art handlers whose works belong on gallery walls. The exhibition, curated by artist Preston Douglas Boyer, brings together works informed by California’s pop culture and its subcultures; its fashion and graffiti; its lush landscapes and iconic landmarks; its brands and its stars. As Preston Douglas Boyer notes, this exhibition is: “A love for the art, a love for the artists, and a love of the long, strange trip we are on together here in California.”