Los Angeles-based artist Luciana Abait explores the fragile nature of our planet’s present-day ecosystem with “A Letter to the Future,” a solo exhibition currently installed at Terminal 7 at LAX through June 2021. Inspired by the issues of climate change and immigration, the show took on a new level of meaning when the global pandemic changed the world as we knew it.
In all of her hand embellished photography-based fine art works, Abait creates pieces with a visually elegant and timeless design, and a heartfelt invitation to find underlying meaning and intricate connections to our fraught, quickly evolving, and peripatetic existence on earth.
She says, “When I developed the artworks for this exhibition during 2018 and 2019, my focus was to raise awareness of environmental issues and the urgent need for corrective actions to halt global warming. It is based on my ‘Iceberg Series,’ comprised of surreal, manipulated landscapes that stem from my own experience as an immigrant and a wanderer – shifting between oceans and continents. I created the frosty landscapes of imaginary icebergs by combining photographs I’d taken of California mountain ranges with found images from encyclopedias and textbooks. Within these inhospitable terrains, I inserted manmade objects, such as a Ferris wheel or a billboard, producing an eerie atmosphere. The presence of these out-of-place objects suggests issues of adaptation, assimilation, isolation, and displacement, and serves as a reflection on the aggressive intrusion of humans on the fragile, natural world and how the effects are far reaching, impacting the most vulnerable in particular.”
The exhibition was installed shortly before the 2020 lockdown. Revisiting it in 2021, the icebergs depicted take on a universal and timely meaning. They represent every single human on the planet earth who has gone through isolation and confinement. The vast oceans and dark skies symbolize our homes in the last year, and talk about a world that we no longer know.
“A Letter to the Future” is presented by the Los Angeles World Airports’ Art Program (LAWA) – which has a mission of humanizing the travel experience – and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Sadly, it opened concurrent with the lockdown, at a time when airports became barren and deserted spaces. This universal crisis became an integral part of the exhibition’s semiotics.
Abait’s work has been shown internationally as well as extensively in Los Angeles.
“A LETTER TO THE FUTURE,” a solo exhibition installed at Terminal 7 at LAX through June 2021
http://www.lucianaabait.com/index.php
https://www.lawa.org/art-program/current-exhibits/a-letter-to-the-future
