“Inconsequential Ideas,” an exhibit by West Hollywood artist Martin Gantman, will open Friday at June Street Architecture in West Hollywood.
Gantman is a conceptual artist whose work features everything from photos of people crossing West Hollywood streets to altered images of classical odalisques to postcards sent aloft on helium-filled balloons.
Gantman has described his “inconsequential” works as an effort to “tiptoe gingerly into the edges of the viewer’s unconscious. While, within these works, one might find reference to contemporary issues, such as migration, colonialism, or visual perception, I am hoping that the path one takes to encounter these somewhat contentious matters travels into the unknown and then back out again.”
The overriding theme to Gantman’s work is inequity in our world. In 1926, his father was taken to Mexico, at the age of 13, by Gantman’s grandfather. They left behind his father’s five siblings and his mother in the Ukrainian region of Russia. His grandfather’s quest for equity was less about economic disparity than about a more fundamental inequity. He was spiriting his son away from a nation where the birth of the Soviet Union had led to massive pogroms that took the lives of tens of thousands of Jews.
That experience made his father a fervent anti-Communist. But, Gantman said, “he also was a populist, and that’s embedded in me. I have a concern about fairness to a fault.”
The exhibit will run through April 21. Friday’s opening will include a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. at June Street Architecture, which is at 8730 Santa Monica Blvd. at Huntley in Suite H. The entrance is off of Huntley.
