🎥 How WeHo inspired artist Allison Katz’ first L.A. exhibit

Painter Allison Katz unveiled her first Los Angeles exhibit Friday night at Hauser Wirth’s West Hollywood gallery.

A packed audience heard the artist detail the inspirations behind her illustrious collection, which the gallery describes as “addressing the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, art history, information systems and commodity culture. Katz’s paintings are informed – and united – by her relentless curiosity about the ways in which images perform and construct meaning.”

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Katz explained how the exhibit’s title — “Westward Ho!” — was inspired by West Hollywood.

“I could say that when I came last year, I thought it was funny that everyone was calling this neighborhood ‘WeHo,'” Katz said. “I thought that was a very cute slang, but it also made me think of this place that I visited in 2016 in England which was a beach town called ‘Westward Ho.’ And it’s named after a novel, and that’s named after a play, and that’s named after the oarring of the boatsman along the Thames. So this Westward Ho has been used since Elizabethan times for various titles of cultural productions.

“But it seemed to me that it was actually embedded already in West Hollywood — this hollering out, which is almost like a call. And I do see painting as a kind of call-and-response and a conversation. It’s also like a direction. Obviously I was thinking about coming here the second I left I left. And this idea of always something being slightly out of reach like you see the horizon when you’re driving.”