Over the weekend, the LA Times featured a cover story about a new exhibition opening this month at MOCA, called “Poetics of the Handmade”. It’s an interesting read and looks to be a great show. The artists involved have taken mass made, common everyday objects and transformed them into powerful statements. I was particularly struck by Chilean artist Livia Marin’s installation called “Fictions of a Use”- which has 2200 tubes of lipstick in 27 colors, with the tips molded in 600 shapes. It’s a statement less about women’s use of the cosmetics, but more about “the makr of an individual on the mass-produces object,” recognizing that “every lipstick adopts a particular shpae in relation to whoever uses it.” All of the artists involved in the show are from Latin America. Other pieces included in the show will be this gigantic sculpture made of Q-tips, and a mural made of discarded currency. 
Read the entire article here, and more info on the exhibit, which opens April 22, here.
