Laguna Art Museum Exhibition: Art Shack June 13, 2010

Guest curated by Greg Escalante, Art Shack is a group exhibition in which artists such as Don Ed Hardy, Shag, Paul Frank, and Mike Shine combine art and architecture. Explore surf shacks, tattoo huts, retro shanties and more, and immerse yourself in 25 different worlds crafted by the artists.

Many shacks will be enterable, and some will include interactive components such as music and film. Don Ed Hardy’s Tattoo Hut will feature an activated tattoo machine.

“In the last ten years we have noticed that many of the artists we have exhibited in the Museum’s popular culture shows have made some type of ‘shack’,” said Laguna Art Museum Director Bolton Colburn. “We’ve worked with Greg Escalante on many of the Museum’s pop culture exhibitions over the years and he brought forward the idea of gathering these art shacks together into a central exhibition that explicates the phenomenon.”

Abandoning the rules of the art market and pressure to create saleable work, art shacks allow the artists to create an experiential environment, narrowing the distinction between art and function, object and environment.

Though few of us have any direct experience with living in shacks, they are at least present in our collective memory through post-apocalyptic films like District 9 or childhood games like MASH (Mansion-Apartment-Shack-House) that predict your future life and placement in social class. Along the west coast, we're quite familiar with surf shacks, date shacks, and Tiki-inspired shacks-romantic, boutique-like bungalows for the leisure visitor.

However, architecturally, a shack is the lowest form of construction, meant to serve the most basic or immediate needs. By definition, a shack is a place of disrepair made of the most humble scrap materials like plywood, corrugated metal, and plastic. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people (one-sixth of the world's population) live in slums-a settlement made of shacks.

In every sense of the word, a shack is temporal. It even implies to the more humorous, subversive, and misbehaved-to "shack up"-or abandon social norms and "shack up in the mountains."

Ultimately, the artists in this exhibition aim to defy the norms of rules set against them, questioning the modes of mass production, social restrictions, and perhaps global capitalism.

Official Website: http://lagunaartmuseum.org/upcoming-exhibitions.html