- Source: Cultured Magazine
- Author: Editors
- Date: February 17, 2025
- Format: PRINT AND DIGITAL
For This Year’s Frieze Projects, 8 Angeleno Artists Are Making Work That Reflects the City’s Enduring Resilience
From left to right: Casey Fremont, Claire Chambless, Greg Ito, Jackie Amézquita, Ozzie Juarez, and Lita Albuquerque at the Cloverfield in Santa Monica. Photography by Ilona Szwarc.
In keeping with Frieze Los Angeles’s deep fascination with its sprawling metropolitan host, this year’s edition of Frieze Projects offers an insider’s glimpse at the city’s cultural topography. Curated by Art Production Fund, “Inside Out” presents a series of installations by artists with deep roots in the city, diving into the microcultures and ecosystems that make LA so confounding, so romantic, so fraught. “‘Inside Out’ reflects on place—how we navigate the spaces where we land,” says Art Production Fund Executive Director Casey Fremont.
“Emerging from these works, often with a touch of whimsy, are reflections on movement, migration, and physical and social mobility,” adds Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of Americas. Indeed, the program’s participating artists—six of whom share the origin stories behind their Frieze Projects contributions here—represent a wide range of Angeleno attachments. Their respective installations offer a touching homage to a city that, even in the wake of ecological disaster, is forever blossoming.
Claire Chambless, Player, Non-Player (Detail Shot), 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Claire Chambless, Player, Non-Player, 2025
How does the story of your site-specific work for Frieze Projects begin?
Player, Non-Player questions the salvific nature of art acquisition by drawing attention to the symbolic nature of purchasing. The work follows a foraging or gift-giving model rather than monetary exchange—everyone has an equal chance to find and acquire a piece. If they do, they will get a handmade talisman. In light of the fires that have caused such inconceivable devastation in Los Angeles, giving and sharing things that can hold memory feels more important than ever.
What is one aspect of Los Angeles that has always captivated you, and how is it reflected in your contribution?
The theatricality of everyday life here fascinates me. Performance is embedded in much of the city’s architecture. The title of my artwork references the two categories video game characters fall into. The juxtaposition between performer and performed-up will be enacted and complicated as people interact with Player, Non-Player in much the same way that LA enacts and complicates that same blurry boundary.
Most underrated thing about LA?
The planetarium shows at Griffith Observatory. They’re the best.
