Artist Carlos Agredano grew up on a dead-end street in the shadow of the 105 Freeway in Lynwood, a city that borders South Los Angeles. In the early days of lockdown, he would trace a path that ran parallel to the interstate highway, an 18-mile stretch of the LA basin’s vast infrastructural network, trying to understand the concrete monolith that had cut his neighborhood in half. That spring 2020 semester, he was finishing his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in his childhood bedroom, where each day he would methodically sweep the fine layer of black soot, pollution from car exhaust blown in from an open window, that had gathered on every surface.

The tyranny of the LA freeway system has since become the primary concern of Agredano’s practice. At the Los Angeles Nomadic Art Division (LAND), he recently exhibited FUME (2025), a traveling sculpture in which three different air quality sensors mounted to an aluminum circular platform are hitched to his black 1992 Toyota Pickup. One sensor monitors the output from the truck’s exhaust pipe. Another, monitoring ambient air quality, is enclosed by futuristic arches inspired by the Googie architecture of the LAX’s Theme Building: a vacant monument to Space Age hubris now stranded in the center of the loop of the airport’s eight terminals.  

As an object, both scientific and artistic, FUME collects the evidence of the gradual violence of toxic drift that seemingly takes place invisibly, primarily impacting working-class communities of color. “I want the sculpture to collect data in the way that my body or my family or my neighbors’ bodies collect data by how they are breathing in the debris,” he told ARTnews. “Although we don’t exactly know [the extent] of it or what it’s doing to us, the idea for this sculpture is to at least quantify it.” He joked that his medium is smog, and his artist assistant is the city of Los Angeles itself.

Over 50 years ago, postwar artists like Yves Klein, Otto Piene, or Fujiko Nakaya used air in different ways, though they were often animated by a utopian idea of air as a borderless, metaphysical material of shared experience. Agredano instead reveals how air quality is unevenly distributed via its sociopolitical context. By extensively researching social histories, like Eric Avila’s Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (2014), scientific studies from UCLA’s Center for Occupational & Environmental Health, and environmental impact reports by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), among other sources, Agredano connects the evidence of pollution to the longer histories of destructive urban planning in Los Angeles (the vanity plate on his truck spells out JSTOR, the digital academic library.)

One example of this ruinous urban planning is, in fact, the 105, an auxiliary interstate freeway constructed in the early ’90s to improve access to LAX. Part of a 1960s masterplan by Caltrans, its construction was halted in 1972 after a community-led federal lawsuit—but only after homes had already been razed. “It’s really important to me to research the development of the freeway system, and know exactly why the freeways were built, which in Los Angeles was the same story of Black and Brown communities being seized through eminent domain and through the historical redlining of those communities,” Agredano said, adding that, under the guise of progress, these projects all follow the same pattern: “eminent domain, destruction of homes, removal of a community, and then the construction of a freeway.”

In an earlier piece, Collector (2019), Agredano placed an unprimed canvas in the backyard of his childhood home. Over the course of a year, it soon became dirtied. To those unfamiliar with the work’s history, at first glance, the canvas’s ashy blots resemble charcoal or smeared graphite. The caption corrects that impression, listing as its materials smog, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, soot, dirt, dust, guano, and automobile tire microplastics, among others. Agredano thinks of the work as a self-portrait, one that indexes not only his body and what it experiences but the larger systems of which it is a part. Agredano’s work uses “gestures that are very minimal, but illustrative of these huge outside forces,” said Bryan Barcena, a curator at large at LAND, who organized the presentation of FUME, with Irina Gusin.

In its title, Collector also references the acquisition of art objects and how they circulate within the art world; a museum previously did not allow the work to enter its galleries because of its use of pollutants, according to Agredano. “I like that the work can create that sort of resistance in people,” he said, “because why is it okay for millions of people to live next to this material, but it can’t enter the museum space?”

As a canvas polluted in the predominantly Latino Lynwood, Collector also points out how conceptions of “dirty” and “clean” can be racially coded. Agredano is reminded of the Bracero Program, in which Mexican laborers came to the US during World War II to fill labor shortages. “This idea of the ‘dirty Mexican’ is a historical thing,” Agredano said, “When the braceros came to the US, they were literally sprayed with DDT, and were, in a sense, fumigated.”

As FUME collected air samples, Agredano invited local artists—Hunter Baoengstrum, Daid Roy, Angela Nguyen, Chris Suarez, Vincent E. Hernandez, Felix Quintana, Lizette Hernandez, Eduardo Camacho, Maria Maea, and Cielo Saucedo—to create works on or around the freeways significant to them. Agredano calls the collaborative project a form of “sous-veillance,” or “a view from below,” a form of data collection that captures what was “created against our will and creates a document of it.” Nguyen has created a tufted rug depicting the history of the 91, which runs from Gardena, through Orange County, to Riverside. Roy staged a noise concert in the bed of Agredano’s Pickup, Baoengstrum planted a filing cabinet on the 101, and Quintana installed a temporary tetherball court by the 105.

Against and within the freeways’ crude geometries, strangling the city and sloughing infinite toxic particles, these artists shape LA’s freeways into sites of resistance and invention, reappropriating privatized, policed, or abandoned spaces for the commons. Like generations of LA artists before them, from Studio Z to ASCO, Agredano and his collaborators are creating a new map of the city. 

In 1965 physicist Lloyd Cross saw his first hologram in Michigan’s Willow Run, a laboratory in a defunct bomber plant, specializing in radar and infrared optics for battlefield surveillance. Scientists there built upon UK-based Dennis Gabor’s original 1948 invention that used a mercury arc lamp to create the laser hologram, the first method of reconstructing reality with a concentrated beam of light. Three years later Cross invented the first moving hologram: an image of a woman blowing a kiss.

Arising from classified Cold War research, holography was once heralded for both its technical applications and artistic possibilities. Unlike stereoscopic illusions, which employ various means of doubling two-dimensional images to create the appearance of depth, holograms are three-dimensional recordings created by manipulating and diffracting light. Proponents believed that, just as photography had overtaken painting as the dominant visual mode by the early twentieth century, the hologram would someday usurp the photograph’s position.

Cross defected from the lab amid the tumult of the anti-Vietnam War movement, becoming one of the first experts to emancipate holography from the military industrial complex. At the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1969, he mounted the first-ever exhibition of holograms. Soon after, he presented another show in New York, with a holographic re-creation of Robert Indiana’s 1967 sculpture Love. Believing information should be free, Cross then launched the San Francisco School of Holography in an old warehouse. A forebear of today’s hacker spaces, the school democratized the medium by using off-the-shelf materials and found objects. It maintained the collaborative, entrepreneurial culture of the Cold War lab while rejecting its militarism. Cross, living in a tie-dyed parachute tent, wrote about lasers for Radical Software, a publication founded by members of the video collective Raindance. He created a moving hologram of avant-garde dancer Simone Forti, and founded the Multiplex Company with a group of Bay Area filmmakers (Salvador Dalí, who created a hologram of Alice Cooper, was one client.)

At the dawn of the Information Age, holography was part of a range of perceptual experiments, from light shows to early video and multimedia art, designed to liberate the individual from the bland templates of mass media. Gene Youngblood concluded his 1970 book, Expanded Cinema, by prophesying that holography was the medium of the future: a cinema that was “a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.” Seen as both primal and futuristic at once, holography seemed to present a new kind of bodily and pictorial space, a mode of communication that could unite a global humanity in a new sensorial community. “The hologram is likely as anything technological to push your subliminal awe and wonder button and leave an ancient message flashing somewhere below the surface of consciousness: Here we have some Powerful Magic,” claimed a 1973 Rolling Stone article on Cross’s acid-laced explorations.

Whether due to their technical complexity, lack of a standardized format, or the explosion of digital media, holograms stalled out as pop curiosities, sidelined from art history to serve instead as shorthand for an ersatz imagining of the future. After endowing figures like Princess Leia with spectral form, holograms began appearing on magazine covers and credit cards. They’re now being used for information storage, medical imaging, and mapping military battlegrounds. The story of holography, riddled with detours and cul-de-sacs, defies any tidy teleological vision of technological progress. And yet the wonder of the hologram still remains: the three-dimensional uncannily conjured, the virtual object both present and absent, sculpted from nothing but light.

This article appears in the January/February 2021 issue as a sidebar to “A History of Presence,” p. 62.

The most immediate aspect of the German artist Anna Oppermann’s work is its insistent and compulsive weirdness. In the late 1960s, Oppermann, who died in 1993 at the age of fifty-three, began creating works she called “Ensembles”: early examples of installation art consisting of drawings, photographs, paintings, and household objects arranged in dense, overlapping constellations that spread across gallery walls and floors, and that took as their central theme the conditions of being a woman and an artist. Oppermann saw her Ensembles as permanently unfinished and endlessly preparatory, often circling back to a given installation over the course of several years. Her work, which has rarely been exhibited outside Europe, was often received harshly by critics during her lifetime, but today it seems ripe for reappraisal as a feminist project reclaiming the domestic sphere as philosophical and aesthetic territory.

This exhibition, the first of Oppermann’s work in the United States since 1999, highlighted her drawings from the ’60s and early ’70s, which she made while developing her early Ensembles. Oppermann, who studied philosophy before taking up art, treated still lifes as metaphysical investigations, depicting not only domestic mundanities like ashtrays, potted plants, aprons, and curtains, but also the process of perceiving them. The ordinary household objects in the drawings become ecstatic instruments, the kitchen tables presenting uncanny tableaux. It’s difficult to parse where the external world ends and Oppermann’s interior landscape begins.

One untitled drawing from 1970 shows a downward view of a woman standing in front of a kitchen table with a mirror at its center, the tablecloth a flat white expanse. Her aproned torso and small feet occupy the lower half of the composition, with a wavering white void indicating the top of her head. Compressed by extreme foreshortening, the forms of her body and the table echo one another to suggest two parts of a whole, as if the borders between self and other have dissolved into a hallucinatory whorl.

Oppermann’s tablescapes are often riddled with mirrors and windows, refracting and multiplying the objects depicted. In Beans (1968), for instance, a dish of green beans sits on a yellow tablecloth whose wrinkles resemble cranial folds, while a mirror displaying a magnified reflection of the beans hovers above. Another untitled 1970 work depicts the artist from behind as she bends over her makeup mirror on the table. Her form is doubled in the foreground as an inflated silhouette superimposed onto the scene. The outline of her head encloses an enlarged version of the mirror, which bears a reflection of her polka-dotted curtains and houseplants.

One Ensemble, Being a Housewife (1968/73), was included in the exhibition. Resting on a low table draped with a checkered tablecloth were cutouts from found cartoons, a potted anthurium plant, and dollhouse miniatures. Handwritten notes, drawings, and photographs were haphazardly pinned and taped to the wall behind the table; others were spread out on the floor. Many of the drawings and photographs depicted the Ensemble itself, replicating its elements from different perspectives to produce a mise en abyme. Suggesting a folk altar or a crowded mood board, the work is concerned less with formal organization than with the unruly display of information in all its overabundance.

In a 1982 review in Der Spiegel, a critic dismissed Oppermann’s Ensembles as “not exactly profound, but assembled with monomaniacal diligence.” There is indeed an obsessiveness laid bare in these works, with their sprawling, grandiose displays of personal talismans, notes, and sketches—but their profundity lies in this very excess. Rejecting the expectation that women present tidy appearances and take up as little space as possible, Oppermann’s work feels subversive in its messiness.

 

This article appears under the title “Anna Oppermann” in the October 2019 issue, pp. 90–91.