{"id":197163,"date":"2025-12-17T21:02:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T21:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/197163\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T21:02:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T21:02:16","slug":"the-2025-california-biennial-is-trapped-in-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/197163\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2025 California Biennial Is Trapped in the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

COSTA MESA, California \u2014 As a former teenage suburbanite, I arrived at the Orange County Museum of Art\u2019s California Biennial, Desperate, Scared, But Social<\/a>, with excitement. I expected to feel kinship with the theme, which revolves around adolescence and the feelings, identity, and sense of the world that mature from it. Instead, I was underwhelmed by its shallow curiosity about today\u2019s teenagers, and the exhibition\u2019s stunted growth.<\/p>\n

The biennial, which had been on hiatus for a number of years, returned with 12 artists depicting youth culture primarily through photography, painting, drawing, and readymade objects pulled from their personal archives. It also features two shows within the show \u2014 the delightful Piece of Me, organized by the Orange County Young Curators program, which gives local teens a taste of art curation and administration, and a ho-hum display devoted to pieces from the historic Gardena High School Art Collection (1919\u201356), a trove of early 20th century paintings that students hand-picked for their school\u2019s investment.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Deanna Templeton’s photo series What She Said (2000\u2013ongoing) <\/p>\n

The exhibition starts strong, with a presentation of Deanna Templeton\u2019s What She Said (2000\u2013ongoing) portrait series, accented with hot pink. The photographer pairs diary entries from her teenage years, which unfolded during the 1980s, with contemporary portraits of teen girls in countercultural movements spread throughout the world. The punks, surfers, and other subcultural groups stand out through their fashion choices, like two-toned hair, shredded tights, and safety pins doubling as nose piercings. <\/p>\n

Most of the women, captured in a combination of black and white and color film, contrast today\u2019s mainstream obsession with Botox and fillers to conceal the effects of aging; the alternative crowd has bags under their eyes and forehead wrinkles paired with scowls, hinting at a potentially rough life. Templeton\u2019s diaries, on the other hand, depict the low-stakes drama of a typical high schooler. She logs concerts, talks about \u201cfuck\u2019n cute\u201d boys, and summarizes petty arguments with her dad. The juxtaposition between the subjects\u2019 appearance and the frivolous journaling suggests that these extremes aren\u2019t mutually exclusive and collapses the teenage girl\u2019s mythos into a universal experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"Close up of the lenticular overlay in Heesoo Kwon’s \u201cLeymusoom Firefly, 2024, Irwon-dong, kitchen, 1990-1993\u201d (2025)<\/p>\n

Another intriguing entry is Heesoo Kwon\u2019s photographic installations, which enhance childhood photographs by adding matriarchal aliens and AI-generated edits. Kwon enlarges old photographs of family moments in the kitchen or living room, sometimes stretching them to the full height of the gallery walls. The edges of these photos warp into an uncanny perspective and eventually blur into blackness, which is the work of Adobe Firefly, an AI software.<\/p>\n

The largest image in the installation \u201cLeymusoom Firefly, 2024, Irwon-dong, kitchen, 1990-1993\u201d (2025) portrays the back of a child\u2019s head in the foreground and their hand, drenched in the camera\u2019s flash, reaching out to a woman washing something in the sink. The older woman looks over her shoulder, surprised by the camera. The digital expansion, which includes extra ceiling space, white walls, and a strange black mass that might be a mutated Christmas tree, gives the scene a haunting quality. AI\u2019s awkward additions put the entire photograph\u2019s authenticity in question, but that isn\u2019t unlike memory, which can also be faulty and inventive, breaking stride with reality.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of ephemera related to The Linda Lindas and custom suits for the band designed by guitarist and in-house stylist Bela Salazar, worn on The Tonight Show in 2024.<\/p>\n

The series also opens a portal into Leymusoom, Kwon\u2019s invented religion and hagiography, which inserts maternal ancestors into the artist\u2019s memories. In another photo from the same installation, one of Leymusoom\u2019s reptilian elders appears next to a woman carrying a dirty dish. Kwon has turned the photograph into a lenticular print, so the alien is only visible from certain angles, blurring boundaries between the spirit and earthly realms.<\/p>\n

While these two artists stood out, they were exceptions. More often, the biennial made statements about adolescence through archival materials. As a result of this odd decision, many established artists presented pieces that they created in their teenage years. Laura Owens, Joey Terrell, and the 1990s riot grrrr band Emily\u2019s Sassy Lime (Emily Ryan, Amy Yao, and Wendy Yao) \u2014 whose album Desperate, Scared, But Social (1995) gave the biennial its title \u2014 are mostly defined by their childhood relics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Laura Owens, \u201cUntitled\u201d (1979), acrylic on canvas<\/p>\n

Owen\u2019s, \u201cUntitled\u201d (1987), made when she was a teenager, is an awkward composition of school lockers, stairs, and trash cans, stretched onto a trapezoidal canvas. The work itself doesn\u2019t inspire deep thoughts, but its existence got me to ruminate on the childhood home my parents sold in 2018, when they finally decided to divorce. My dad was ruthless about downsizing and wanted to throw away all my drawings from high school. I had to justify their sentimental value, and rescued a few of them. Those drawings, as well as my entire childhood, were crammed into a single plastic tote that lives in my dad\u2019s garage in Chicago.<\/p>\n

It seems that Owens was able to salvage much more from her youth, as were Ryan and the Yao sisters. In the gallery devoted to Emily\u2019s Sassy Lime, all three bandmates use their personal tchotchkes to recreate bookshelves from their ’90s-era teenage bedrooms. A plush Garfield toy sits atop handwritten notes embellished with stickers, an ancient can of Cheez Balls, and tons of pins made by punks and zinesters. The bookcases are fun and fascinating, but simply putting nostalgia on display does little to transform its meaning or to connect past generations to today\u2019s teenagers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Abetz & Drescher, \u201cLong Before Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll\u201d (2006), acrylic on canvas<\/p>\n

The most conceptual takes appear in the Orange County Young Curators mini exhibition, Piece of Me, which explores authenticity in the digital age. Though the curators had to work with OCMA\u2019s permanent collection, they could still get into a teen\u2019s mind. A dazzling painting by Abetz & Drescher, \u201cLong Before Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll\u201d (2006), shows a young woman with an electric guitar posing amid a surrealist archeological site, surrounded by vignettes of sin and suffering. It\u2019s both the trauma that has shaped her and the inner turmoil in her angsty mind. Another photographic series, Ed Templeton\u2019s Teenage Smokers (1999), touches upon the performative acts teenagers engage in to appear cool. A modern take on this series wouldn\u2019t even need to reshoot it with vapes, because Gen Z brought smoking back into style<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Displaying juvenilia from established artists feels like a lazy way to add some name recognition to the biennial, but says little about adolescents today and makes the show\u2019s message inscrutable. With little remixing, Desperate, Scared, But Social\u2019s broad strokes paint a portrait of youth that mirrors an after school special more than the real world.<\/p>\n

\"\"Assemblages by Amy Yao<\/p>\n

The 2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social<\/a> continues at the Orange County Museum of Art (3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, California) through January 4, 2026. The biennial was organized by Courtenay Finn and Christopher Y. Lew, with Associate Curator Lauren Leving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COSTA MESA, California \u2014 As a former teenage suburbanite, I arrived at the Orange County Museum of Art\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-197163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}