BIG TENT Works by CalArts Reef Residency Artists-in-Residence and Collaborators RSVP link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/big-tent-opening-reception-tickets-1014105034457 September 14th - October 12th, 2024 Opening Reception: Saturday 14th, 6:00 - 9:00 PM The Reef, 1933 S Broadway, Los Angeles 90007, Suite 1206 (12th floor) The CalArts Reef Residency and MM/DD/YYYY present BIG TENT, a group exhibition featuring works by residents Anaís Azul, Alex Barlas, Nick Ginsburg, Zoe Moon, Wes Weisbaum, Shu L. Xu, Yanbin Zhao, and collaborating artists Edgar Arceneaux, Justine Faith, Samuel Garnett, Clay Hollander, Cameron Masters, Abigail Stanton, and Kaiwen Ren. 74 years ago in a Downtown LA parking lot, more than 7,000 visitors crowded into two conjoined circus tents for the West Coast’s largest-ever Southern Baptist congregation. Dubbed the ‘Canvas Cathedral’ and ‘Big Tent,’ services ran for eight consecutive weeks, its main entrance framed by a sign reading GREATER LOS ANGELES REVIVAL. The CalArts Reef Residency, now in its ninth year, sits at the evangelical meeting’s former address on Washington and Hill. The residency and Big Tent share themes — fellowship, meditation, outreach, inward and/or outward revival — that could lend some tidy subtext to the exhibition. But this collection of works was made without pre-agreed aesthetics or conceptual uniformity in mind. Instead, BIG TENT is predicated on the works’ unforced connections, outcomes of residents’ and collaborators’ sharing of the residency’s time and space. An inexhaustive list of overlaps can be seen throughout the two nearby gallery spaces. Written language falls apart and reforms into types of visual glossolalia. Obsolete monitors screen footage of urban and personal transformations. Draped mosquito nets and tarp-like paintings become makeshift shelters. Photographs of empty pews and a re-staging of a play by Sartre suggest theological anxieties. Spoken words mix with performances of hybridized charango songs. A quote by political philosopher Regis Debray relates to the exhibition’s central conceit: “There is no traveling dogma, no revolutionary strategy independent of the conditions determined by the place and time; everything is to be reinvented every time on location.” Like the Big Tent’s itinerant preachers and audiences, each resident, collaborator, and spectator enters with their own agendas and leaves with their own epiphanies, but only after communing for a while. With this in mind, Debray’s citation could be updated: everything is to be reinvented every time on location — by its specific constituencies. This is the inaugural exhibition of MM/DD/YYYY, the CalArts Reef Residency’s resident-run gallery.