Where Does Your Excitement Go?
What are you excited about? What gets you going?
Last week was Los Angeles Art Week. I managed to get to 22 art openings, 4 fairs, attended 3 parties, 2 studio visits, 1 architecture tour, and even snuck in a shabbat dinner all in the span of 7 days. I’d say it was one for the books.
All in all, I enjoyed myself. Important to note that I experienced a lot of things that bugged me, killed me, appalled me, flattened me and most destructively, bored me. Wouldn’t want it any other way :)
On the upside, I bumped into many friends who were selling out of their works, beaming with joy, and genuinely having fun—something we all need to be having a little bit more of in times like these.
My distaste for art fairs has swung to a new side of the pendulum. Dare I say, I may even like them?
Perhaps it’s just Los Angeles.
In fact, yea maybe that’s it. It’s definitely Los Angeles.
How do I know? I think about the community we have here in LA. I can’t help but think about the wildly magnetic and exhaustive energy the people in my close circles and peripheries put into their practice, their work, and their lives. It was on full display during art week. I think if there is anything to take away from a fair, it’s that they have a funny way of pointing out who is putting in the necessary work and who isn’t.
One evening, I was standing atop a hill looking over West Hollywood in a sea of designers, first talking to Rocky and then Rocco, shaking hands with old friends and new talking about what we have been seeing, what projects we have coming up, and what we are excited to build. The curiosity and attention we all pay towards each other’s practice is truly unbeatable. While my body was on the verge of collapse, and Dan Tana’s was calling, all I really wanted to do was get back to work.
That’s the Los Angeles I know and have grown to love. Complacency has no place here.
It’s been 1.5 years since I last published a piece of writing on this Substack. Within that period, I co-founded AUTOBODY autobody, an experimental gallery practice with Joseph Santiago-Dieppa in between two auto body shops on south La Brea Avenue. What started purely as a method for putting on the art and design we’d like to see more of has become the single most exciting venture I have ever participated in. Focused solely on Los Angeles (and area) makers and doers, AUTOBODY autobody shows quarterly since opening in November 2024.
Our next intervention is March 27-29th. Look out! We’re building a block of cheese— or something like that :)
While we practice and exist mostly as a gallery right now, AUTOBODY autobody is currently blobbing into new fields of interest. More on that another time.
The beauty of AUTOBODY autobody, other than the fact that I always get to say it twice, is that we are actively creating and finding the moment for that artwork or that sculpture or that sketch sitting dormant in a sketchbook, to get built, seen, gathered around, discussed, and sold. But I think it’s vital that I mention that we never intended to start a “gallery.” It just sorta, well, happened. After the Chair Show people were like “when’s the next show?”
Joseph and I straight up turned to each other and scratched our noggins like a clip from a cartoon and started to follow the excitement.
On November 7, 2025, almost a year since we started, we opened Lamp Show in a 13,000 sq ft, 3 story vacant office building in transition to become another office building called Wilshire Online down the street from LACMA.
38 artists, 54 pieces.
1,100 people showed up for our opening night. Hundreds more in the two weeks following. We even had a drummer, Greg Lewis, play for 4 hours straight crammed in a tiny office space nestled between rooms of luminous oddities, apparatuses, and swarms of art and design junkies bobbing in and out of each room.
What I think I love most about what we do with AUTOBODY autobody is giving the people we care about something to look forward to. Whether it be the artists and designers we challenge to be a part of our interventions or the stranger who overheard us explaining what the next build is— 90% of what I think my job is, is to catalyze that excitement. It’s funny, Joseph would rather not discuss what we are up to because it disrupts his regular flow of making work in silence in the studio and then BAM! A new piece to add to the oeuvre and the world.
The prestige… That is Joseph’s jam.
I definitely have a hard time keeping things to myself.
Sounds like a good balance for collaborators, right?
Through our partnership I have learned a great deal about what it means to facilitate and curate the temporal experiences we call art shows. While they are often short lived, especially at AUTOBODY autobody (Lamp Show was our longest show yet at 21 days) the expectations we set for ourselves and our collaborators are extremely high. So much of what has made this past year successful is how reliant we are on three things: risk, uncertainty, and trust.
Historically, California has had a knack for ushering in risk as part of artistic practice. Take Joan Didion’s epic words on California,
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
To say it simply, and completely disregarding Anton Chekhov, California is where it starts and ends. This is as far west you can go before you are out of land to make it happen on. The impetus behind this writing came from a conversation I shared with my friend and close collaborator Devin Feldman (mastermind behind the infamous HVAC lamp from Lamp Show) about how we are all trying to make it work all the time— because it has to. Nothing to fall back on, nothing to pivot to. There is no alternative to this line of work that we are all entrenched in 24 hours a day.
Risk taking in LA isn’t aesthetic or optional, it’s structural. Speaking of authors on California, Henry Miller changed my mind not so long ago in his writing, Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Up until February, if you had asked me what “The West” meant, I’d say Colorado. But Miller suggests that the Colorado Rockies are just a stop on the road that ultimately continues to the Pacific Edge, where the American act of reinvention has no choice but to work.
The desperation described in Didion’s words mixed with the paradise of the West coast Miller described is the blend that anybody living and making it happen in California understands well, most likely without even acknowledging it.
I return to risk, uncertainty, and trust.
AUTOBODY autobody’s playbook would be nothing without trust. When we say “run it” to an artist who has only just sent us the roughest scribble of an idea for a show, there is a mutual assurance occurring. They’re doing something ambitious, perhaps something they haven’t quite done before, and we’re essentially offering to help make it happen.
Incredible things happen when you stoke the flame under what we might call rather rambunctious ideas. Between Joseph and me, if we don’t have a good enough reason for saying no, it’s a yes. There are times when I have no idea what Joseph is trying to get at, but I trust… I know that if it were flipped, Joseph would trust, too.
At the end of the day, we must remind ourselves that none of this is too precious.
I return to the question—what are you excited about?
Tell me. I’d like to know.
See you soon— I promise it won’t be another year and a half :)
Eli