In a City Shaken by ICE and Fire, Dealer Bruce Lurie Focuses On Hope
Since spring, when ICE descended on L.A., indiscriminately detaining innocent people and igniting mayhem, a significant portion of the city has been living in fear. Public transit has seen a 10-15 percent decline in riders since the beginning of the raids, and predominantly Latino neighborhoods look like ghost towns where immigrants, legal and otherwise, hide from authorities.
“There’s just not enough positivity and love,” Santa Monica gallerist Bruce Lurie told Observer. That’s the impetus behind his show, “Carpe Every Single Diem,” featuring works by street artists Ruben Rojas and WRDSMITH (Phil Brody). “This show means a lot more to me since this is such an emotional time in everybody’s life. I’m excited to do something that people are going to say, ‘Wow, I’m really glad I saw this.’”
The new exhibit features limited-edition prints, immersive installations and some collaborative works and curated pieces by the artists. The title of the show is borrowed from a collaboration by the two, Carpe Every Single Diem, featuring WRDSMITH’s signature manual typewriter stencil with the title set against a backdrop of Rojas’ “love” pattern. The color scheme is monochrome on the right, blue and orange on the left.
The Only Lie, another typewriter by WRDSMITH, reads “The only lie I ever told you is that I liked you when I already knew I loved you.” Rojas’ Pool Party is the word “love” in cursive red against a lapis background.
“We named the show ‘Carpe Every Single Diem’ and it’s just spreading positivity,” says WRDSMITH, who did pieces benefiting the recovery effort after the fires earlier this year. “There’s a lot going on in the world right now. It starts with empathy and then the neighborhood, the city, state, country, world. This show is about: come, walk through the door, we’re going to spread positivity. We’re going to make you smile, we’re going to make you feel good in the moment and live in the moment.”
A native Angeleno, Rojas was a boy when the Rodney King uprising reduced portions of the city to ashes. This year alone, his hometown has witnessed not one but two man-made conflagrations.
“I see L.A. burning, and it’s like, what’s the right way? Lighting cars on fire, lighting the U.S. flag on fire isn’t the answer,” says Rojas, a TED speaker and corporate consultant who has partnered with brands like the NFL, BMW and American Express. “There’s too much fear in the world. You turn on the TV, it’s fear, you read the news, it’s fear. It’s too easy to forget that love is the answer. I’m inviting people to see the world through the lens of love. I hope my work allows people to have more conversations. We’ve lost the art of debate. Maybe we don’t see eye to eye, but we can accept each other and have a beer together.”
Rojas planned on becoming an orthopedic surgeon, but spent the summer before med school working in real estate, where he made a small fortune. By his early twenties, he was working in loans and finance, making more money than he ever imagined. Then came the subprime meltdown of 2008. He turned to retirement financial services and again earned a fortune, but little peace of mind. To clear his head, he did community work, painting murals.
“My first mural said, ‘Who will you be?’ And instead of looking at billboards that told me I wasn’t enough and I needed to buy this and I needed to buy that, I started writing the opposite of fear,” recalls Rojas. “And that’s how the work started.”
WRDSMITH moved to L.A. after quitting an advertising job in Cleveland. He wrote screenplays for short movies and features, as well as a novel, The Holden Age of Hollywood, a satiric noir set in Tinseltown. It was around this time that his typewriters with cryptic messages started turning up on walls and overpasses around the city.
“It started with L.A., to say things to people in L.A. that I wish they had said to me when I arrived,” he notes, recalling the origins of a street art career that has taken him around the world. “We come here with big dreams, and my messages were to aspire to inspire, and dream bigger and persevere. I like the idea of being surprised by my pieces, it will change your mood, your day. I know people started taking photos and forwarding them to friends and family and loved ones, and there was a ripple effect. That was calculated in that I wanted to spread positivity.”
When fire struck the Palisades last January, gallerist Lurie was concerned, but not overly. “When they tell you you got to get out, the fire’s coming down the hill, you figure they’ll stop it. It’s the village, it’s not going to go into the town,” he shrugs. “So, you leave everything. I was almost going to leave my dog. I figured I’ll be back in three or four hours.”
He wasn’t. The fire took everything, his entire inventory, including names like Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Anna Sims, Mr. Brainwash and Michael Gorman. At the time, he was planning a blue-chip show featuring $1.2 million worth of art: works on paper by David Hockney, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons and Robert Motherwell. Luckily, the truck delivering the artwork got snarled in emergency traffic and had to turn back.
Originally from Brooklyn, Lurie was steeped in Manhattan’s vibrant 1980s art scene. He launched his first gallery in the East Village and later moved to Chelsea in 1987. After 9/11, he relocated to L.A. Since losing his Pacific Palisades gallery in the fire, he opened a new space last March in nearby Santa Monica.
“I feel like I’m doing something positive,” he says about “Carpe Every Single Diem.” “Ruben’s work just says ‘love.’ How much better can you get than that? Brody’s work is always about positivity. What’s better than a message with positive wording? This show will give people hope and compassion.”
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