MIA Gallery, the pocket-sized contemporary space tucked into Chung King Road in Chinatown, has built a reputation for programmming that sits at the productive edge between fine art and popular culture. This month the gallery stages its most ambitious project to date, partnering with Downtown LA collective Unraveled Artists for a show that dissolves the line between music merchandise and gallery exhibition.
The show — titled simply Unraveled at MIA — brings together the full archive of Unraveled Artists’ musician-designer collaborations alongside a new body of works commissioned specifically for the exhibition. Where the T-shirt project asks what happens when you give a musician’s visual identity to a graphic designer, the gallery works ask what happens when you remove the garment entirely and leave only the image.
The result is a mixed-media installation that references album cover art, concert poster design and street typography as much as it references the white-cube conventions of the gallery environment. Several of the participating designers have produced large-format works on canvas; others have contributed silkscreen editions and painted constructions that occupy the wall and floor space of the gallery simultaneously.
A live performance component — three short sets by musicians from the Unraveled Artists roster, staged on successive Friday evenings during the run — completes the picture. The show opens with the February Art Walk and runs through the end of the month. MIA Gallery, Chung King Road, Chinatown. Free admission.