A Night in West Hollywood

Doug Aitken Chris Jordan David LaChapelle Spotted at Frieze: Celebrities, Sales, and a Sauna Doug Aitken Remastered When in Basel for... Art Basel Dallas Cowboys Show Their Artsy Side

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David LaChapelle was the most famous name showing off art that evening, and he attracted a typically glamorous crowd to the David DeSanctis Gallery to see his Rape of Africa (2009) photograph, which was accompanied by his preparatory sketches for the piece. His fans — Carol Song, singer Juakali, model Nana Agyapong, Project Runway enfant terrible Santino Rice, and producer Thairin Smothers, among others — were sporting hairstyles and outfits that gallery-goers in New York don’t even attempt.

As LaChapelle’s subjects have become more serious — he gone from fashion models in precarious situations, to baroque religious iconography, to, now, the wholesale pillaging of a continent — his post-production work has only gotten more hallucinogenic. The new work has babies brandishing bazookas and a young man wrapped only in a satin loincloth that looks suspiciously like a young ("Banality"-era) Jeff Koons.

Meanwhile, Regen Projects was feting Doug Aitken, who last popped up at the gallery back in 2005. He was an established figure then, but he’s cemented his standing in recent years with shows at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and the 2008's Carnegie International, making it an ideal time for a victory lap.

Thankfully, Los Angeles’s celebrities did not let Aitken down. Inglorious Basterds star Omar Doom came through with friend Bella Fisher to watch migration (2008), the artist’s video of animals roaming through abandoned hotel rooms, which was making its California debut. Curator Andrew Berardini strolled through, and Sean Thomas was also on hand to check out Aitken’s new light boxes.

That would be enough art to fill an evening in most cities, but West Hollywood was feeling generous, also offering Chris Jordan and Laura Ball at Kopeikin Gallery and Cristof Yvoré at Michael Kohn Gallery. Shadi Beccai and Brandon Goodman were spotted at the former, while a healthy crowd of art lovers, who must have been barely born when West Hollywood was created, wandered through the later.

Rebecca McQuigg, Reggie Casagrande, Alyxa Chang, and Isabelle Saubadu Carter were at M+B Gallery, where Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits provided a fitting close to the evening. Los Angeles is, as the cliché goes, a city obsessed with driving and staring, and Bush's photographs concern both. They catch people behind the steering wheels of cars, together with the camera for a brief moment before coasting off in countless different directions.