At the Hammer Museum, Gary Garrels assembles a distinctly Angeleno strain of contemporary visual language

Doug Harvey in the LA Weekly: �One of the most pronounced symptoms of the wide-scale institutionalization of artistic practice has been the rise of curatorial studies as an academic category and the subsequent escalation of the curator�s role and visibility � sometimes to the point of supplanting the place of the artist as the raison d��tre of an exhibition. Occasionally this inversion is justified, but more often it stands as sad and stunted evidence of the blahblahblah-ification of what is essentially a complex preverbal multisensory language; just because a picture�s worth a thousand words doesn�t mean those words demand to be spelled out�.Which is why it is such a great and unexpected pleasure to come across a museum show like �Eden�s Edge,� a sampler of 15 contemporary Los Angeles artists assembled by the Hammer�s chief curator, Gary Garrels.� Artists: Ginny Bishton, Mark Bradford, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Stanya Kahn & Harry Dodge, Monica Majoli, Matthew Monahan, Rebecca Morales, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Jason Rhoades, Anna Sew Hoy, and Jim ShawRead more. �Eden�s Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists� The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., through September 2