Why I love L.A.
I am not from Los Angeles, but I came to live here over ten years ago. Since then, this has become my home. My friends here, some of them native Angelinos and others who found themselves here by chance alike, have welcomed me into their lives with a generosity and warmth that has really made this city for me.
"everything can test anybody’s understanding of camp or elegance"
In my experience, the imaginative energy of Los Angeles is what really distinguishes it from any other place. Its history in moviemaking has perpetually shaped the urban landscape as both hilariously thin artifice and immense and boundless possibility. This tenuous balance where the city doubles as a horrible incoherent mix of half-baked architectural styles and simultaneously a unique and complex sampling of any and everything can test anybody’s understanding of camp or elegance. This makes it a particularly interesting place to consider issues of taste, aesthetics, desire, and history. It is a place that has all of these qualities and also has none of these qualities at once. Just as when a movie is over and the set is taken apart, can you be sure it was real or just a dream?
Recent events here in Los Angeles with the devastating wild fires have only strengthened my understanding of Los Angeles as a city that perpetually reinvents itself. It has a resilient determination to become something new that is its own defining feature. Everyone’s support and love to come together to keep Los Angeles moving forward and rebuilding itself has been an inspiring episode in the face of so much tragic loss. It is a city that will continue to reinvent itself and yet retain its essential dream of its own possibility.
"historical sampling is what I love about Los Angeles most"
Having just moved into one of the apartment buildings that served as the home of Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe and his nudist neighbors in Robert Altman’s adaptation of The Long Goodbye, life takes on an eccentric pseudo-cinematic aura where the ambience of the film and the hillside enclave merge and daily life plays out in a series of memories and fantasies that are a great setting for my painting practice as I too paint my way between the imagined and the real.”
Max Xeno Karnig (b. 1990 in New York, New York, lives and works between Los Angeles and Berkeley, California). Karnig received a BA in both art history and studio art from the University of California, San Diego and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.
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