LACMA College Night- Surrealists, sculpture, mashed potato bar oh my!

The LACMA College Night was perhaps too much of a good thing. For one, the museum had an impressive line-up of exhibits, from California Design to Surrealists to sculptures to a mashed potato bar in the main atrium, and secondly, all of the aforementioned things were free. The catch: it's only for two hours, and then the security would frisk, or belligerently push as you will soon read, all the visitors out the door. Given the circumstances, I wasn't able to take as long as I wanted to to look at the artworks, but there were several that certainly caught my eye and I would definitely be revisiting. One of them was  Chris Burden's Metropolis II, a massive model city with at least a hundred cars running on race tracks up and down and around the city. I especially liked this piece because it evoked in me a sense of nostalgia for the past when my siblings and I would spend hours using building blocks and plastic race tracks to build our own metropolis, and how Burden's piece was a manifestation of our wildest childhood dreams. It's like when people build those enormous and intricate sand castles- it's the most idealized version of a childhood ideal. It just makes you happy looking at hundreds the toy cars zipping along the tracks and swooping around 8 foot buildings. I certainly enjoyed it, and it also made me want to do sculptures like this, in that it's just something fun and amazing at the same time and resonates with anyone who was ever a kid before. In the California Design section I was really drawn to these architectural, colorful gift boxes, mostly because they seemed like they could stand alone as works of art and yet they're these mass-produced collectables meant for extremely corporate ends. I thought it was an ingenious business strategy and perhaps a landmark in packaging design. As for the Surrealist exhibit, I was in awe at how many Frida Kahlo's they had, but I was drawn especially to the works of Remedios Varo which contained many fantasy elements which too reminded me of childhood. Her use of texture was especially deliberate and impressive, and her images haunting and color schemes subtle and beautiful. I really wanted to look at her paintings some more but by then the security guards were yelling for everyone to get out. One especially snubbed visitor decided to pick a fight with the security guards which led to some minor physical injuries. Besides the abrupt ending, I had very enjoyable time and would definitely be going back to get a closer look.