Smog and Mirrors: The Versatility of Video Art

New Theater Hollywood / Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, THEATER (installation view) (2025). Video, color, sound. Image courtesy of the artists and the Hammer Museum. Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Photo: Jeff McLane.

“The town was one giant audition,” asserts the narrator in THEATER (2025), a five-part film by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, on view in Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum. Los Angeles functions as both a backdrop and an allegory in THEATER and across Made in L.A. 2025 more broadly. While the exhibition stops short of offering any cohesive curatorial insight about the city and its art scene, it does make a strong case for the continued significance and subversive potential of video art in a place known for its relentless image-making. Spanning short-form videos, immersive installations, and a feature-length film, the video works in Made in L.A. 2025 demonstrate how versatile the camera can be as an artistic tool, capable not only of capturing a singular moment but of documenting the accumulating layers of time. Through experimentations in perspective, light, and movement—and how these elements correspond to memory, history, and place—several artists in Made in L.A. 2025 reveal an image of Los Angeles that is at once glamorous and mundane: a site of constant reinvention, where process becomes a performance in and of itself.

Self-referential, illusory, and delightfully navel-gazing, THEATER follows the pursuits of Kennedy, a fictional character who buys a black box theater on Santa Monica Boulevard and attempts to form an ensemble. The film incorporates footage shot on 16mm film during rehearsals at Henkel and Pitegoff’s very own New Theater Hollywood, a small theater that the two founded in 2024. We see artist Tarren Johnson dancing on stage in black high-heeled boots, actress Kaia Gerber applying lipliner in a mirror. Narrated only by subtitles, these scenes evoke the theatrical drama of silent films while the work’s playful existentialism and use of jump cut editing refers to the techniques of the French New Wave. The combination of documentary footage and fictional narrative gives THEATER a dreamlike quality, reinforced by the physical elements—red carpet, theater seats, tinsel, and a large mirror—that accompany the film’s installation. These objects not only operate as extensions of the film’s content but involve the viewer in its conceptual framework. What we are presented with in THEATER is not a perfected performance or a final product but a love letter to collective gathering—the repetitive rehearsals, preparatory rituals, and meandering obsessions that comprise a life in Hollywood.

Though similarly immersive, Na Mira’s work involves a more painterly approach to video. Sugungga (Hello) (2024) takes its title from one of five surviving stories of the Korean pansori storytelling tradition in which epic tales are performed by a solo singer and a drummer. In the story of Sugungga, a Dragon King of the Southern Sea suffers from an illness that can only be cured by the liver of a rabbit. In Mira’s work, two video channels are projected onto opposite sides of a sheet of holographic glass. One channel slowly moves along the surface of a large outdoor sculpture of a rabbit, while the other depicts spiraling footage taken from a cab ride in Seoul, South Korea. Refracted and distorted through the holographic glass, the videos flicker across the gallery walls in a textured and disorienting frenzy. Beyond a narrative or documentary device, Mira uses the camera to reconstruct the sensorial experience of driving through an urban landscape—at times slow and up close, wide and frantic at others. It is as if, in the process of moving through a city—be it Seoul, Los Angeles, or any other—its buildings, structures, and objects are moving too, animated by the myths and stories of its past.

Freddy Villalobos continues the conversation between camera and cityscape in waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of aventure (2025). The video is shot from a moving car that travels the north-south route of Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, beginning at the hotel where singer Sam Cooke was shot and killed in 1964 and making its way to the morgue where his body was taken. Though the camera’s position in the passenger seat does not move, its frame contains many simultaneous perspectives: a sense of constant forward motion, fleeting glimpses of illuminated storefronts, the car’s own shadow cast onto those buildings, and the confined reflection of the rearview mirror. As these vantage points slow down and speed up in tandem with the car, the heavy bass of the film’s soundtrack reverberates throughout the gallery space as well as the viewer’s body. This visceral intensity imbues Villalobos’s work with an ominous undertone, inviting further consideration of the ways in which tragedy and violence are inscribed into the physical landscape of a city. Villalobos uses the camera to not only excavate what might be forgotten or overlooked in the day-to-day but to construct a metaphor for the coexistence of past, present, and future. Congested freeways and well-trodden paths are more than just transitory spaces; they bear witness to the ever-changing faces of Los Angeles. The tiresome daily task of traversing the city emerges here as a way to honor and reflect upon what has changed and what remains the same.

This examination of the meditative, potentially transcendent, power of monotony is taken one step further in Mike Stoltz’s contribution, which consists of found images and experimental videos displayed across five screens of various sizes. Pinktoned (2025) and Pinktoned (Exploded View) (2025) distill the medium of film into its material components: image, sound, and time. Photographic slides from a rummage sale at Echo Park Film Center depict the busy streets of Los Angeles, lined with movie posters for the 1976 documentary Underground. The colors of the photographs have degraded over time, settling into hues of pink as if to look back at the past through a rose-colored lens. On a nearby screen, bold lines of black and white overlap and overtake one another in a mathematical dance. Together these patterns form an optical soundtrack, a method of storing audio on film popularized in the 1920s. Here, Stoltz presents us with a visual representation of pink noise, a calming sound similar to white noise. The final component, time, is represented by observational footage shot from the artist’s studio in East Hollywood. Pedestrians wait at crosswalks, smoke cigarettes, swipe fingers across phone screens. Their casual movements reveal the poetry that can be found in moments of transition, in the slow passing of time. Film is a sensitive medium, Stoltz reminds us, attuned to nuance and vulnerable to decay. By unraveling its material qualities, the artist pays homage to process in and of itself: to the trial and error of constructing an image, telling a story, or shaping a perspective.

For the video artists in Made in L.A. 2025, the camera is not only a tool for documenting their surroundings but a portal through which they can access the less legible aspects of inhabiting a place. Their works hone in on the memories, movements, and sensations that inform our perceptions, both personal and collective, whether consciously or not. In Los Angeles, it can often feel as though we are neither here nor there, constantly in transit, always in pursuit of something bigger, better, or more dazzling than the present. Sprawling and starry-eyed, it is a place where glamorized fictions collide with the quiet truths of our daily lives. Perhaps, the artists in Made in L.A. 2025 seem to suggest, it is somewhere in between these failed dreams and actualized fantasies—in the auditions and rehearsals, the slow drives and hurried commutes—that an image of Los Angeles comes into view.

Na Mira, Sugungga (Hello) (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Soto Gallery, New York and Los Angeles. Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Nora Kovacs is a Hungarian-American arts professional based in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published by Art in America, AQNB, Berlin Art Link, Burnaway, the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Pelican Bomb, Public Parking, and This Is Tomorrow. Nora holds a BA in Global Liberal Studies from New York University and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art.

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