ART : A Heavenly Show

There’s something about looking at a bleacher filled with 1,000 bright magenta angels sitting cross-legged, wings folded behind them, that has to make you smile. Especially since they conjure up the memories of their 4,687 street cousins--12-inch plaster angels placed around the city for a year by artist Jill D’Agnenica as an act of personal prayer after the 1992 riots.

The new generation of 1,000 angels are visiting the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station for a month.

D’Agnenica, a UCLA graduate with a degree in history, is an installation artist. Her work is temporary and usually site-specific, such as when she filled an abandoned Downtown Los Angeles building so full of tropical plants that they burst through cracks and broken windows, accompanied by a stereo system playing sounds of a rain forest. So the gallery environment is something new to her.

“My work is usually outdoors, where people wouldn’t expect to experience art--they kind of stumble upon it,” she said. “For a split-second, I’m going to get someone in a state of disbelief where they can’t intellectualize something as art, but rather experience it with a sense of wonder.”

Typical of her work was an installation she recently completed in an oil-rich area of New Mexico. She calls it the Miracle Well--a hole dug into the ground that spews bubbly black water while the trees she rigged emit animal and nature sounds one minute and sounds of technology the next. “I change a small portion of someone’s day because they have no choice but to demonstrate some reaction,” she said.

And that’s precisely what happened when D’Agnenica, 10 assistants and 90 volunteers randomly distributed the plaster sitting angels around Los Angeles. Each angel was stamped with a number, documented with a photograph and inscribed with its exact location in a ledger. Many people felt so delighted by the angels that they took them, which was just what D’Agnenica hoped for. She’s managed to keep track of the whereabouts of 400 of her creations, thanks to the more conscientious patrons who called after they adopted an angel.

“After we placed 30 in the parking lot of a GTE building, a television crew came out and put it on the air. The next day I got a call from an employee who told me she hasn’t stopped talking about finding the angels and that they made everything a little brighter,” she said.

There were less inspirational moments, such as the time a restaurant owner chased a volunteer across four lanes of traffic on Ventura Boulevard, yelling at her for not getting his permission to leave an angel outside his establishment. Or the woman who gnashed her teeth at the sight of three angels blocking the way into her earthquake-ruined building.

Gallery owner Robert Berman was visiting another artist when he happened upon D’Agnenica’s Downtown Los Angeles studio and saw a bunch of angels. “It was a burst of color. For me, it’s the art of the ‘90s, something that can change the moment. When I walk through a museum I expect to be uplifted, but walking in an alley Downtown and seeing a magenta angel perched on a telephone booth--that’s unexpected and exhilarating,” he said.

Although D’Agnenica received close to $5,000 in grants for the project from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, among others, Berman says she is $10,000 in debt, which is why each of the newly cast angels costs $100. A book is planned featuring photographs of the original casting.

Peter Partyka, an architect who attended the opening night of the new casting of 1,000 angels, described them as “innocent souls in the L.A. environment, like many of the people who come to the city invigorated and then face the grim reality.”

The angels just sat there with their magenta wings folded around them and stared right back, defying the very idea of grim.

Robert Berman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building C2, Santa Monica. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m, Tuesday through Saturday. Information: (310) 453 9195.