The Louvre It Ain’t

“While U Wait: Time Travel” is a group exhibition that brings the work of Los Angeles-based artists to--of all places--the Department of Motor Vehicles in Hollywood.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. A diverse and steady audience is what project coordinator Jamie Bush, 28, had in mind when he came up with the idea two years ago and brought it to the Hollywood DMV, at 803 N. Cole St., which provides services to about 1,000 people daily.

“It gives the artists huge exposure,” Bush explained. “You have a captive audience in the form of hundreds of people who have nothing to do but stand around for hours being disgruntled. We’ve given them a diversion.”

Bush, an artist himself, was never satisfied with the exposure that comes from exhibiting in museums or galleries. But instead of mounting an exhibition of his own work, he became the facilitator for a larger project, enrolling four curators for “While U Wait.”

As it happened, siting the project at the DMV became central to the exhibition’s theme. The mixed-media works all suggest impressions of how people relate to, and move through, time and space.

Elizabeth Saveri’s installation, “360 Degrees in My Studio,” consists of painted objects depicting snapshots of the artist’s life--a bottle of Advil, a door handle and a television set. Saveri employs cinematic devices to pan from painting to painting, creating the sensation of a moving gaze.

“Driving,” a film installation by Mark Roeder and Dianne Prutch, includes four boxes housing projectors that show short films of Angelenos in their cars. Two other works take the theme of time and space into the realm of science fiction. The flashes of light in Halsey Rodman’s photo-based work, “Car/Sun Negative,” resemble galaxies. Sean Duffy’s painting “The Guardian of Forever” is a time portal from an episode of “Star Trek.”

So what do the people waiting in line think?

“You catch one or two people looking,” Vincent Hori, manager of the Hollywood DMV, said. “Our main concern with this crowd was that people would deface or steal the art. They haven’t done that yet, so maybe they do like it!”

“While U Wait: Time Travel” ends March 13 and will be followed by four more shows. Describing the next exhibition, which will document how people spend time, Bush offered humorously, “I guess you could just install mirrors and show the line at the DMV!”