FUTURE PRESENCE

Robert Therrien

Artist, 52

What he’s done: For 25 years, Therrien has been making evocative sculptural objects that typically occupy in-between spaces: between handmade and machined, between two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional forms, between memory and perception, between dreams and reality, between representations of ordinary things--a keystone, a boat’s hull, a snowman, a casket--and simplified geometric abstractions. These poetic objects have become a staple on the international exhibition circuit, from Spain’s Reina Sofia Museum to Germany’s Documenta.

Outlook for 2000: Although he’s always been based in Los Angeles and is represented in many public and private collections locally, Therrien hasn’t shown a substantive body of work here in the past decade. That will change soon, as the L.A. County Museum of Art presents a selection of recent large-scale sculptures (Feb. 20-May 7), including several not publicly shown before.

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Ruben Ortiz Torres

Artist, 35

What he’s done: In the fall of 1998, Ortiz’s eclectic photographs, videotapes and mixed-media sculptures were the subject of a concise and illuminating survey at the Huntington Beach Art Center. Ortiz, who lives in Mexico City and L.A., has been at the forefront of a new and progressive multiculturalism in the 1990s that celebrates the wondrous mutations of hybrid existence--crossing cultures, genres and categories, as it were, without a crossing guard.

Outlook for 2000: For “Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty” (Feb. 29-May 7), a show of new paintings, sculptures, photographs, mixed-media works, video and film commissioned from L.A-based artists in response to the Getty Center’s holdings, Ortiz dug into the files of the center’s Research Institute for inspiration. He’s come up with “La Zamba del Chevy,” a sculpture and accompanying 3-D video that blend the sleek customization of low-rider car culture with the memory of legendary revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose prized possession was a 1960 Chevy Impala.

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Stephanie Barron

Curator, 49

What she’s done: During her 23-year tenure at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Barron has risen to the position of senior curator of 20th century art and vice president of education and public programs, but she is best known for organizing critically acclaimed, landmark exhibitions, most notably “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” in 1991, and “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler,” in 1997. Her trademark projects place art in the broad context of social history.

Outlook for 2000: Barron’s latest project, “Made in California: 1900-2000,” is an enormous collaborative venture, scheduled to open in October. Conceived as the museum’s major millennium exhibition and developed by a team of curators and advisors, the show will fill the Anderson and Hammer buildings and part of LACMA West with 750 artworks, 350 cultural documents and 15 specially commissioned film and multimedia stations. Instead of trotting out a century of the state’s “greatest hits,” as might be expected, the exhibition will examine California’s image through a combination of fine art and material culture.

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Tony Oursler

Video artist, 42

What he’s done: An innovative New York-based artist whose interest in performance and media-based art developed when he was a student at CalArts in the late 1970s, Oursler is known for probing modern neuroses and psychoses in witty but disturbing works that project human images on sculptural forms, accompanied by soundtracks. The creator of disembodied, blinking eyes and discarded dolls who suck viewers into pathetic psychodramas, he has won the attention of an international array of critics and curators in dozens of exhibitions at major museums and galleries.

Outlook for 2000: “Introjection: Tony Oursler Mid-Career Survey, 1976-1999,” a national traveling show organized by Deborah Rothschild for the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass., is the first comprehensive overview of the artist’s work. It will appear at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art from April 2-July 30 and will include about 25 works tracking Oursler’s liberation from the confinement of video monitors to the freedom of projecting images on sculptural installations that invite visitors’ participation. Among expected highlights are multimedia projects that question the influence of television and examine multiple personalities of fictitious characters.