A new fantastical character is making an appearance at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue in Westwood, just outside UCLA’s Hammer Museum. “Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A.” is a 25-foot inflatable sculpture of a bear driving a convertible atop a daisy-dotted road. It’s created by Alake Shilling as a companion piece to the museum’s seventh Made in L.A. biennial, which celebrates artists who have worked — or are working — in various disciplines in the sprawling metropolis.
“Everyone will have their opinions and critiques,” Shilling said of her psychedelic creation just before the piece was inflated for a test run prior to Saturday’s opening night party. “I’m excited to hear them and also very nervous.”
Shilling, 32, also has a series of sculptures and drawings in the Made in L.A. exhibit, which features the work of 28 artists, including Alonzo Davis, Ali Eyal, Gabriela Ruiz, Hanna Hur, Leilah Weinraub and John Knight.
Shilling’s singular work reflects the artist’s earnest, optimistic nature — but also her sense of realism and hard-earned experience. Her art features cute animals — the kind a child might cuddle with — but with thoughtful, melancholy features and expressions, as if they are grappling with a recent misfortune or trying to navigate a hard day.
Buggy Bear is no exception, the giant bear’s face looks world-weary and slightly apologetic. The tires of his car are splayed out and he appears to be about to careen off his corner pedestal straight into traffic. From the looks of it, such a merge would not go well. The daisies beneath him are crying — unhappy to be driven on.
“When I think about things, I kind of convert them into cartoon characters,” explained Shilling in her cheerful, singsong voice. “It just makes things more palatable to me to think of the duality of life through the eyes of a little puppy dog or ladybug.”
If she’s having an unpleasant conversation with her mother, Shilling added as an example, it becomes easier “if I go over it in my head, and she’s a ladybug and I’m a bumblebee, I can empathize with her side more if she looks like a cute ladybug.”
Drivers tackling the madness of westside traffic leading to or from the tangled 405 Freeway will surely empathize with Buggy Bear who looks as if he’s one wrong turn away from having a traffic-induced meltdown. Shilling doesn’t drive, but she knows how Buggy Bear feels.
“You really can’t enjoy the beauty of life unless you look at the whole picture,” she says. “You have to have something savory with something sweet to really enjoy it. I don’t want it to feel generic. It’s a more genuine expression if it has duality.”
Over a lunch of falafel and coffee at the Hammer, Shilling talked about growing up in L.A. and attending Fairfax High School. She never felt comfortable in class and tried to “slide under the radar” — afraid that her unique voice, which resonates sweetly at a higher pitch — would cause classmates to tease her.
“I never felt people really understood how magical I am,” Shilling said. “I feel like Clark Kent — just a regular, humdrum, boring person that nobody notices. And then, through my art, I feel like people see what’s on the inside of me, and I become a beautiful butterfly.”
Art came easily to Shilling at a young age, and her mother Kidogo Kennedy — a former professor of gender and race studies at Cal State L.A. who now works in the education department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art — encouraged her to pursue it. At 15 she did an arts-based residency at the Oxbow School in Napa and spent her senior year attending classes at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She attended college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but wasn’t ready for the “mind-blowing” experience. She speculated that she maybe should have taken a gap year. She finished her degree at Los Angeles City College.
Shilling found a like-minded home as an intern for Laura Owens’ now-closed gallery 356 Mission, an artist-run space in Boyle Heights that Shilling describes as a creative utopia: “Studio 54 with no drinking or drugging.” Along the way, Shilling met Lauren Halsey, who became her friend and champion. It was Halsey who recommended Shilling’s studio to this year’s Made in L.A. curators, Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha.
“She’s a really interesting artist in the way that she’s able to infuse her very, very cute work with things that are off-putting,” Pobocha said of Shilling on Thursday during a tour of Made in L.A. The inflatable sculpture was inspired by a painting Shilling made of a similarly cute little bear, which is also on view.
Shilling is still pinching herself, even though she now realizes her journey was meant to be. A decade ago, Shilling felt unsatisfied as an administrative assistant at L.A. Metro.
“You really have to be passionate about transportation to work somewhere like that,” Shilling said. “And I told [my mom], I’m not going to work here anymore. I want to be an artist. And she said, ‘OK.’”
Her mother asked what she was going to do for money, and Shilling said she planned to not have any money and to “live very small.” She vowed to give herself one year, and if nothing happened, she’d go back to Metro. That never came to pass.
With Buggy Bear, Shilling is again tackling transportation — just from an entirely different angle. It’s art, and it’s all hers.