Made In L.A. is coming to the Hammer, Barnsdall Park, LAXART, and billboards around town on June 2 and will showcase sixty emerging, under-recognized Los Angeles artists–one of which will be voted to win a $100,000 prize. In order to help you make an educated vote this summer, we’re counting down to Made In L.A. by showcasing each artist participating in the biennial.

D’Ette Nogle is a Los Angeles performance, video, and visual artist who is heavy on self-reflexive art. She is very meta, if you will.

Nogle’s work surrounds herself and her artistic practice. She almost has a Woody Allen type of feeling to her art, this self-effacing and brilliant and funny personality and approach to her art making. Like many performance/video artists, her work revolves around her or at least the idea of her. In her mind, she’s not the best or brightest or coolest: she’s just an artist who could be better, if only she didn’t stand in her own way. In her 2009 solo project at UC Irvine entitled Suspended Projection, Nogle shared a series of non-productions, projects and art pieces she meant to do within a series of time she didn’t do them. The show incorporated various excuses for her inability to create–such as the photo The Moment I Realized my Hair Was Getting in the Way of My Art Practice–and symbols that stand for people who cheered her on for success or failure, Matthew McConaughey being one of them, a person who stands for mobility and inability, success and failure at the same time.

Similarly, Nogle’s Reality/Relax is a meta piece about the reality of her life and her family’s life through video. Referencing Dan Graham’s Lax/Relax, she filmed her and her parents reading scripts of reality television episodes leading into a juxtaposition of them relaxing. It’s a funny play on what her reality is and what her reality isn’t, what her life is versus what her life could be. Other entries into this canon range from her participation in Says I, a group show with Kiersten Puusemp and Made In L.A. friends Math Bass and Dan Finsel, who she is very much alike. Her piece in the show about the self was a giant tarp placed above the office of the gallery entitled Tarp For Gallery Office in addition to Flipping Through The Best of 2008, which was a series of fifteen bound books (which appear to be flipbooks). They seem to get at her slight obsession with work and the work of art. Her piece at Clifton Benevento’s Los Angeles centered show 3348 Hours Of Sunshine saw an archway of fresh flowers that went from nice to OK to gross as they went through their cycle of life during the course of the exhibit. Although about Los Angeles and nature, it is almost the most emblematic for her: the piece almost says “Look at this beautiful..!!!…oh, it’s dying. Okay.”

D’Ette Nogle is a very funny artist, a heady person whose work is tied up in her idea of herself and the idea of art making. She doesn’t go to a parodic extreme in portraying herself instead opting for self-deprecating funny pieces that each seem to be an effort for her to get herself out there. We’re hoping she brings a video to the exhibition that represents what she thinks of Made In L.A. or at least her process surrounding it. Of course, this is a selfish desire of ours since we’d love to see Reality/Relax in person. If anything, we hope she allows Matthew McConaughey to make a cameo at the Hammer.