Is there more to LA than being the home of Hollywood and the epicenter of celebrity culture? Undoubtedly, but it is through the city’s many clichés that artist Alex Israel seeks to better understand the metropolis and the larger fame-driven culture. The LA-born artist’s solo show, #AlexIsrael,at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, functions like a “gigantic 3D postcard from LA” and contextualized by the city's trenchant tropes.

Idyllic palm trees pop up throughout the exhibition, but they appear in 2D as wall-bound representations serving a perfectly-flat decorative purpose. Between these palms are large-scale paintings often cut in the shape of Israel's own profile. Within these large renderings of the artist’s head, the content varies from piles of glossy surfboards to LA cityscapes filled with luxury buildings and billboards featuring the same profile. The impulse for fame becomes a meta visualization of personal grandeur, narcissistically and obsessively seeing oneself in one's own surroundings.

In 2012, Israel created As It Lays, a YouTube talk show where the artist conducted a series of unorthodox interviews with an eclectic range of celebrities, from Marilyn Manson to Christina Ricci. In As It Lays – Molly Ringwald, Israel’s questions to the Sixteen Candles star is a seven-minute series of deadpan non-sequiturs: “What’s your best swimming stroke?” “Do you use antibacterial hand sanitizer?”

The interviews strangely humanize the celebrities as they are forced to step outside of a fame-oriented and PR-directed mindset to answer unconventional questions. For his current exhibit, Israel has included the same talk show set—void of interviewer and interviewee—evoking an unsettling feeling of plasticity in its absence of human life.

“Being born here and living in LA, I’m very inspired by what surrounds me," Israel tells The Creators Project. "LA is incredibly useful for examining larger cultural conditions. Now it provides the backdrop for the innumerable celebrity images, videos, and selfies that circulate through social media. Hollywood is a language spoken far and wide around the world and it’s a language informed by global desire.”

The complexities underlying leisure and desire come to life in another architectural structure—a recreation of the pier at LA’s Paradise Cove. The large, raised wooden structure leads the viewer to an acrylic wetsuit self-portrait of the artist, behind which lies a large wall covered in an sunset-y gradient. Israel simulates the carefree, bucolic image of the beach through artificial materials trapped within indoor confines. The installations seem to communication the idea of freedom within boundaries: the world is all yours, but only under the circumstances permitted by greater forces.

#AlexIsrael runs until September 11, 2016 at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. Check out more on the exhibit here.

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