The unique experience of DJ Javier’s exhibition San Milano Drive begins at the beginning, at the very portal of its host space of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB). The artist has elegantly splashed his bold-lined, color-basted design, an abstraction vaguely referencing ocean wave action, all over the entrance to MCASB, and it’s an enticing and integrated welcome screen to what carries on inside.
Dodging the notion of museum as a neutral wall-and-floor display opportunity for incoming art, Javier has concocted an immersive, multisensory, and multidimensional environment, utterly transforming the space.
MCASB has become a space of his own devising, between the dozens of vibrant fluorescent-hued paintings and “sculptural” design features in the room, with a welcoming “Nipa Hut,” a padyak (Filipino pedicab), and turning the museum’s central pillar into a stylized painting of a palm tree, that “pillar” of the Santa Barbara landscape. As such, the show is as much about the atmospheric whole as it is a sum of its parts.