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It’s 1:30 on a Friday afternoon and the city is buzzing outside on Wilshire Boulevard. While people everywhere are rushing to finish their work weeks, those inside the UCLA Hammer Museum are bustling as if the work week has just begun. Five short days remain until the deadline for the installation of the museum’s upcoming exhibit “THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles,” set to open on Feb. 6.

“This is kind of like Christmas morning over the span of a week,” independent curator Chris Miles said with a smile. “And you just watch everything get unwrapped. There’s still a lot of tension, a lot of possibility of success or failure.”

Yet the artists present, who are installing and adding finishing touches to their pieces, and especially the exhibit’s three curators, are picturesquely calm. As it typically is, the museum is its own quiet and creative environment.

In an exhibition room, sculptor Kaz Oshiro and an assistant measure the dimensions of parts of his piece titled “Kitchen Project,” while his other work “Pink Marshall Stack Wall” – made of acrylic and bondo on stretched canvas to replicate real, full-stack Marshall guitar amplifiers as if they were dipped in Barbie pink – lies horizontally on the floor in another room in plastic packing wrap.

Alone in another room, artist Kristen Morgin moves almost imperceptibly, quietly adding the finishing touches to her large-scale corroding lowrider, which is made simply of unfired clay, wood, wire, cement and glue.

Further in the exhibition room lie sculptor Olga Koumoundouros’ giant-size Lincoln Logs, made of PVC, wire, HydroCal, spray foam, newspaper and vermiculite, also in plastic packing material. She is discussing with the curators how best to position her piece “Sagamore: The Good Life” in the room. They ask themselves, “Do people usually enter this room from the left or the right?” They then all agree it is the latter.

These are just three of the 20 emerging L.A.-based sculptors whose work is being exhibited in THING, which will run until June 5. Most of the sculptures have never been exhibited before, and over half were made specifically for this exhibit. Created between 2002 and 2005, the work is all very recent. In fact, many of the dates of the artwork will be just days before the opening of the show.

“We aren’t joking when we’re saying there’s work that’s literally being finished right now,” Aimee Chang, curatorial assistant, said with a nervous laugh.

This seems to trigger the emotions of her collaborators. Their words jumble together.

“Like the piece is supposed to be right here ... ,” Miles adds.

Chang finishes this line with rushed urgency.

“But is not yet ... ,” she says.

Just shortly before, their quiet voices echoed in the empty, pristine white corridors of the gallery like they would in a monastery. What was previously calm and quiet talk among the three curators suddenly turns into a sonic explosion when the curators are asked whether there is any anxiety.

“Oh definitely! Major anxiety!” Miles said.

“Sure!” Hammer Projects curator James Elaine added.

“Yeah!” Chang said.

It is at once apparent that their calm visages were hiding how stressful this exhibit has been for them, especially when they begin to discuss how tight the exhibit schedule remains and how much they have had to rely on the artists to produce the work in such a short period of time. Many works of the exhibit had not yet been created when the curators first signed on the artists for the show April through September of last year.

“In this case, it’s not just finding artists whose work you like, it’s also been in many cases finding artists who you think you can put your faith in,” Miles said. “Doing that once or twice in a show is one thing, but there’s probably, out of 51 pieces in the show, I’d say there are 15. So that’s 15 major leaps of faith in one show. So far we’re getting a good return on that faith. But yeah, that’s stress.

• • •

Part of the rush is for the exhibit’s timeliness. According to the curators, there has never been a better time than now to present contemporary sculpture in Los Angeles with the recent surge of interest among emerging artists in creating objects again.

Miles, who is also an art critic and an assistant professor at CSU Long Beach, suggested the surge has likely been a result of several factors, including a great number of strong sculpture professors in L.A.-area colleges, the availability of material and technological resources in Los Angeles and the city’s visual culture of faux objects such as movie sets. Elaine also suggested the simple fact that Los Angeles is more spacious than other cities.

Many of the pieces included in the exhibit are quite large, and have caused issues of transportation for the artists and curators. Sculptor Jedediah Caesar, who earned his masters at UCLA, had to FedEx his 800-pound geode, which is filled with resin-glued studio detritus, to an Idaho quarry just to get it cut in half. Similarly, Morgin’s 16-foot lowrider had to be divided into eight sections in order to be transported to the museum.

“I think there is a kind of indulgence here,” Miles said. “It is somewhat of a guilty pleasure to go to your studio and make a gigantic thing that’s 15 feet long. That kind of activity used to be ideologically suspect in a bad way. This is a generation that is over that thinking of art objects.”

Emerging L.A.-based sculptors also seem to have been liberated in other ways.

“One thing that we’ve noticed as we’ve put together the show is that there’s really an intense sense of openness and fun that artists are feeling,” Chang said. “With conceptual art in the past 20 to 40 years, there have been a lot of times when people have had to be very ideological in their approach to art making and I think now we’re seeing that artists are able to just go wild.”

Take for instance Caesar’s 800-pound geode, Oshiro’s pink Marshall stacks and Koumoundouros’ giant Lincoln Logs. There is also UCLA MFA graduate Nathan Mabry’s piece “Three-Toed Love,” which sits promiscuously in the corner of the first room in the exhibition hall. It features a dark-colored sloth sitting at the edge of a small table with what looks like a yellow exercise ball squashed between the underside of the table’s top and the top of the table’s shelf.

Elaine put it more succinctly.

“They’re having fun,” Elaine said.

• • •

It was only last April when the curators began their six-month search, and now the whole experience is coming to a close with the opening of the exhibit. In their search, the curators eventually caravanned and zigzagged across town from Claremont to Long Beach to over 400 studios. In a single day, they sometimes would visit eight different studios and drive 150 miles. This experience was no doubt physically and mentally taxing.

“When you do that for an entire day, and at the end of the day you haven’t seen anything that excited you, then you ask, ‘What about a postcard show?’” Miles joked.

Although this exhibit has no doubt been stressful, perhaps the biggest rewards are those earned with the greatest efforts.

“You have that day when you see nothing that interests you, and then you have that day when you see something that knocks you dead,” Miles said.

This is something the curators can all relate to.

“The thing is, that’s just regular fare. I mean, in life in general,” Elaine added.

Noticing how cliche this sounds, everyone starts laughing.

“No, really,” Elaine said in earnest, “It’s like having this amazing experience at a restaurant. You eat a lot of good food, then, one day, you have amazing food. And it’s really the same way with art. If I have this enlightenment, this experience, it just goes into my soul, and I drink it down. It doesn’t happen that often.”