I sometimes wonder what the point of an art fair is anymore. I mean, isn’t that why we ‘let our fingers do the walking’ through Artforum every month? When I expressed this thought on a recent FB post, one of my pals (a well-known artist) rejoined that a “great...
Jason McLean
First of all, soda and gardeners don’t usually go together; that’s not to say that all gardeners must abstain from soda or that soda doesn’t sometimes yearn for the garden, but it’s an unlikely alliance, yet Jason McLean’s exhibition at Wilding Cran is a playful and...
The Middle Passage – Andrew Voogel’s Black Water
It’s a commonplace of urban life that certain social or cultural venues exert disproportionate influence simply because of their size and leverage in the community. It’s no different in the L.A. art world, where certain galleries and museums compel our attention...
Calling A Moratorium On The American Dream
Like many other American citizens, I listened to President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening. Full disclosure: I was an early supporter of the President in his first election campaign—but, as I’ve stated on the record, I live in a state of deep...
Monique Prieto
Monique Prieto’s newest exhibition aptly titled Hat Dance, on view at the brand new LAM Gallery on Highland Avenue, charts like the banned Mexican dance it was named for: a kind of radiant courtship between the artist and the painting, and further still between the...
Figaro “Unbound”—but undocumented: ¡Figaro! (90210)
It’s been said that The Marriage of Figaro (or, more precisely, The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro, as it was originally titled) was one of the first nails in the coffin of the ancien régime. Its author, the playwright, musician, watch-maker (and inventor),...
HIKE, HACK / HIC et NUNC
I was generally sympathetic to the examination of remote machinic vision on display at XPO Gallery, with their presentation of a Brooklyn-heavy group show that is weirdly shut to the public: HIKE, HACK, HIC et NUNC. Interestingly, it coincided with the punch of...
Top Ten Pieces at the LA Art Show
The opening night of the LA Art Show offered the usual enticements—free food and drink, opportunities for schmoozing and networking, celebrity-gawking—but it also happened to have a great deal of impressive contemporary art on display. Here, in no especial order, are...
Max Presneill
Max Presneill has broken through to the “other side” and by this I do not mean he’s cavorting with spirits, but simply that he has in his second exhibition at the Garboushian Gallery in Beverly Hills created a stunningly rigorous body of work that even the dead would...
Akira Yoshizawa
Je suis Charlie. (Part II) A plea for sanctuary
“I have no choice but to be optimistic,” a friend of mine remarked to me the other day; and I get it. But I ‘m not so sanguine about our prospects on this front, the challenge to free speech and truly unfettered creative expression in an environment hemmed in by many...
Robert Heinecken Object Matter
Robert Heinecken was truly obsessed with modern culture and all its sometimes unfortunate and always ubiquitous vicissitudes. Using a wide range of materials including photography, sculpture, video, printmaking and collage, the artist recontextualized images toward a...
Je suis Charlie. Je n’ai pas peur—mais je vis dans le déni complet. (Part I)
Let me first say that I did not expect to be revisiting the issue of free speech so soon after examining the overblown rhetoric and jingoism surrounding Sony’s release of The Interview and the corporate cyber-vandalism immediately preceding it. It’s not as if free...
Western Project
"11-Years Anniversary Group Show" From Western Project. Posted by Artillery Magazine on 1/07/2015 (11 items) Kohl King, Christian TedeschiMargaret Griffith John Weston Samantha Fields Carole Caroompas, Mary Anna Pomonis Habib and Emma Zamani Wayne White, Mimi Pond...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers Happy New Year! We start off 2015 with a survey of Asian art. I’ve been wanting to cover contemporary Asian art for quite some time but never had the confidence that we could represent that culture. It’s the largest and most populated continent on the...
China: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz
On a clear sunny day there’s a press preview for the ambitious “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” exhibition. Famous for its former use as a prison, with notorious inhabitants such as Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Robert “The Bird Man” Stroud, its layered...
India: Hema Upadhyay
Artist Hema Upadhyay has been a force in Indian contemporary art for two decades. Still, her recent solo exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai in fall 2014 was a major event in both the artist’s trajectory and the landscape of Indian art today. “Fish in a...
Cambodia: Vuth Lyno
In a series of evocatively posed large photographic diptychs entitled Thoamada II, Vuth Lyno expands common frameworks of sexuality, family and memory. This work is an outgrowth of an earlier series of photographic and audio portraits of individual MSM (men who have...