The art world ‘conversation,’ in many ways, can be a small one. In the post-modern, post-conceptual landscape, anything goes. Yet (Juxtapoz to one side) we’re not typically privy to the kinds of conversations Corey Helford Gallery artists might ignite. Once upon a...
Home Is Where the Horror Is – Guillermo del Toro (Part 1)
We live very close to horror in the early 21st century. But then I wonder how much has really changed since, say, the 1940s (although the northern 75 percent or so of the North American continent was relatively at peace during the 20th century up to that time). The...
The exhausted, inexhaustible, and eternal city – GRIND
Roughly a generation separates me from artist-curator Joshua Nathanson; but we clearly live in very similar moments in very similar cities. (My understanding is that he is based here in L.A., but he was born in Washington, D.C. and studied in New York prior to grad...
SF Art Show
Last weekend we found ourselves in San Francisco, trading in the ungodly heat of an LA summer for Carl (the fog) and 50 degrees. On Saturday night we were tipped off by friends about a must see art opening at the soon to close Flax Art Store - the likes of which was...
Passage
ACME’s late summer group show, Passage, chooses subtlety over ‘statement’, quietly suggesting a spectrum of emerging ideas and directions through its artists’ varied address of notions of passage or transition in their work. In doing so, it also gives a glimpse of the...
LA Louver: David Hockney
David Hockney, well known as a painter and draftsman, is also a versatile multi-disciplinary artist who has embraced technology in surprising ways. It comes as no surprise that he has adopted the iPad as another new-fangled artistic tool to make electronic sketches in...
Can The Broad Rise Above
Victorian critic Walter Pater’s famous maxim that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” admires the musician for her destruction of boundaries: “[Music’s] end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the...
Will Benedict’s I AM A PROBLEM
I AM A PROBLEM (2016) is a music video by Will Benedict for the Detroit-based noise band Wolf Eyes. An alien discusses issues surrounding assimilation in an extra global context with television talk show host Charlie Rose. I AM A PROBLEM, 2016 Video, color, sound,...
Apocalypse On the “Miracle Mile”: Steve De Jarnatt’s Movie Milestone
In the late 1970s there was a running joke surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s much anticipated, but disaster-plagued and seemingly endless Vietnam War-as-American Heart of Darkness project, Apocalypse Now. While Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate was already bleeding...
Minding our Mannerisms at Jai & Jai Gallery
Saturday night we found ourselves in Chinatown for the opening of Mind Your Mannerisms at Jai & Jai, a gallery tucked discretely along Spring Street north of Cesar Chavez. Highly regarded in Los Angeles’ architectural community, Jai & Jai is known for staging...
Arthur Jafa, at MADE IN L.A. 2016, Hammer Museum
As we are posting this, we are informed that Arthur Jafa has not been awarded the Mohn Public Recognition Award; and we can’t help wondering if he might have been at some competitive disadvantage simply because visitors to the Museum were unable to actually flip the...
Robert Berman Gallery: Mr. Fish
The collection of portraits by Mr. Fish (Dwayne Booth) at Robert Berman Gallery serves as a testament to the idols that the political cartoonist holds dear. While Mr. Fish is best known for tongue-in-cheek cartoons, these meticulously rendered portraits show Mr....
Jorge R Gutierrez
The concept of an artist commemorating a particular time and place is always interesting, specifically in this case the border between Tijuana and the U.S. Here, the creation of images becomes a means by which the artist begins to understand his own deeply personal...
The Embedded Fragment – Gronk’s Theater of Paint
Long before I had a clue about art, or at least modern or contemporary art, my older brother and I would occasionally be dropped off at twin fantasylands on either side of Central Park that, to our five and six year-old brains, were like complementary sides of what...
The CarCroach Croons of Real Love: “Triptych: Trippy Threesome” at Superchief Gallery
The dust stirs and rises quickly from its surrounding detritus, particles colliding wildly, glistening in the hard glare of a halogen spotlight. They drift through a crumpled vent and settle atop a pair of white antlers. Dirt sparkles beautifully when it’s...
Grice Bench: Don’t call me when you are rich or famous. Call me only if you are in the gutter.
Nods to the philosophical and an absurdist humor set the tone of this eclectic group show that is never short on substance. An homage of sorts to a late UC Berkeley professor, “Don’t call me when you are rich or famous. Call me only if you are in the gutter.” is a...
Vesna Pavlović: “Fall and Folds”
Stefano Maderno’s celebrated sculpture of Santa Cecilia—or rather an enlarged archival pigment print of a slide of the work—greets the viewer on the far gallery wall. Mounted on a substantial support and including information recorded on old-fashioned art history...
Grind
The idea of a failed utopia is certainly nothing new as those of us who live in any bustling city like Los Angeles will tell you, but the way in which this failure is understood can, and must be, redefined according to the state of disintegration we have become...