If it feels as if it’s been years since you saw work by Beverly Pepper, it probably has. I don’t think she was even included in the Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel “Revolution In the Making” debut show. Not revolutionary enough? Or too far from the madding crowd? Pepper...
My Brain on Trump
I finally made my first visit to LA’s Broad museum this week. Even though it opened in September, I waited until I could easily get free tickets online rather than standing in a long line in front of the museum. Who are you trying to kid? You only went because you...
Egyptian Art & Antiques: Lena Wolek
Lena Wolek's "Arbitraitor's Clauset" is clever in title and use of space. Arriving at her installation in the diminutive exhibition chamber misleadingly named "Egyptian Art & Antiques" feels like discovering a child's toy-room in a nondescript Beverly Hills office...
LA (Selfie) Show 2017
Los Angeles was just starting to glow with the encroaching night life as we rushed through the Convention Center, blindly searching for the LA Art Show (more directions please, we are simple beings). Racing against the clock, we chose to begin feasting (or violating,...
Patrick Martinez – All Season Portfolio
For those of us who grew up in America in the second half of the 20th century, especially the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, it would have been impossible to go through middle or high school without stumbling across certain staple school stationery supplies. One such...
JoAnne Artman Gallery: John “CRASH” Matos
The graffiti artist John Crash Matos, known simply as Crash, started spray-painting buildings and trains in New York City in his early teens. Before long, he transitioned to showing in galleries. Although he may not be as renowned as colleagues Shepard Fairey or Barry...
WOMEN’S MARCH LA
This Saturday, January 21st, one day after inauguration day, thousands will take to the streets in Washington D.C. for the Women's March in protest of the incoming president.Los Angeles, of course, could not sit this one out. Holding our own installment, Women's March...
Art and Literature in the News in a Post-11/8 World
Do you feel you are living in some bizarre parallel universe? Is your head spinning, your anxiety spiking? Are you starting to worry you’re on a watchlist because you’ve signed so many petitions? Are you breathlessly hoping that Penthouse gets the sex tape,...
HITTING A NERVE OF STEEL
Art galleries can be places where the mundane becomes divine, but as the front door of the Honor Fraser Gallery closed behind me, I knew that what I saw was what I was gonna get. In front of me was what appeared to be a selection of various types and lengths of...
The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley
The curators of Ecstasy, Virginia Broersma, Nick Brown and Kio Griffith, characterize their show as an “exhibition and lab” (the latter aspect of which may be more prominent in a couple of the objects by Candice Lin included here); but its installation has the airy...
FACE OUR FEARS: COME TOGETHER
It became clear to us during our first night of gallery hopping in 2017, that this year can only be better than last if we choose not to fear what we do not understand. It was a night of coming together—artists, gallery lovers and strangers alike …We talked about...
JOAN: Blair Saxon-Hill
In Blair Saxon-Hill's installation to no ending except ourselves (2016), wall and floor based sculptures fashioned from discarded and broken materials come to life. Making art from found objects is nothing new and while Saxon-Hill's works pay homage both to outsider...
EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Readers Happy New Year! Last October I was invited to moderate a panel titled: “Is Art our Last Safe Place?” The general topic was whether art could be healing in times of war, poverty, starvation, overpopulation ...you know, all that stuff that just keeps...
Molly Jo Shea: Driven By Fear
Los Angeles performance artist Molly Jo Shea knows that you’ve got some genuine feelings, you’re just scared to reveal them. If you attend one of her shows, maybe you should be afraid. Shea operates as a doula of the emotions and she will barf blood or take a tough...
Osceola Refetoff: A Room with a View
An austere flat horizon is blanketed by intensely blue sky and bracketed by the remnants of an orange window frame, its rectilinear quiet slyly evoking Rothko. Gauzy clouds, piled atop a low mountain, are seen Magritte-like, through a thick wooden square—maybe a...
BEST IN SHOW 2016
“My name is called Disturbance,” as Mick Jagger sang in "Street Fighting Man," and as 2016 careened into 2017, many of us wondered where exactly we stood with respect to what beckoned immediately across the horizon and came to grips with an unsettling notion that we...
Melanie Pullen: Pictures of Passion
Melanie Pullen invites me into her sunny apartment as she cleans up from a party the night before, “This is why I left New York!” she says, gesturing to full-length windows with a sweeping view of Koreatown. “All this room!”Pullen’s enthusiasm for Los Angeles is apt,...
Taking a Trump
It’s worth considering why it’s so easy to caricature Donald Trump. He looks strange—with his fake tan, anus-like pout, signature comb-over—topped with a bright red, race-baiting ball cap. Like any President-to-be, he’s the focus of boundless criticism and ridicule,...