“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly...
Strangers On A Train – The Abduction From the Seraglio
The Los Angeles Opera’s co-production of Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), which closed February 19th, updated the action of this singspiel from its original mid- to late-18th century Ottoman Turkish setting, when the Ottoman...
Leo Garcia: My Alien Abduction
Every now and then an artist pops above the horizon line with a private cosmology like the late Mati Klarwein whose Aleph Sanctuary in the 1970s was a marvel of jewel-like paintings. An artist like Alex Grey known for his visionary painting and his "Chapel of Sacred...
Riding the Rhoades Coaster
Arriving at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel last Saturday night for Jason Rhoades’ retrospective wasn’t much different from arriving to an amusement park. Experiencing his six immersive installations was like finally getting to enjoy the rides at the park. There’s a bunch...
Focus Iran 2 – Contemporary Photography and Video
Sometimes a powerful image is enough – not simply to focus and arrest attention, but to shift the narrative, move the world, or certainly the viewer’s perspective on it. A great image can re-make that world or deliver an entirely new one. The watch word at this moment...
Online Exhibition: Politically Inspired Art
Welcome to the blog’s first curated online exhibition! The call for entries was for work that had been inspired by recent politics. I’ve selected 12 from the many responses I received. They represent a variety of media and include work that was meant to be overtly...
Central Park: All the Best
Artist-run gallery spaces perform a unique balancing act. They offer less established artists the chance to refine the nuances of exhibiting work, develop a reputation for reliability, court the other gallerists and curators, and occasionally receive feedback. They’re...
Zona Maco Art Fair Report
As every year, since 2004, Zona Maco, one of the most important Latin American art fairs, was carried last week in Mexico City with the participation of more than 150 galleries. Founded by Mexican Zélika García, Zona Maco is such a big and social event in a city...
Make America
Saturday night we went to the LA Art Association’s “Make America” Show at Gallery 825. The original plan was to begin at Wallspace LA, a commercial gallery that typically represents street artists who sold their souls, but after one glance through the windows, we...
Moholy-Nagy: Future Present
If there is a single word that could sum up the the career of László Moholy-Nagy, it would probably be refraction. The refraction of light is an obvious key, both with respect to Moholy’s overall formal approach and technical approach to his preferred media (and not...
Hudson Marquez at La Luz de Jesus
Hudson Marquez, alumni of the art group Ant Farm and creator of The Cadillac Ranch, wants to make your sex life better—and it’s not by meds or therapy—it’s with his paintings of women’s stiletto high heel shoes. Marquez’ exhibition, "Welcome to Stiletto," at La Luz de...
Survey Results and A Call For Entries
Thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s survey about how politics is affecting you. According to the survey, a whole lot of us -- 84% -- are running around with our hair on fire! SurveyMonkey generates a word cloud based on text responses -- the more often a...
Diane Rosenstein: Gisela Colon
Gisela Colon’s “HYPER-MINIMAL” is a psychedelic futurist’s dream come true. The spacious Diane Rosenstein gallery is divided into a handful of rooms displaying fifteen new works. The works include two freestanding pieces, one of which is the Untitled (Monolith Silver)...
Llyn Foulkes – Old Man Blues
The plaintive title of Llyn Foulkes’ current exhibition – his first for Sprüth Magers – suggests we might be in for some mournful, if not downright bitter, riffs on laboriously trodden themes. This is not necessarily a drastic departure from the surreal dissonance of...
Heartbreak Hotel
The initial idea of Human Resource’s Breaking Up With Amerikkka—a night to commiserate with friends, alcohol and music and get over the worst breakup ever (that with our country) with the help of karaoke breakup-songs—sounds like the most fun way to get over the...
A Survey About How Politics is Affecting You and a Beautiful Book to Take Your Mind Off It
I want to thank everyone who wrote supporting my political tirade after the inauguration (if you missed it, click here). There were also a few who weren’t so supportive and demanded to be removed from my mailing list. If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, don't...
New Image Art: Carlos Ramirez
The relevancy of “Complejo de Cristo y Vampiros,” Carlos Ramirez’s first solo show at New Image Art, couldn’t be timelier given our new president’s executive orders on immigration. The American-born, Chicano artist and member of the artistic duo, The Date Farmers,...
Douglas Tausik Ryder – Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis can refer to processes both natural and supernatural; but the works in Douglas Tausik Ryder’s exhibition of this title, while they reference the commonly understood biomorphic dimension, also encompass a much larger domain: the metamorphosis between...