I'm happy to introduce a new feature to the blog called Image of the Week. This week’s image is by Minoru Ohira, a Los Angeles based artist who has won some of Japan’s highest honors for his woodworking. Click here to visit his website and learn more about him. _...
SCAPE: Lawrence Fodor
While abstract art often begins with inspiration and develops spontaneously, Lawrence Fodor approaches his canvasses in a different manner, basing his paintings on historic works. Loosely connected to abstract expressionism, Fodor works in a style in which...
Jacob Ciocci
One doesn’t quite know how to act inside Jacob Ciocci’s deliberately underwhelming installation. The artist has transformed And/Or Gallery into a bland arena that feels more like a waiting room than an exhibition. Chairs line the walls—are you supposed to sit? Tablets...
PLEASE TAKE US TO YOUR PLANET
To host a free evening of jazz in the center of Union Station’s Historic Ticketing Hall is a testament that a Renaissance is alive and kicking in Los Angeles. Projected into a journey of utter cosmic symphonic bliss, Josef Leimberg and The Astral Progressions Ensemble...
Who Will Eat Cake: Rimini Protokoll at MCASB
This Spring, for the first time in the US, spectators can engage directly with the art and performance of the Berlin-based collective Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel) in City as Stage, a multidisciplinary work in two parts: 100%...
Oedipus Wrecked – The Town Hall Affair
It says something that you need not one, but two actors to play Norman Mailer in a performance that places him at the center of a cultural moment he could hardly have held without the connivance of a media machinery he had masterfully charmed and manipulated for...
On The Edge
If an artist’s style is a visual representation of their technical abilities, then the painter Deborah Salt should have no problem applying her Minimalist talents to house painting. I mean that sincerely and without sarcasm or irony, for after all, paint itself has no...
Uta Barth
Uta Barth’s work has always dealt with the way images and perceptions are shaped through both the tools and conventions of image making. Much of that work has addressed more specifically divergences between those synthetically shaped and focused perceptions and...
Good Art, Drunk MFAs & Free Bracelets
Saturday evening happy hour was well spent on South Anderson Street hopping between UTA Artist Space, Ibid Gallery and Museum as Retail Space UTA’s “HeatWave” is an energetic show that explores the influences of pop culture on artists, including a massive painting of...
Skip Snow’s “Virtual Reality Trump” and a Call for Entries
I’m still receiving submissions of political art even though the deadline for the exhibition has passed. One in particular, however, I want to share with you – not because it is political, but because it addresses some of the questions I’m grappling with about art in...
Peter Blake Gallery: Scot Heywood
Minimalism is alive and well in Southern California. In tandem with the current exhibition of historic California Hard-Edge painter John McLaughlin’s work at LACMA, preceded by their well-received Agnes Martin retrospective, Scot Heywood’s new works on view at Peter...
Lisa Adams – Petrichor
‘Petrichor’ was a word I was unfamiliar with until Lisa Adams used it as the title of her current show at CB1. It apparently refers to the smells of drying earth, grasses, and atmosphere following the first rainstorms after a long period of warm or dry weather. I...
The Joshua Treenial 2017: Event Horizon
Okay, not to be completely overshadowed by Desert X—which takes place in Coachella Valley, the Low Desert—the Joshua Treenial will be returning to the High Desert for its second iteration with “Event Horizon” from March 31–April 2, 2017. Two dozen artists will be...
The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “In Plain Site”
Maybe every gesture that you make can birth a fresh way of living. Perhaps by merely looking over your shoulder, or touching the ground, you can create a brand new philosophy or a radical break with reality. So argued the dancers in the Trisha Brown Dance Company at...
Safe in our Tribe
What do you think about when you’re looking at art? Whether its conscious or not, we’ve all had that internal query: Do I get it? Or perhaps you’ve felt that delectable pride as a wave of enlightenment washes over you: I get it! That’s how our experience began last...
Nicodim Gallery: Daniel Pitín
Daniel Pitín's paintings allegorize the uneasy tension between our mortal individuality and the cold cardboard abyss of the computerized world. Most works in his current show depict inchoate figures merging into geometric multi-planar forms. These unclassifiable,...
Venice dumps on Damien
He turned into a commonly recognized name in the wake of pickling the carcasses of a sheep, a cow and even a shark, in formaldehyde, and suspending them in glass tanks. Be that as it may, Britart star Damien Hirst's work isn't to everybody's taste. What's more, every...
Online Exhibition: Politically Inspired Art: Part 2
Thanks to everyone who submitted work for Politically Inspired Art: Part 2. I received three times the number of submissions as I did for Part 1! Topics ranged from homelessness to guns, immigration, women’s rights, the environment, and of course, the increasingly...