Features
DYSTOPIAN FILTERS Ethel Lilienfeld Considers the Nuances of our Virtual Selves
Technology cannot be separated from the world we live in today. Indeed, post-pandemic, we are...
SHATTERED Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme Find Meaning in Remembrance and Resistance
In the 18th century, when the Iranian elite heard rumors of the grand mirrored halls of Europe,...
AS THE WORLD TURNS Deborah Stratman Gazes Into the Abyss of Time
“I’m not sure satisfaction is a thing I feel while making art. I get satisfied from stuff like...
Reviews
Brad Kronz Gaylord Apartments
For his untitled exhibition at Gaylord Apartments, Brad Kronz created what looked like a kind of...
Nora Turato Sprüth Magers
“Self is source. Self is pure positive energy. Self is worthy. Self is full of vitality. Self is...
Se Oh Stroll Garden
As a Korean-born queer person who was adopted at nine months by a conservative white Christian...
Columns
BUNKER VISION The Prime-Time Underground Film
The history of film is full of paradigm shifts. Once people got used to the idea that the train on...
ART BRIEF The Role of an Art Advisor
Wendy Posner is the CEO of Posner Fine Arts, an international art advisory based in Los Angeles....
THE DIGITAL Tala Madani Explores the Darkness
Have you ever howled at the moon? Stood up to your demons and screamed until your lungs ached? I...
Departments
From the Editor May/June Volume 18, issue 5
Dear Reader, In the early Artillery days, I assigned a writer to critique the films and videos...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Frieze LA, Spring/Break, Gana Art LA's Quiet Opening
I don’t know about you, but I’m still recovering from Frieze LA (Feb. 29–March 3), and the art...
POEMS "Chalk Poem" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Chalk Poem The long cool freedom pure as a stick of chalk powdering against the edge of jealousy...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Janet Olivia Henry Stars
Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture. In Wrought: WAC’s Drum Corps (2007–24), Henry’s compositions made up of legos, miniature collectables, action figures and dolls and handcrafted elements, are excellent at narrating the multiple realities in and outside of the art world. In this multiroom scene, there’s a storage room of tools, boxes, journals and supplies, admirably arranged as if the space was truly utilized. Adjacent to it lies another room with black and white flyers scattered on the ground, a homage to Ana Mendieta, bearing the text “¿Donde está Ana?” Cutting and joyful, Henry’s well-dressed and eclectic figurines gather for food and music, while a Christmas tree is fully decorated and a dog approaches the garbage bins outside. Surrounding these dioramas, there are meticulous and brightly colored notebook scale drawings and collages that capture the same fantastic and peculiar sensibility that oscillates between an ironic and earnest use of camp. Reveling in the absurd with heightened alertness, Henry holds a discursive position leading viewers to question, probe and laugh at the places where the politics of culture occur.
Stars
3116 North El Centro Ave.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through May 11, 2024
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Olivia Mole Tiffany's
Bringing back recurring characters from her practice, Olivia Mole is changing the installation of her show, “Dopesheet Batman,” each week in this intimate East Hollywood space, keeping only the wall pieces and purple carpeted platform intact. In her first iteration of the project, her characters, which include a bear and a skull-masked figure in a blue spandex suit, are piled on top of each other, stuffed limbs hanging to the sides, the viewer unsure of whether there are three or four figures and which limbs are attached to what. Situated on an automated platform, the assemblage rotates for a brief period every six minutes and includes a folding chair at its peak. Based on an exposure sheet drawn by Looney Tunes animator Spike Brandt, in which Daffy Duck exclaims he is Batman, the project addresses identity and costume, and will continue to unfold with the remaining incarnations.
Olivia Mole: Dopesheet Batman
Tiffany’s
861 N Alexandria Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90029
POEMS "Chalk Poem" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Chalk Poem
The long cool freedom
pure as a stick of chalk
powdering against the
edge of jealousy
hard and green, also cool
a tongue in your mouth
an equation in your mind
about where
purity goes
as it’s clapped against
a tree trunk,
the side of a building
leaving squares of dust,
only its traces.
—Caitlin Brady
The Lugubrious Game
Do you ever look at the work of your friends
purely in order to marvel
at its shortcomings: to spitefully wallow,
with sheer horror and disbelief,
in its shockingly abysmal incompetence,
and cheerfully reassure yourself
of its utterly irredeemable worthlessness?
If not, you are missing out
on one of life’s greatest pleasures.
So much more pleasurable than
looking at a friend’s work and finding
that it surpasses anything
you could ever hope to achieve.
—John Tottenham