Features
STAYING INSIDE THE LINES Painting AI's Possible Future
Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and...
FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills
"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon
It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several...
Reviews
GALLERY ROUNDS: Carolyn Castaño Walter Maciel Gallery
Carolyn Castaño's “Otros Seres” (Other Beings) exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery is an...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Evangeline AdaLioryn Sebastian Gladstone
Feathers, fur, gills, horns, tails (spiked and scaled), claws, talons, hooves, and forked tongues...
GALLERY ROUNDS: June Edmonds Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Now known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing , written by James Weldon...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Olivia van Kuiken Château Shatto
In “Biel Lieb,” Olivia van Kuiken’s inaugural exhibition at Château Shatto, oil paintings of untamed, bold color and mark-making swing between styles of ink wash, graphic novel, pixel and gestures on the verge of becoming scripture, spellbinding the gallery. Fuchsia, aubergine, canary yellow, vermillion and lilac burst forth on the canvases, contained by artist frames and room dividers, allowing multiple works to be sistered together. In terms of portrayal, an important element of van Kuiken’s work is that within a singular canvas, there is no sense of one singular realm. Instead, it seems as though multiple provinces or domains—corporeal, notebook, cosmos and delusion—are peeled back and dripped into one another. Influenced by Unica Zürn’s 1968 novel, The Trumpets of Jericho, her paintings similarly guide viewers through surreal landscapes where reality and a sense of self disintegrate. Welcoming mania, angst and alienation, van Kuiken’s paintings become a psychic apparatus with fluid confines. It’s a kind of madness that would be mentally paralyzing in real-time, but in painting, the disorder shines like a perfect secret we aren’t meant to understand, where the journey may be to become a stranger to oneself.
Château Shatto
1206 S. Maple Ave. Suite 1030
Los Angeles, CA
On view through April 6, 2024
PUBLISHER’S EYE: I Call it Home, My Hell Bel Ami
In this group exhibition of artists based in Germany, curated by the Cologne gallery DREI, the videos, paintings and photographs come together to comment on surveillance and pop culture, creating a sense of eeriness and familiarity within the show. Featuring the works of Rosa Aiello, Matthias Groebel, Markus Saile and Julia Scher, the exhibition also includes a mysterious selection of Polaroids from a body of photos that was found in New York in 2012, dated approximately from the late 1960s to early ’70s. Named Type 42, these photos show up-close portraits of TV and film stars such as Eartha Kitt and Gail Russell, their names scrawled in pink pen on the white borders. While Saile’s paintings are gestural and Scher’s are reminiscent of landscapes, Groebel’s compositions are from TV and film stills with subtitles, the source of the exhibition’s name.
Bel Ami
I Call it Home, My Hell
709 N. Hill St.,
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through April 13, 2024
Columns
REMARKS ON COLOR: LBJ’s Lucky Light Grays April's Hue
He had five of them—hats that is. Part cowboy, part fedora—they saw him through the presidency...
REMARKS ON COLOR: Slave Ship Ivory March's Hue
To be sure, George Washington was an honest fellow by all accounts, smart and upstanding, and yes,...
BUNKER VISION I'm Sorry, Dave
The word “robot” first appeared in a Czech play by Karel Čapek from 1920 called R.U.R., to...
Departments
CODE ORANGE Time to Say Goodbye
Thank you to everyone who submitted their documentary photographs to the Code Orange column over...
BOOK REVIEW: parasocialite Brittany Menjivar's Literary Debut
Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a...
From the Editor March/April; Volume 18, issue 4
Dear Reader, I admit to being a Luddite when it comes to preferring a paintbrush to the computer....
POEMS "What's Available for Happy Hour" and "Cowardly New World"
What’s Available for Happy Hour?
“Nothing, happy hour is from four till five.”
“Really?”
“It’s a literal hour.”
“So, by extension all other hours are
unhappy?”
“Not necessarily. There are sad hours, bored
hours, angry hours, even ecstatic hours,
though some forms of ecstasy border on
pain.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
—Jared Joseph
Cowardly New World
There was a time when distraction
could not so easily be grasped,
when time was just time
and the past was just the past,
when places could just be themselves,
unassuming, undefined,
and one’s thoughts kept one to the task;
before the world became enclosed
by wide-openness, constricted
by expansion, where nothing
can just be itself
or forgotten anymore.
—John Tottenham