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: Marilyn Nance Roberts Projects
The Marilyn Nance exhibition at Roberts Projects beautifully demonstrates the phenomenon known as...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Janet Olivia Henry Stars
Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Carolyn Castaño Walter Maciel Gallery
Carolyn Castaño's “Otros Seres” (Other Beings) exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery is an...
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
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