For those of us who have followed Yuja Wang’s career for the last 15 years or so (at least since her major American orchestral debuts) and especially over the last five, we have more or less come to expect two things: to be dazzled and to be surprised. Los Angeles...
Yuja Wang — April 6, 2022, Disney Hall
Let Me Talk Witness Trees, Melting Gates, and Quiet Breathing
Let me talk. How often have I had to say that? Or wanted to say that? Or conversely, put it back to an interlocutor—‘no, go ahead—you talk; I want to hear what you have to say.’ Or in yet another mood or set of conditions, thought to myself, ‘let me hear this...
Julian Stanczak: The Light Inside Other Horizons, Other Lights
I had some idea of what to expect when I walked into the Julian Stanczak show at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery a couple Saturdays ago (this is the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery). Almost from the outset of his career, Stanczak was identified with the ‘Op...
No Humans Involved Hammer Museum
The landmark exhibition “No Humans Involved” was remarkably compact, filling a single gallery at the Hammer with installations by only seven artists. Its impact, however, was seismic and sustained. Its title alone was enough to take viewers aback—and that was part of...
Mapping Fiction — The Huntington Plotting the Dimensional Fictional World
It is probably safe to say that cartography evolved directly alongside oral and written narrative. Similarly, it is plausible to assume that fictional narrative began to take form as travel between known or proximate locations gave way to voyages across unplotted or...
Ten More to Remember — or simply bring to Los Angeles Postscript to the 2021 Artillery Top Ten
As I wrote to preface ARTILLERY’s 2021 “Top Ten” compilation, there could have easily been a parallel list of 10 or more shows and exhibitions approaching the level of the ten I selected. At one time, the magazine designated a few “honorable mentions,” usually, as I...
Hilary Baker: Predators – And Other L.A. Stories Rory Devine Fine Art
Hilary Baker calls her current show at Rory Devine Fine Art, Predators—which we might loosely define as any species that dares to assert its presence amongst the invasive, marauding, and all-devouring species of apex-predators, we know as humans. Baker’s subtitle is,...
Mary Weatherford David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense. The title of her...
Top 10 Picks of 2021
I resisted compiling this list (the limitations of which are obvious); but then thought: “Wait! In this awkward year of slow emergence from a pandemic that may never really be over, how many really great shows could there actually be?” Until, as I went over the shows...
Jean-Yves Thibaudet at Disney Hall — Through the fog and straight to the moon Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays the complete Debussy Préludes — December 1, 2021, Walt Disney Concert Hall
“Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir.” Charles Baudelaire, “Harmonie du soir,” Les Fleurs du mal (1857) The title of the first of the 12 Preludes in Book II of Debussy’s Préludes is “Brouillards”—and Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s audience at Disney Hall was...
Brave New World: Handel’s Alcina The English Concert & soloists, conducted by Harry Bicket — Los Angeles Opera, November 2, 2021
“Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,...” William Shakespeare, The Tempest Scarcely into the second act of Alcina—the third of Handel’s operas based on material from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso...
Young Joon Kwak Commonwealth and Council
The show’s original incarnation was the culmination of the artist’s residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University’s Lansing campus from August 2020 through May 2021. Fastening onto the campus’s most prominent landmark—the statue of Michigan State’s...
Sun & Sea — Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, October 15, 2021 On the Beach — Now and Forever
Nothing really happens in Sun & Sea, an opera set during a time in which we may expect ‘things’ will more or less stop happening altogether; or in any case, when things only happen to us—excepting possibly those wealthy enough to have provided themselves...
Agnus of God — “Lamb” for the Apocalypse The pursuit of happiness and the surrender of Hope in Valdimar Jóhannsson’s “Lamb”
One thing Orson Welles understood about movie-making was that a great motion picture, like any great work of art, tapped into a sense of the magical. He also understood that the magic was not simply the final studio product, however released or presented...
Emblazoned World — Bel Ami Where “Everything Is Illuminated” — Lucy Bull & friends find the light in the dust.
It was really a break from a break from a break from a longer art project (which is what art features turn into after they’ve been festering and metastasizing for more than a month or two) that brought me out to Bel Ami – a gallery I’d never been to located in the...
Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (at OUTFEST Los Angeles) Making a creative life at the culture’s edge – Jump, Darling (Big Island Productions/2645850 Ontario/LevelFILM) - directed by Phil Connell
Identity evolution, struggles and troubled transitions are familiar themes and storylines in Outfest fare, and Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (the U.S. release of which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic) fits neatly if slightly awkwardly into this category. What’s...
Susan Silton: WE at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles WE WILL BE SEEING IT DIFFERENTLY—ALWAYS: SUSAN SILTON’S MORPHOLOGY OF IMAGE AND WORD
“What are we looking at?” You hear that (usually rhetorical) question a lot in art galleries and design houses – also in accounting firms, screening rooms, at construction sites, and (really) business meetings of any kind – frequently spoken with some impatience. ...
Umar Rashid Transformative Arts
For an artist who has deliberately cultivated a naïve style, Umar Rashid (who also occasionally calls himself Frohawk Two Feathers) appears to have calculated the exhibition’s title, “Per Capita” with almost labyrinthine deliberation—an amalgam of the coyly...