A series of secreting, grotesquely glamorous portrait paintings rendered in gloopy lip gloss, lustrous nail polish, sparkly eye shadows, tints, and creams pay homage to queer-feminist heroes and the power of the performative body. Intimate in scale, Vaginal Davis’...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vaginal Davis
PICK OF THE WEEK: Keegan Monaghan Parker Gallery
Keegan Monaghan's paintings feel like the moldy nooks and crannies of a house or a well-worn shoe, rendered in epic and compact proportions. Their compositions shiver with an eerie affection akin to the apparitional creaking of my old, poorly insulated apartment. The...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Augustina Wang Sow & Tailor
Augustina Wang's fantastical world evokes a style of magical realism that is uniquely hers, embracing the immersive aspects of fantasy that function as a means of escapism, allowing more playful, nuanced, and expansive notions of identity to flourish. The femmes that...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Masaomi Yasunaga NonakaHill
Vessels are shadowy shapeshifters—morphic geological bodies that contain ancient and imaginative geometries. A strange uncanniness is embedded in Masaomi Yasunaga’s ceramic vessels, evoking fossils and corporeal architecture. The sheen of some of their glazed surfaces...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Njideka Akunyili Crosby The Huntington
Njideka Akunyili Crosby's portraits feel static on the walls of the Huntington Library. Thomas Gainsborough's famous "Blue Boy" painting in the adjacent room suddenly feels stagnant and deflated. The Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist's large-scale collages...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Bambou Gili Night Gallery
Taking its name from The Chick's 1999 song "Goodbye Earl," Bambou Gili's solo Night Gallery exhibition is a beautiful, yet ominous, exploration of the power and potential of womanhood and female friendship. The exhibition loosely follows the song—the story of Mary...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vanessa Prager Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Richly colored, blossoming pseudo-portraits comprise Vanessa Prager's solo exhibition titled "Portraits" at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Each painting depicts a bloom of vibrant flowers sprouting from the necks of the (assumedly) human subjects. Prager's works are a nod...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Martin Puryear Matthew Marks Gallery
It's been 30 years since Martin Puryear's last solo exhibition in Los Angeles—an exciting place to contextualize Puryear's work considering the city's history of burgeoning sculptural practices, especially those relating to assemblage and minimalism. The show includes...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Becky Kolsrud Morán Morán
Naked, decapitated women were a favorite amongst the macho surrealists of the 1930s, projecting their desire and power onto phantom breasts and bellies. The female figures in Becky Kolsrud's surrealist paintings might also be missing heads and appendages, but they are...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Kelly Akashi Villa Aurora
I crouch down to get a closer look at Kelly Akashi’s blooming burial mound and ponder what it might feel like to photosynthesize. An undulating imprint of the artist’s body bulges beneath the landscape like a bloated corpse. Seedlings sprout through a blanket of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Patrick Jackson François Ghebaly
A series of diaphanous shelves hover with a brooding, eerie sense of stillness that charms and terrifies. Patrick Jackson's exhibition “Liquid Clay” presents two separate but related sculpture-based installations. Occupying most of the gallery space is a series of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: River Styx Sea View
River Styx, curated by Brandy Carstens and Sara Lee Hantman, brings together a range of artists whose work is concerned with the interior and emotive forces of landscape that are spiritual, mythological, and metamorphic. Featured in the show include artists such as...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Alison Saar LA Louver
Alison Saar’s diasporic deities are gestures of remembrance that honor the resilience of Black women. Reconfiguring and reclaiming the image of the Sable Venus, Saar depicts a series of women as spiritually charged warriors that are full of agency. This reclamation is...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Another World Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Captivated by the spiritual and vibrational aspects of the natural world, Agnes Pelton renders the invisible forces that surge through life. While Pelton is not the only artist included in LACMA's survey exhibition "Another World," she is the most compelling and...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Brandon Ndife Matthew Brown
Brandon Ndife's practice is grounded in vital materiality that considers matter as lively and metamorphic, bound to forces and encounters that push and pull, tumbling ceaselessly into rambunctious states of transformation. Biomorphic clusters of industrial and...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Francesca Woodman Danziger Gallery
Forever enchanted by Francesca Woodman’s photographic realms, I trace her contorted, fluttering body in the passing shadows and opaque reflections of her self-portraits–I see a witch, a siren, a spirit, a saint, a veiled apparition. Woodman’s body is simultaneously...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Elaine Cameron-Weir Hannah Hoffman Gallery
For those already acquainted with Elaine Cameron-Weir’s practice, her recent exhibition “Exploded View / Dressing for Windows” at Hannah Hoffman Gallery feels familiarly sterile and sacred, mechanical and magical. Clusters of assemblage sculpture made of concrete,...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Tala Madani The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
To experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of...