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March/April 2024
DIGITAL EDITION
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. So, when artists gained access to AI-generating tools, I wasn’t that impressed, nor alarmed. There seemed to be a lot of hoopla and fearmongering about the prospect of...
ART FOR DUMMIES Sophie Becker and the Ventriloquy Redux
Often seen as an eccentric art form, ventriloquism has resurfaced and gained popularity again in mainstream culture over the past few years, from televised talent competitions (three ventriloquists have won America’s Got Talent: Terry Fator, Paul Zerdin and Darci...
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 advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage...
HYPER-REAL HYBRIDIZATION Patricia Piccinini Finds Beauty in Otherness
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s world is inhabited by creatures that suggest genetic engineering gone awry or the infusion of sentience in hitherto inanimate objects. Her hyper-realistic sculptures combine elements of human form blended with those of animals,...
ABSTRACTION STUDIES George Legrady's Collaborations and Mythic Narratives
Generative AI image synthesis, exemplified by software like Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and similar tools, has captivated widespread attention enabling on-the-fly image creation through text prompts and image prompts. While either text or image quickly...
INFINITE VARIETY David Em Finds Endless Possibilities
Digital art pioneer David Em, whose work has been published and exhibited internationally, was the first to make images with pixels at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1975. He then went on to build articulated 3D creatures with mainframes at the company...
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 being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was...
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 describe humans made of inferior materials that would function as unthinking and unfeeling slaves. The Czech word “robota” translates to “forced labor.” So began the uneasy...
ART BRIEF Gaga for AI
In the past year, galleries have opened shows displaying AI-generated art, so it was no surprise that one of the world’s top galleries, Gagosian, would host AI art shows in New York last year and in LA this January. Bennett Miller may have been an appropriate...
THE DIGITAL Technology is Their Beat
For your next fancy art after-party, I would recommend the following signature cocktail. While somewhat nontraditional and off-menu, this enchanted concoction is guaranteed to please and is crafted with a simple combination of ingredients: two parts childhood...
PEER REVIEW Sula Bermúdez-Silverman on Candice Lin
A sculptor and revisionist historian, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman uses a plethora of sculptural materials, from glass to ready-mades, to achieve her conceptual ends. The Los Angeles–based artist is known for her vibrant, sometimes eerie objects that conjure otherworldly...
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 museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce...
OBITUARIES David Kunzle, Jay Willis and Margit Omar
Art historian and artist, curator and collector, gymnast, actor and activist David Kunzle, died January 1 at 87. Through his teaching at UCLA and his prodigious writings, the pioneer comicologist opened the doors of art history for the once-disdained topics of...
ASK BABS Welcome...Now Get Out!
Dear Babs, I was recently visiting some blue-chip galleries with my septuagenarian mother. After a few hours, she pointed out that not one gallery had a comfortable place to sit down and experience the art. She felt like it was an insult to anyone who isn’t a...
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...
COMICS Puppets on Strike!
Griselda Rosas Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
The title of Griselda Rosas’ exhibition, “Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before),” recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, “Once upon a time...,” but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn’t frame so much as foreground the...
Todd Gray Vielmetter Los Angeles
Photographer Todd Gray is a rule breaker. In this brave new art world he has fashioned for us, gone are the two-dimensional, singular perspective, rectangular photographs that hung on the walls these past 200 years. In their place, Gray presents something entirely...
Joey Terrill Marc Selwyn Fine Art
The 1980s witnessed the specter of AIDS as it decimated a generation of queer men and many others. Some prevailed—artist Joey Terrill among them, though he wistfully noted in an interview, “Unlike my friends … I’m still here—working....” That sentiment sets a...
Leidy Churchman Matthew Marks Gallery
At Leidy Churchman’s “Heart Drop,” what unfolds is not rooted in rationality nor the immediate appearance of the paintings. The show features winsome and playful subjects, colors and text, yielding an impression of light-hearted themes that in time reveal pictures...
Alejandro Cardenas Anat Ebgi
So much more than paintings in bespoke carrying cases—though they certainly are that—the results of Alejandro Cardenas’ collaboration with Case Studyo, a Belgian artist-edition platform, engage the conceptual premise of the project with a thoughtful intentionality...
Dyani White Hawk Various Small Fires
A celebrated episode of the groundbreaking Native television series Reservation Dogs takes a harrowing look at life inside an Indian boarding school, where strict Catholic nuns do their best to indoctrinate Native children into Western culture by punishing them...
Catherine Opie REGEN PROJECTS
In a photograph titled Idexa and Denix, 2002 (2002/2024), a woman in a tight black T-shirt, with tattoos poking out from under the sleeves, short coiffed hair and a nose ring, among other piercings, stares with striking blue eyes at the camera. On her lap is an...
John Cage & Leah Ke Yi Zheng CASTLE
John Cage and Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s joint exhibition, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” presents two aesthetically dissimilar bodies of work with overlapping concerns that entangle them. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination tool that uses hexagrams to predict divine...