Features
Seeing Detroit Through Fresh Eyes Taylor Renee Aldridge Returns to her Hometown to Head Modern Ancient Brown Foundation
Recently I had the opportunity to visit Detroit for the first time in my life. What a...
ABOLITION IN ACTION Crenshaw Dairy Mart Cares About People
The artist-of-color-led arts organization and collective in Inglewood, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM),...
HEAVY WATER Rethinking the LA River for Future Generations
The Los Angeles River is a permanent topic of fascination for artists in this city. In order to...
Reviews
Lotus L. Kang at Commonwealth and Council
To experience lack is to be reminded of the boundaries of the self, of others. Lacking realizes...
Eugenia P. Butler at The Box
Butler’s threadbare saffron works-on-silk line the perimeter of the back gallery, floating forward...
Shirazeh Houshiary at Lisson Gallery
Houshiary's mesmeric abstract canvases depose our human perception of scope and scale, engaging...
Columns
REMARKS ON COLOR Fall's Hue
It’s not the blue of melancholia, nor is it the blue of frigid, icy waters surrounding some lovely...
THE DIGITAL Form and Function May Still Have a Chance
There are few places on this earth where I have stood and felt humbled, in awe of the grandeur of...
BUNKER VISION The Outsider Cosmonaut
One of the places where art and science can interact as a powerful force is in outsider art. This...
Departments
From the Editor Sept/Oct 2024; Volume 19, issue 1
Dear Reader, I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: This, after 18 years,...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Olympics Paris 2024: Art, Fashion & Camp
Here’s something different: I am going to talk about the Olympics that were opening in Paris as I...
PLANET CITY AT SCI-ARC Liam Young Imagines Our Future
Liam Young is an Australian-born speculative architect and world-builder who constructs digital...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Covey Gong and Monique Mouton Bel Ami
The meeting of Covey Gong and Monique Mouton at Bel Ami is like watching the contact of two elements transforming one another. While their respective works are satisfying on their own, together, Mouton’s mixed media on paper and Gong’s tactful sculptures, spotlights a transitional and unsettled nature that resignifies the experience of fully emerging without committing to a definition. In Gong’s work, a sculpture such as TRD-RDDL01-HP (2024), with its delicate stainless-steel assembly and sequenced acrylic rods, oscillates between feeling talismanic like an I Ching hexagram and embodying the function of an architectural maquette. In Mouton’s Zones (2024), an asymmetrical floating paper touched by horizontal gray brushstrokes and a subdued fluorescent lemon wash, counters what I expect—yet is seemingly right. Their separate and complimentary tenderness towards materials and the construction of each work is technical without requiring a complete sense of fixity. While one could say these works are ephemeral or understated, that suggests a softness and short-lived quality that doesn’t capture the fortitude in their fragility nor their finely tuned approach. Propelling together with a sharp clarity, “a vista,” is steady and penetrating.
Bel Ami
709 N. Hill St. Suite #105
Los Angeles, CA
On view through October 12, 2024
PUBLISHER’S EYE: DAVID SHULL NOON Projects
Centering his ten charcoal drawings around the silhouette of the cowboy hat, David Shull meditates on the object’s form as well as significance and associations in our culture, such as the masculine traits of the Western hero, in his show titled “FLHAT EARTH FALLING WATER.” The works feature various landscapes or scenes reflected onto the hats, which become the boundaries of the drawings, the bold line of the rims a constant in his series; some of the works are more consumed by their subjects, the lines of the hats less obvious in those featuring a lighthouse, a brick water well, or a dinner table with a bouquet of roses and candles. One is almost themed—in Sing Sing (2023), a black-and-white striped hat features a locked chain as its hatband and a songbird on its brim, the famous prison’s name and the work’s title written by the bird’s beak. Despite their shared outlines, each of Shull’s drawings are completely different, showcasing his perspective, cleverness and sometimes humor.
POEMS "Licking Time" and "A Lesser Work"
Licking Time
There’s a fortune to be made
thinking about licking the bare upper thigh
of historical figures.
The way the first person gave up all hope
echoes in everyone everywhere forever.
Wearing animal print, and writing poems
one can get close to the world
licking itself.
—Hans Wagner
A Lesser Work
I have finally come to the decision:
not to come to a decision, to simply wait
for the opportunity to pass, and then
bitterly regret not having come
to a different decision earlier.
I have done everything wrong.
That was the plan all along,
to watch other people move on.
At which I have failed admirably.
—John Tottenham