Since 2017, I have been among the 1.7 million people who have participated in the art biennial-cum-treasure hunt to seek out large-scale, site-specific contemporary art installations scattered throughout the Coachella Valley desert, the land of the haves and have-nots. Not in a white cube, locked away in a walled institution, or behind a paywall, Desert X is a great equalizer, breaking...
As fate would have it, the biannual “Spring 2025 ArtNight Pasadena” event is taking place on March 14th—winter’s coldest, dreariest, and rainiest day. Accordingly, you select the handful of venues most likely to feature contemporary work, then set off. An hour and a half and four stops later, you’ve experienced about fourteen seconds worth of satori. It doesn’t seem at all sporting to break out...
Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at the Karma party at Ghengis Cohen, his trucker hat popping up behind a psychic and very beautiful astrologer. I saw James Franco at Frieze,...
I’m at a bar in Palmdale and it’s nearly empty. From where I am sitting, I can see two men playing chess. Or, rather, they’re not really playing—they’re afraid to make a move. It’s Pawn to E4, followed by the all-too-familiar analysis paralysis: finger steadies the piece, eyes tighten, neck cranes and turtles to check for danger, and then…Pawn back to E2. Let’s start again. Every move never...
This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous textile-based technologies of the early modern era, and reflections on the environmental precarity of Los Angeles. There were as...
Trying to Navigate LA Dear Dr. Trainwreck, Can you talk about chasing fame and how that affects friendship? I’m from the Midwest and came out to California for art school. I’m fresh out of school (one year) and was able to get pretty good gallery representation early on so I count myself lucky. But a classmate that graduated at the same time keeps asking me how I did it. I’m happy to share. I’m...
Sontag famously wrote about the photograph as a means of securing ownership over an ethereal past. Her words come to mind as one moves through Hailey Heaton’s "Hissyfit," which reckons with the erosion of memory (and therefore history) through dementia. (The...
Time is a common theme in Kelly Akashi’s work. Doilies inherited from her grandmother represent the past. The artist’s hands, cast in bronze, serve as timestamps for the present— lines and wrinkles marking specific moments. Cast bronze seed pods represent the...
It’s not uncommon that an art show claims to deconstruct the human form and challenge societal notions of beauty. Derrian Pharr’s innovative “I Am a Bloodstone” makes good on this promise. The otherworldly heroines in Pharr’s works (made with pastels and prisma...
Palm Springs’ annual Modernism Week dominates the city in February, but I caught this quiet, elegant exhibit at the museum’s satellite space. It’s a revelatory history and homage to Frank Lloyd Wright craftsman Manuel Sandoval, a twentieth-century Nicaraguan American...
Textile art has not always been one of my favorite mediums, but Ramekon O’Arwisters' exhibit altered my thinking. At a time where being Black and Queer, and any semblance of DEI seems fraught - the artist has come out swinging. The thoughtfully curated show is...
The long-running MexiCali Biennial got a recent boost from Mellon Foundation and is currently making its mark in the eastern LA suburb of Whittier. The space, which also houses an archive, MXCL BNL LAB545, is located in an unpretentious storefront, betraying an...
I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the...
As I fought through crosstown traffic, the messages came in fast and furious. Hurry up!... Where are you?!... She’s about to arrive!... You’re gonna miss her corvette pull up! When I finally parked and made it to Melrose Botanical Garden, the crowd was spilling onto...
I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but...