Entering Joseph Holtzman’s recent Hammer Project feels akin to entering a child’s sacred imaginative landscape, one where all the imaginary friends can not only be seen, but also deeply witnessed on a visceral level. Not all these friends are indeed friendly and some,...
Hippie Noir
There are times when an art movement quietly documents the heart and soul of the much louder story of history that surrounds it. In 1966, LSD was legal. It was available to a large group of first adopters who found the drug to be “very sensational.”In 1967, LSD was...
Fruity Exotic DTLA Mural
Katherine Bernhardt’s quirky public mural is currently covering the exterior walls of Venus Over Los Angeles gallery in the Arts District of Downtown LA just in time for the mid-summer heat wave.Giant free-floating cigarettes, slices of watermelon, cantaloupe, papaya,...
The Slick & The Sticky
"The Slick & The Sticky," a group show co-curated by Vanessa Place, insists adamantly on its own dystopian themes, wherein the works in the exhibition deliberately obfuscate their own suggested meaning. Working off the premise that all language is inherently...
Back to the Future
The only quibble I might have with the Getty's excellent show, "Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography," would be that its title is too literal-minded. A show as exciting as this one is might have had a more adventurous title – say, "Back to the Future," or...
Petra Cortright
Straddling a fine line somewhere between sincere participation and ironic appropriation, Petra Cortright’s multimedia cyberspace art endlessly reflects and redoubles the medium from which it borrows. The Internet is Cortright’s vehicle and content, framed by...
Mistaken Identities: What We Miss In Our Quest for the Next
It’s time for a little retrospect here at AWOL – as in looking back in an attempt to take in the whole of something. An impossible task – but you have to start somewhere. It’s also about taking the proper measure of something or someone you thought you knew –...
TOTTENHAM CORNER
There are few sights more ridiculous than a grown man wearing a pair of shorts. Back in my day, grown men simply did not venture outside clad in shorts. Anyone choosing to appear in public in such outlandish garb would be laughed off the streets. Scorn would...
Flat World
Not that this hasn’t been done before, the theme of “flatness” explored again and again in all its variations, but in its most recent incarnation at David Kordansky Gallery, artists like Tauba Auerbach transform the static spatial plane that is “flatness” into a...
Live! Nude! Paint!
Last Sunday, instead of curling up to watch an episode of Orange is the New Black and calling it a night, I headed to Venice Beach where art collectors Mike and Diane Silver had opened their gorgeous canal-front home for “Nude Survey Two,” where the established Plein...
Some Faves and Some Suck
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, now includes 30-plus national pavilion spaces in the Giardini area, a mindboggling abundance of ancillary exhibitions (including especially the group show in the warehouse-like Arsenale), as well as a plethora of performance art,...
Fast Food Art
How often have you found yourself saying, “I would bring my business here, if only they had more generic, mall-safe, focus-group chosen art on the walls?” Surrounded by more museums, galleries, and out-of-work MFAs than in any other city, these SoCal establishments...
Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford’s first solo exhibition "Scorched Earth" at the Hammer Museum is a stunner and not in the typical ways one might expect. These paintings, engendered equally by the 1992 LA uprisings as well as the AIDS epidemic, constitute a visceral visual experience...