There was astonishing buzz around Philippe Quesne’s La Mélancolie des Dragons at REDCAT last Wednesday night; and as a sucker for avant-garde theatre, I simply had to be there, heat or no heat. I felt cooler just looking at the stage set, which resembled a forest...
A Different Voice of the Same Generation
<p><em></em><em></em>As lookers and lovers of contemporary art, we too often encounter millennial artists making work as willing (or proud, even) participants in a culture of banality. That is, the isolation and presentation of...
Pinaree Sanpitak: Ma-Lai
A refreshing fragrance of hyacinth and tiger lilies sets the tone for Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak’s delicate installation of white garlands, or Ma-Lai, for which her third solo exhibition in New York is named. Continuing with her interest in the body that she has...
Lisa Adams, Hilde Overbergh & Gert Verhoeven, and Nathan Hayden
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Chris Goennawein
Chris Goennawein is an artist who “theorizes” painterly surfaces and the underlying structures that support them. His first exhibition at c.nichols project explores various notions of place wherein the signification of an object wrestles with the process by which it...
The Center of the World is Where Your Work Happens –
The L.A. art industry never rests (as if awol ever needed proof of that!); but tradition dies hard, and art galleries and museums break out the new season alongside other arts and cultural venues. Matthew Barney had already screened his not-so-new (2014 – and six...
Broad Museum Opening Reception
Sarah Awad
Sarah Awad’s paintings are large-scale and meditative—images that exude a sense of “place” and attitude, a timelessness as it were, even as they remain powerfully contemporary. Awad has chosen to paint gates and with that choice comes an entire visual history of...
Ethereal Visions and Dangerous Liaisons: Adès and Cheng in concert at Zipper Hall
<p>For many of us in Los Angeles glued to a screen as a ferociously hot Tuesday afternoon faded with an exhausted sigh into a still intolerably warm Tuesday evening, possibly toggling between one task and another as <strong>Venus</strong>...
Mick Rock: Shooting For Stardust; The Rise of David Bowie and Co.
Who doesn’t love David Bowie? Some would argue that Ziggy Stardust was Bowie at his best, and at Taschen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard one can experience the “Bowiesque” 1970s in all their weirdness and colorful splendor. Noted photographer and bandmate Mick Rock...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers When I moved to Los Angeles to attend grad school for my MFA at the University of Southern California, it was apparent I was at a crossroads in my life. Making the decision to leave the place where I grew up, to leave behind all my family and friends,...
Rules of Engagement
The term, “mindful awareness,” is a buzz phrase in current therapeutic and meditation circles (and, as I discovered a year or so ago, the institutional art world—or at least the Hammer Museum, by way of its alliance with UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center). But...
(Un)Reliably Ranking MFA Education
More than any other MFA programs in Southern California—there are in excess of a dozen—CalArts and UCLA have long been associated with art super-stardom. Whether this perception is accurate or a mere distillation of selective anecdotes, it bolsters the mythology of...
The Accidental Artist
Just blocks from Venice Beach near Appleton Way I’m wandering down an alley, trying to find Jud Fine’s studio. Over the cell he tells me to look for the DWP truck parked in front. But as I turn the corner the truck is pulling away. I’m not quite sure which nondescript...
Yale Pit Crit
At the Yale School of Painting and Printmaking there is a pit. They called it a pit. There were discussions in the pit and they were twice a year, about you, and mandatory.Some people cried in the pit. They wept because the artist-professors said they held low...
Judgment Day
All good crits are alike; each miserable crit is miserable in its own way. Isn’t that the way it goes? We asked a few reliable Southern California university faculty to recommend recent MFA grad students for contributions to our Back to School issue on their critique...
Portland Photo Month
Each April, galleries in Portland, OR, exhibit photography in recognition of Photo Month. As one might expect from a small art scene, the exhibitions are locally important but seem nostalgic, derivative or touristic to outsiders. The two notable exceptions are Coleen...
The Troubles
In the perennial discussion of which of the several distinguished art schools in Los Angeles is the best, the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California has always been a contender. Until now. This year the Roski School, with its...