With a high of only 50 degrees and a slow misting rain, this year’s Frieze New York art fair on Randall's Island could have been renamed Freeze, but that didn’t seem to stop the throngs of attendees on preview day. For this melting pot of a fair, half the galleries in...
Samuel Freeman: Mineo Mizuno
For Mineo Mizuno’s 2015 exhibition “Current,” the artist presented a body of work that marked a definitive shift in his practice. Unlike his earlier works which feature bold and brilliant glazes, the pieces he made for last year’s show included a selection of unglazed...
Culver City Early Bird Special
Showing up to gallery openings in Culver City promptly at 6 p.m. looks a lot like stumbling on the early bird special at your local Denny’s. It’s a quiet scene mostly made up of graying hair and Keds for comfort. This is the OG La Cienega crowd and they’re probably...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers We are bringing back a popular theme—photography. As a regular Artillery contributor, I guest-edited a photo issue four years ago. Since then, Artillery Editor Tulsa Kinney and I have talked about revisiting the topic. That 2012 photography issue...
Audrey Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World
One of Los Angeles–based artist Audrey Wollen’s Instagram posts features an undated 1890s painting in which a nude woman reclines, examining herself in a mirror she is holding up to her face. Red beads are wrapped around the woman’s neck and ankle, bringing to mind...
Todd Gray’s Framing of Identity
“I’ve been going the wrong way for a long time … it’s sort of a reverse commute.” This is said by Todd Gray at the start of his 2010 performance, Caliban in the Mirror. This seemingly autobiographical, storytelling piece has Gray on stage with a few props—a camera, a...
The Science of Seeing
Two hundred years ago, the hierarchy of subjects taught to academic painters placed history and mythology at the top, with landscape and still life at the bottom. This ranking followed the scala naturae, the ladder or scale of nature derived from Plato: God, followed...
The Analog Revolution
The first to grow up in an image-centric world where the mass-dissemination of images via film, print and television started to infiltrate American culture on scales never before seen, those of the Pictures Generation found themselves grappling with notions concerning...
A Hot Hollywood at LACE’s Benefit Art Auction
“Ditch the jacket. It’s always hot in there.”I disregard the warning. Hollywood is hushed, cool, with the usual spattering of sleaze and stale piss.A doorman swings open the glass doors to the baking hot Benefit Art Auction at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions....
Amy Elkins’ Male Protagonists
Inside American prisons, thousands of men sequestered in tiny, dim rooms spend their lives waiting to die. Outside, this marginal population is hardly considered, except as a seamy abstraction. SoCal-based artist Amy Elkins finds inspiration in prisoners’ hermetic...
Lost At Sea
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years,...
Deep Dreams
Jeremy Couillard says that the pleasure of working with virtual reality (VR) is that he can move away from “a deceitful world I deeply wish did not exist. I need to create an alternative to that universe so I don’t go insane.” A video and installation artist, and...
KEN GONZALES-DAY
1 Unknown, Bust of Kakaley, Isabelle, Salomon Islands (MNHN-HA-872), National Museum of Natural History, Paris 2 Emile-André Leroy, Young Haitian, Museum of the 30s, Boulogne-Billancourt. 3 Unknown, Bust of a Young Man, Arigi Dunka, Born on the White Nile...
DECODER
Self-portraits have been around forever and photos have been around longer than anyone now living. But selfies, I am going to argue, are their own thing. New in important ways. Definition: on a Venn diagram selfies are a small circle within “self-portraits” and...
ART BRIEF
The City of West Hollywood is well known as one of the most liberal cities in America, so it’s more than a little ironic that the city officials have been accused of censoring the artistic work of photographer Brooke Mason who curated shows of women’s artwork at three...
RECONNOITER
Dhyandra Lawson is a curatorial assistant in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). ARTILLERY: Please describe your job at LACMA.Lawson: I support the curatorial work of my departmental colleagues and make time for...
ASK BABS: Etiquette for Artful Living
BIGGER IS BETTERDear Babs, I went to the inaugural opening of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel here in Los Angeles. Seeing the sheer magnitude of the new mega gallery as well as the crowds it brought out made me wonder what it would mean for LA. Are these gallery/museum...
RETROSPECT
Unlike Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with his models—whom he painted obsessively, much to the detriment of his painting—Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Lisa Lyon show no signs of such frustration. Rossetti was like a man locked outside of a house to which...