Articles
PROFILES: JOAQUIN SEGURA
Throughout his 1982 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman returns over and over to a single passage from Marx’s Communist Manifesto: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept...
PROFILES: Sergio Bromberg
In the 20th century there has long been a long tradition of artists extending their visions beyond the studio walls to encompass a wider range of ideas and modes of thinking, wherein artists like Wallace Berman with his magazine Semina in the ’60s, or much later in...
PROFILES: Marycarmen Arroyo Macias
Meeting Marycarmen Arroyo Macias in MexiCali was a fortuitous event; she lent me her camera in a pinch to photograph potential performance locations for the MexiCali Biennial 13, in which we were both included. When I asked about her work for the show, she told me the...
PROFILES: Julio César Morales
Geographical border zones figure prominently in the work of Julio César Morales, particularly those separating the U.S., where he lives, from Mexico, where he was born. In “Undocumented Interventions,” an ongoing series of watercolor and ink drawings, Morales presents...
CURFEW: WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ WALL
Heaven’s gate doesn’t separate life and death like the U.S.-Mexican border. And if the rhetoric and rifles weren’t forcibly obvious symbols, the new pedestrian crossing from San Ysidro into Tijuana is unambiguously penal. A cattle stockade. While the debate over the...
Yoshua Okón of SOMA, Mexico City
Yoshua Okón came to prominence in the blossoming Mexico City art scene of the 1990s. In partnership with Miguel Calderón, another rising star of Mexican art, they founded La Panadería, an artist’s residency and gallery space in a four-story building and former bakery...
GUEST LECTURE
Photo by Leonard Nadel, 1956 “Bracero workers being fumigated at border town Hidalgo, Texas”, Courtesy Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
PROFILES, Q&A: Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia
Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia loves to create objects expressing hybridized meanings, calling attention to how things are not as simple as they first appear. For “by Deborah Calderwood,” his first solo exhibition at CB1 gallery in downtown Los Angeles, he presented...
The Supernatural Hero Bunker Vision
The most interesting thing about Mexican superheroes is that the super is short for supernatural. Where such people in the English-speaking world might inhabit a science fiction, their Mexican counterparts exist in the realm of Magical Realism.
FILM: SPRING BREAKERS
Last year’s James Franco–curated “Rebel” show at the Joel Cohen/MOCA space included a collaboration between Hollywood’s polymathic heartthrob and indie enfant terrible Harmony Korine, in the form of a video entitled CAPUT. The rooftop rumble between bare-naked gang...
THE GOODBYE LOOK
THERE IS SOMETHING VERY REASSURING—;for someone whose attention, unless riveted by something truly compelling, tends to wander—about being told by her interviewee, "I pride myself on my short attention span." Chances are, though, Dawn Kasper's span of attention,...
MEDIA: YOUTUBE
BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN WATCH THE GENerally hit or miss online content of MOCAtv you'll have to navigate through a bombardment of commercials and pop-up ads conjured up by Google and used as revenue for both the Internet giant and MOCA. The newly instated YouTube channel...
DANCING WITH A STAR
Two days before the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performs, I am opposite Artistic Director Benoit-Swan Pouffer at l'Agora, cité internationale de la danse in the charming French city of Montpellier. We are sitting in a corner of the courtyard on a warm July...
KIND OF BLUE
That's what black people are, myths. I come to you as a myth," announces Sun Ra in a scene from Space Is The Place, the marvelously entertaining mixture of blaxploitation, space travel, mysticism and free jazz that screens on one of the many video monitors at the...
Mark Bradford
In the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the anonymous unmarked storefront of Mark Bradford’s studio betrays nothing to passersby, but the large white security gate which rolls back to reveal a parking lot at the north east end of the property is an unusual...
A Women’s Place
Slender, dark-haired Lisa Aslanian speaks softly but with conviction as she shows visitors around her sparsely furnished 1,000-square-foot space, The George Gallery. The venue derives its name from George Sand, a pseudonym for the intrepid 19th-century writer Aurora...
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
One of the largest survey shows of contemporary Canadian art ever produced, "Oh Canada," is the culmination of five-year's research and 400 studio visits by North Adams MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish. It joins a history of international survey exhibitions of...
Tomer Aluf
FOR AN ARTIST, FINDING THE ENTRY POINT to a canvas can be the most confounding part of the creative process. Tomer Aluf, a 35-year-old Israeli who has lived in New York City for the past eight years, uses fictional narratives in which he is the protagonist as his...
London Calling
Phyllida Barlow, "Rift," a site specific installation in three parts, 2012: Untitled: hoardings, 2012, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, photo by Maksim Belousov, Mykhailo Chornyy. DO WE NEED ANOTHER BIENNALE? CERTAINLY UKRAINE SEEMS to think so,...
UNDER THE RADAR
UNDER THE RADAR Pearblossom Hwy MIKE OTT'S PEARBLOSSOM HWY REACHES for reality, in a real way, sort of. LA filmmaker's Mike Ott's last movie—LiTTLEROCK (2010) was a surprise smash in indie terms, racking up the kewpie dolls at LA's AFI Fest, indie fests in Boston,...