Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world. While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with...
Los Angeles is a city of immigrants: over 200 different languages are spoken here. Every immigrant comes to this country with an already established identity. Each has to jettison their old identities and craft new, LA-based ones. Some do so by making art. One way to...
At the entrance to “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnizter and His Family Foundation” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, stand two giant ceramic heads. One features a black-and-white striped neck, red crown and...
The quality and diversity of the work of Yolanda González—a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramic sculptor—makes a solo installation of her work long overdue. This current exhibition, with nearly a 100 pieces from the career of the 59-year-old LA–based Chicana...
A series of secreting, grotesquely glamorous portrait paintings rendered in gloopy lip gloss, lustrous nail polish, sparkly eye shadows, tints, and creams pay homage to queer-feminist heroes and the power of the performative body. Intimate in scale, Vaginal Davis’...
Keegan Monaghan's paintings feel like the moldy nooks and crannies of a house or a well-worn shoe, rendered in epic and compact proportions. Their compositions shiver with an eerie affection akin to the apparitional creaking of my old, poorly insulated apartment. The...
Augustina Wang's fantastical world evokes a style of magical realism that is uniquely hers, embracing the immersive aspects of fantasy that function as a means of escapism, allowing more playful, nuanced, and expansive notions of identity to flourish. The femmes that...
The first weekend of the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has come and gone, celebrating not only the best of music but of visual art, both locally and internationally. I was invited to meet with the slate of artists chosen by Paul Clemente with Raffi...
Vessels are shadowy shapeshifters—morphic geological bodies that contain ancient and imaginative geometries. A strange uncanniness is embedded in Masaomi Yasunaga’s ceramic vessels, evoking fossils and corporeal architecture. The sheen of some of their glazed surfaces...
Njideka Akunyili Crosby's portraits feel static on the walls of the Huntington Library. Thomas Gainsborough's famous "Blue Boy" painting in the adjacent room suddenly feels stagnant and deflated. The Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist's large-scale collages...
Full disclosure up-front: I am well-acquainted with Zak Smith as an artist. Before we met (in 2010), I was aware of his work only because of his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and not incidentally because his work for that show had (what was for me) an...
Walking through Edie Beaucage's show of sculptures and larger-than-life portraits is like wading through clouds of brushstrokes made of vivid greens, blues, and pops of orange, the subjects of the paintings staring coolly at you. In the following gallery, Jean Lowe's...
Dear Reader, As long as there are people, there will be portraits. Face it—no pun intended—people are attracted to people. We like to look at ourselves; we like to people-watch; we gaze into our lover’s eyes. Our faces are unique and fascinating: they are who we are....
Congratulations to our winner, Tim Sassoon, and our finalists, Sasson's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the March/April 2023 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for...
Jim Shaw’s work has always moved, both performatively and analytically, between the quotidian space of individual consciousness, and collective and cultural spaces both conscious and unconscious. Since he began using film studio and theater backdrops as readymade...
A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants...
Transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings which operate like a story or a fairytale—a mythology of metamorphic processes that disrupt, shape-shift, alter and expand concepts of the self—employing a kind of magical thinking oriented around...
It is not unusual for an exhibition of Friedrich Kunath’s paintings to be accompanied by something outrageous and unexpected. In both 2012 and 2017 he carpeted gallery floors, transforming them into soft, colorful fields dotted with sculptures, couches, socks, giant...
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