Toilet Cheer, Surreal Santas
Robolights, the annual open house for a vast year-round, found-art installation in Palm Springs, is coming to a close. Open through January 8th nightly from 4:30-9:30 p.m., aglow with holiday lights, this surreal yet sweet art installation is rich in detail and...
Caroline Larsen and Dominic Terlizzi
A pair of concurrent shows at Craig Krull features paintings that, despite firm adherence to the tradition of pigment on canvas, appear to exist as other objects. Caroline Larsen squeezes vibrantly hued paint from pastry tubes into loopy ribbons and whimsical daubs...
Brand Library & Art Center: : ONE YEAR
Whatever one’s disposition, “ONE YEAR: The Art of Politics in Los Angeles” at Glendale’s Brand Library & Art Center provides fuel for thought and stimulus to action. Negotiating the polemics of the current political climate and the overarching sense of anxiety...
EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Reader, The new year is a time to look forward, but in this issue we also take stock. Staff writer Ezrha Jean Black does so with her popular (and for obvious reasons, not so popular) Top Ten LA shows of 2017. Ezrha works hard to be fair-minded yet critical, with...
Artillery Best in Show 2017
The experience of art in Los Angeles is always both very specific to its localized encounter and acutely conscious of its engagement with the world. As political forces outside California moved to further isolate us in 2017, that dialogue and artists’ sensitivity to...
Theory and Experience in the Work of Kandis Williams
At Kandis Williams’ studio, sparse and white with tall ceilings and drywall divisions, her studio neighbor Orion Martin and I sit and talk with her about contemporary intimacy. I am struggling as to whether I should revive a Tinder account in an act of hysteria...
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
In the mainstream, queerness has a way of being pushed into the shadows, forced back into the closet. It happens all around us, especially in communities of color, spaces which still oftentimes say that queerness does not belong here. It was a bit of a surprise then...
Culture Coverup: L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege
Just as there is a certain metaphysical link between acknowledging one’s existence and looking in the mirror, there exists a similar link between the acknowledgement of a culture’s experienced reality and its representation in media. When a cultural group lacks...
Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago at MOLAA
Years before the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA” was initiated, the Museum of Latin American Art was exploring Latin and Latino culture. Its previous 2011–12 PST, “Mex/L.A. ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930–1985,” explored the relationship between...
Code Orange
CODE ORANGE is a new Artillery feature, a web-based, issue-oriented photography contest curated by LA artist and photographer Laura London. Winning entries will be published in upcoming issues of the magazine, and finalists will appear online. CODE ORANGE is a...
Report from New York
China had its first major avant-garde exhibition in 1989, which was also the year of the Tiananmen protests. The exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (through Jan. 7, 2018) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, acknowledges that sea...
SHOPTALK
Fair News January is fair month in our fair city. The LA Art Show (Jan. 10–14) in all its massiveness returns to the Convention Center downtown, and Art LA Contemporary (Jan. 25–28) returns to Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. A month later in the nearby low desert is...
ART BRIEF
Although I’m not a big fan of Norman Rockwell’s artwork, a painting of his caught my eye after becoming the centerpiece of a controversy that has rocked the art world. Rockwell, the longtime cover illustrator of the Saturday Evening Post working from the 1920s to the...
UNDER THE RADAR
This whole end-of-net-neutrality panic is a bit of a mystery to me. Sure, it sucks, but what were people expecting? That businessmen would suddenly do the right thing, because, like, information wants to be free? So did Frederick Douglass, but trickle-down economics...
RECONNOITER
Bill Sheehy is the director of Latin American Masters, which he founded in 1987. What led you to exhibit only Latin-American artists? Do you think that LA’s proximity to Latin America lends its art a special relevance here? I was led to exhibit Latin-American...
BUNKER VISION
If you happen to be looking for a textbook example of film as collaborative art, a special feature on the DVD of The Lure might be one of the best. The movie itself is a sort of musical/horror hybrid. It involves a pair of mermaids (not the cute kind) who come ashore...
ASK BABS
DIFFICULT SUBJECT MATTER DEAR BABS: In my art practice, I gravitate toward using ephemeral media and creating installations. Sometimes my work deals with “difficult” subject matter. Do most gallery owners steer clear of those qualities in art because it is challenging...
