SIGHTS UNSCENE
RECONNOITER
Wendy Watriss is an award-winning photographer, journalist, curator and co-founder and artistic director of Houston’s FotoFest. In the wake of a season of climate disasters unfurling across the Gulf and Caribbean following only a year after FotoFest’s 2016 biennial,...
Ken Gonzales-Day
The singularly remarkable thing about Ken Gonzales-Day’s re-creation of his breakthrough 1993-96 photographic project, “Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River,” is the infinitely expansive temporal envelope it seems to occupy. This is more than...
A Universal History of Infamy: Virtues of Disparity
Much like the Jorge Luis Borges book after which it is named, the 18th Street Arts Center’s PST: LA/LA exhibition addresses history and its delineations, whether entirely or partially fictitious, in order to question the role of master narratives in general, and...
Alejandro Cartagena
“The Collective Memory of the Worst Place to Live in the World Today If You Are Not White” is a small but nicely arranged exhibition comprised of Alejandro Cartagena’s current and previous work, contrasting Santa Barbara, California with Monterrey, Mexico. The main...
Brian Wills: Line Light
Densely fretted and motion activated and crying out for every metaphorical use of the word string from art to design, music to physics, three new bodies of work by Brian Wills expand and deepen his relationship to his material muse—colored thread. A star in the...
Mark Steven Greenfield
Mark Steven Greenfield’s works explore the complexities of the African American experience, speaking to personal as well as universal themes. While earlier works explored stereotypes characterized by black cartoon characters and Blackface minstrels, in his current...
Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero
“Revolution and Ritual,” while very narrowly focused on three Mexican women photographers, seeks to address in broad strokes changes in ideas about Mexican identity through the work of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero, whose careers together span...
Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954-1969
Kinetic Art, like so many postwar movements, arose simultaneously in several disparate corners of the world, coalesced in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and derived from prewar tendencies whose revolutionary aesthetics and idealistic spirit seemed appropriate to a...
Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now
Brazilian artist Valeska Soares’ mid-career survey at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, her first solo museum exhibit in the western United States, seamlessly expresses the ephemeral qualities of love and longing, in harmony with and opposition to the weighted—and...
Memories of Under-development
“Memories of Underdevelopment” is a sweeping exhibition composed of 400 objects from more than 50 artists from eight countries throughout Latin America. It shares its title with the 1968 movie directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea about the Cuban revolution and associated...
Ahrong Kim
Right as you cross the threshold into Ahrong Kim’s show “Internal Voice” at the Clay Studio, you’re met by five pairs of eyes set into brightly colored teapots resting at eye level on plinths jutting from the wall. The eyes, embedded into fragmented faces, exposed...
Coming Down From Machu Picchu – or – the Afterglow
So I was on the phone with my pal Mary the other day and we were talking about how, between our respective work deadlines and obligations, and taking care of our quadruped loved ones, we essentially never went out anymore. “I mean it’s not as if we’ll ever catch up on...
Artillery Promo
Politically Powerful and Often Seductive
On Saturday afternoon, the Millard Sheets Art Center at the Fairplex in Pomona hosted dialogue between UCLA art historian Charlene Villasenor Black and exhibiting artist Judithe Hernandez. The current show "One Path Two Journeys" is a PST LA/LA offering, pairing...
Van Hanos
Van Hanos' paintings parodizing partisan preposterousness would be utterly comical if they didn't so mordantly reflect our circusy cultural reality. Cynically dubbed "Late American Paintings," his current show at Chateau Shatto concentrates social discord, political...
REDCAT: : León Ferrari
In a letter to a fellow Argentine artist living in Paris, León Ferrari wrote, “We produce culture for our ideological enemies, and they gobble everything up, the pretty paintings and the protest paintings alike.” That is the continuing crisis for art that is built...
