RECONNOITER
Gerard O’Brien founded The Landing a year ago and is the owner of Reform Gallery in Los Angeles, a store that quickly became a leading source for furnishings, crafts and accessories in the California Modern style.ARTILLERY: You’ve gotten a lot of admiration and good...
Looking At Doug Aitken
Exiting Electric Earth, Doug Aitken’s immersive, multichannel narrative installation first presented in 1999 and immediately confronting Twilight (2016), an eerie, translucent ghost-like freestanding replica of a now obsolete pay phone that pulsates from light to dark...
Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor has described his figurative painting, which is not infrequently straight portraiture, as landscape; and to press the point, he has taken the further step of mounting the work within a gallery prepared from the floor up, in effect treating the space as...
Sam Falls
Visual affinities extend throughout Sam Falls’ solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, suggesting relationships between natural phenomena and man-made objects, while also developing a thematic unity for Falls’ heterogeneous production. A pair of texturally rich photographs...
Miya Ando
A descendent of samurai-era Bizen sword makers, Miya Ando was first introduced to metalworking as a child while living in a Japanese Buddhist Temple. In homage to her ancestral heritage, she has since looked to this medium (whose impermanent properties convey the...
Analia Saban
Through her show, “Paper or Plastic?”, at the innovative Mixografia studio, Analia Saban breathes new life into plastic grocery bags while highlighting their vapidity as an aging commercial technology.In earlier bodies of work, Saban cast mundane objects in pure paint...
Carina Brandes
The black-and-white photographs of Carina Brandes, which capture her ritualistically enigmatic performances for a self-timed camera, suffer a paradoxical fate: they’re modestly powerful images grounded in a uniquely European sensibility, but ultimately leave little...
Colette Robbins
Standing erect on pedestals, Colette Robbins’ seven skeletal sculptures twist and bend like limbs, frown and gape like skulls, and yet they are clearly not figurative. Rather, the ethereal totems coax the mind to create fiction from their abstract...
Karla Klarins
For over 35 years Karla Klarins has painted the built landscape, now presented in a survey exhibition entitled “Subdividing the Landscape.” In the early 1980s she gained attention for her expressive and unique sculptural relief paintings of downtown Los Angeles...
Sadie Barnette
While earlier exhibitions used horse racing as a point of departure and a metaphor, perhaps, for the handicapping aspect of the art world, “FROM HERE,” recently on view at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, focuses on artist Sadie Barnette’s impressions of her...
Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women
In Ellen Cantor’s restaging of Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women, the landmark show that she originally curated in 1993 at the David Zwirner Gallery, there are the obvious standouts: Yoko Ono’s Object in Three Parts—Revolution (1966),...
ON THE COVER
Marc Horowitz, photo by Stefan Simchowitz, 2015. Marc is featured and interviewed by Christopher Michno.
An Arty Halloween
Aside from the leering ancient goblin who haunted the bar at Richard Heller Gallery, Saturday night at the spooky Bergamot Station was perfect for any art-loving monster with a sense of humor. In order to gaze in pensive awe upon Andrew Ho’s drawings, we were first...
Stealing Art From the Clueless
In the four-page press release for his show at Blum & Poe, the artist Mark Grotjahn lets us in on the little secret he “knew” as a young man: “Art could be whatever (he) wanted it to be.” That tenet would prove to save his ass when he decided to abandon the human...
Night Gallery: Cara Benedetto and Christine Wang
“Please recall the name Medea,” asks the narrator in the opening minutes of Cara Benedetto’s video currently on view at Night Gallery. While conjuring the Greek mythological character who avenges her husband’s betrayal by killing their children, the video pans down...
S/Election – Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom
We Americans live in interesting times. The old Chinese curse has come home to roost long before the country itself has supplanted our economic and cultural hegemony. We have more freedom, more choices generally – but we’re not equally informed or empowered to sort...
Home Is Where the Horror Is – Guillermo del Toro (2)
It’s Halloween and it’s about time I finished my walk-through of Guillermo del Toro’s reconfigured ‘Bleak House’ home/office/inspiration space in the Art of the Americas Building at LACMA. What, after all, could have been keeping me so long? Maybe I simply needed a...
