Showing up to gallery openings in Culver City promptly at 6 p.m. looks a lot like stumbling on the early bird special at your local Denny’s. It’s a quiet scene mostly made up of graying hair and Keds for comfort. This is the OG La Cienega crowd and they’re probably...
One of Los Angeles–based artist Audrey Wollen’s Instagram posts features an undated 1890s painting in which a nude woman reclines, examining herself in a mirror she is holding up to her face. Red beads are wrapped around the woman’s neck and ankle, bringing to mind...
“I’ve been going the wrong way for a long time … it’s sort of a reverse commute.” This is said by Todd Gray at the start of his 2010 performance, Caliban in the Mirror. This seemingly autobiographical, storytelling piece has Gray on stage with a few props—a camera, a...
Two hundred years ago, the hierarchy of subjects taught to academic painters placed history and mythology at the top, with landscape and still life at the bottom. This ranking followed the scala naturae, the ladder or scale of nature derived from Plato: God, followed...
The first to grow up in an image-centric world where the mass-dissemination of images via film, print and television started to infiltrate American culture on scales never before seen, those of the Pictures Generation found themselves grappling with notions concerning...
“Ditch the jacket. It’s always hot in there.”I disregard the warning. Hollywood is hushed, cool, with the usual spattering of sleaze and stale piss.A doorman swings open the glass doors to the baking hot Benefit Art Auction at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions....
Inside American prisons, thousands of men sequestered in tiny, dim rooms spend their lives waiting to die. Outside, this marginal population is hardly considered, except as a seamy abstraction. SoCal-based artist Amy Elkins finds inspiration in prisoners’ hermetic...
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years,...
Jeremy Couillard says that the pleasure of working with virtual reality (VR) is that he can move away from “a deceitful world I deeply wish did not exist. I need to create an alternative to that universe so I don’t go insane.” A video and installation artist, and...
1 Unknown, Bust of Kakaley, Isabelle, Salomon Islands (MNHN-HA-872), National Museum of Natural History, Paris 2 Emile-André Leroy, Young Haitian, Museum of the 30s, Boulogne-Billancourt. 3 Unknown, Bust of a Young Man, Arigi Dunka, Born on the White Nile...
The City of West Hollywood is well known as one of the most liberal cities in America, so it’s more than a little ironic that the city officials have been accused of censoring the artistic work of photographer Brooke Mason who curated shows of women’s artwork at three...
Dhyandra Lawson is a curatorial assistant in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). ARTILLERY: Please describe your job at LACMA.Lawson: I support the curatorial work of my departmental colleagues and make time for...
BIGGER IS BETTERDear Babs, I went to the inaugural opening of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel here in Los Angeles. Seeing the sheer magnitude of the new mega gallery as well as the crowds it brought out made me wonder what it would mean for LA. Are these gallery/museum...
Unlike Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with his models—whom he painted obsessively, much to the detriment of his painting—Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Lisa Lyon show no signs of such frustration. Rossetti was like a man locked outside of a house to which...
LIVELY UP LA ARTS DISTRICT INTERVIEW WITH JENNI SORKINHauser Wirth & Schimmel launched with a bang on Sunday, March 13, opening its doors in a former flour factory in Downtown LA with the exhibition “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women,...
The world of contemporary popular culture has largely left the biosphere behind, for a world of limitless extraterrestrial space. It is not so different from the contemporary avant-garde, which remains a cerebral, intramural phenomenon. It takes an extraordinary,...
One of my favorite photo monographs by Kahn & Selesnick is an accordion-folded book that stretches out to 19 feet when it is fully unfurled. There is a narrative involving an Edwardian moon mission that is rescued by the Apollo astronauts. A version of these...
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