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...
Virginia Broersma’s exploitation of wet-on-wet painting is not simply self-indulgent, it is lavish, extravagant, and delirious, amplifying what is already a relatively excessive technique into an over-the-top visual experience, at once ecstatic and excruciating....
From 1973 to 1985, Chris Killip lived among and photographed working-class and underclass communities in the north of England whose livelihoods depended on traditional heavy industry. His subjects include the declining coal mining and shipbuilding cities of Tyneside,...
Sant Khalsa isn’t reticent about her artistic influences. In artist statements, she points to the photographs of Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, and the Bechers as impactful on her own practice of photographing landscapes of the Southwest, particularly those of Southern...
Every surface, each object of Aaron Fowler’s thirteen assemblage paintings in “Blessings On Blessings,” has been contemplated, touched and worked to build layers of meaning and matter that cohere and disrupt. Dimensionality—of ideas, materials, possible readings—is...
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