Exquisite Cadaver: Sundaram’s Couture of Surreal Salvage
The first encounter with the most strikingly original art (not unlike the most speculative scientific thinking) is always a bit strange – possibly configured, oriented or abstracted in a way toward which our minds and senses can only gradually accustom themselves. We...
Jack Kirby
Comic-book artists are sometimes dismissed as just that—common “drawers” as it were rather than fine artists. This recent retrospective of Jack Kirby’s graphic work currently on view at Cal State Northridge’s Mike Curb Gallery sets the record straight and proves that...
A Sublime Moment on the Sixth Street Bridge
I’ve been trying to discourage art, cultural, political, fashion and retail organizations of every size from exhibiting, performing, organizing, opening, demonstrating or launching anything during the summer before Labor Day, and especially August. But I suppose it’s...
Perception Through Process and the Persuasion of Pathos – A Day at The Getty
I’d taken a photographer friend to The Getty to look at the Light, Paper, Process show curated by Virginia Heckert – a must for any photographer and, for that matter, for anyone interested in process-oriented form and media (which includes myself, in recent months)....
Noah Purifoy
Noah Purifoy made it his life long duty to seek art everywhere in everything, and to do so with tremendous poise and discernment. The retrospective Junk Dada on view at LACMA is breathtakingly inventive and, if nothing else, speaks to the unending seductiveness of the...
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA)
When I enter the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive for the first time, I know that I have not viewed art in any space like it before. The venue bridges the gap between gallery space and archive —the exhibit’s content is displayed among boxes of materials, shelves of...
Deedee Cheriel
Deedee Cheriel’s work feels akin to falling headlong into a rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream while drinking a pint of Buffalo Trace Bourbon on a hot New York summer night in Chelsea. Her mostly small paintings of animals reenacting human activities...
Going Station to Station with Doug Aitken
In 2013 artist Doug Aitken realized an extraordinarily ambitious art project, "Station to Station," a kind of continuous art performance on wheels. This one rolled coast to coast, populated with creative folk who got on and off, making music, making art, making...
Bill Graham
Popular music is increasingly a topic of exhibition in the museum and gallery world but I’ve found its presentation can be either overwhelming or underwhelming. After all, how can the curator condense an experience so visceral like performance—an act itself at once...
Uncanny Space
Drawing a fine line between voyeurism and vigilance, Indian artist Abir Karmakar’s second solo exhibition "Uncanny Space” at Aicon Gallery continues with his preoccupation of seducing viewers to become surreptitious onlookers of his painted private spaces. Yet at the...
Smoke and Mirrors – Per omnia saecula saeculorum
Jeffrey Vallance’s séance/performance, Ghost Writers – a collaboration with the self-titled psychic astrologer, Joseph Ross, held in conjunction with Vallance’s show at CB1 Gallery, The Medium Is the Message – was ostensibly intended to draw out the spirits (and...
Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros
Gertrude Stein once famously wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” and Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, whose exhibition "Wonder Pop," consisting of Disney characters and well-known Pop cultural figures drawn in bright colors and recast with gay themes, might respond...
Joseph Holtzman
Entering Joseph Holtzman’s recent Hammer Project feels akin to entering a child’s sacred imaginative landscape, one where all the imaginary friends can not only be seen, but also deeply witnessed on a visceral level. Not all these friends are indeed friendly and some,...
Hippie Noir
There are times when an art movement quietly documents the heart and soul of the much louder story of history that surrounds it. In 1966, LSD was legal. It was available to a large group of first adopters who found the drug to be “very sensational.”In 1967, LSD was...
Fruity Exotic DTLA Mural
Katherine Bernhardt’s quirky public mural is currently covering the exterior walls of Venus Over Los Angeles gallery in the Arts District of Downtown LA just in time for the mid-summer heat wave.Giant free-floating cigarettes, slices of watermelon, cantaloupe, papaya,...
The Slick & The Sticky
"The Slick & The Sticky," a group show co-curated by Vanessa Place, insists adamantly on its own dystopian themes, wherein the works in the exhibition deliberately obfuscate their own suggested meaning. Working off the premise that all language is inherently...
Back to the Future
The only quibble I might have with the Getty's excellent show, "Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography," would be that its title is too literal-minded. A show as exciting as this one is might have had a more adventurous title – say, "Back to the Future," or...
