Harkening to the grace of bygone days when those who wished to communicate with one another would do so by putting pen to paper, East Bay-based artist Gail Tarantino’s “Hand Written” draws content from letters written by the artist to astronomers, naturalists and...
A trio of sepia-toned photographs, displayed at the entrance of the Leila Heller Gallery, documenting four naked men followed by Western soldiers in a rundown village instantly evokes the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The jarring scene—American soldiers humiliating local...
Julia von Eichel’s wall sculptures (all 2014) are oddly unsettling, with innards that seem to strain against their outer skin and an overall configuration suggesting movement or attenuated growth. It’s tempting to see naturally occurring phenomenon like spores,...
At first, Andrew Dadson’s newest exhibition at David Kordansky, “Painting (Organic),” seems to lack cohesion, with medium and mood shifting frequently. There are three very distinct types of works on display: a collection of photographs hung in a grid formation; six...
It seems every traveler, on occasion, suffers a collapse of time and space. Careening down a hotel hallway late at night, carrying a suitcase whose weight amplifies the exhaustion from hours of cramped travel, one's head begins to spin. Doors, walls, and expanses of...
Ann Chamberlin approaches painting like an alchemist approaches a vile of life-giving succor—with tremendous reverence and passion. The new paintings on view at Lora Schlesinger Gallery mine some of the same archetypal themes she has visited previously. However these...
Last week I ventured to the Cooper Design Space in Downtown LA’s fashion district to see the “15 CalArts MFA Show.” It is a large inconspicuous building surrounded by cut-rate fabric stores typically used for designer showcases—a somewhat irregular location for an art...
Washington Post In the rarefied world inhabited by performance artists, gallery owners and MFA candidates, there is something called “non-collectible art.” Making this art doesn’t produce something that someone can buy and take home, like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona...
Ochi Projects, a new gallery on Washington Boulevard. hit a home run this week with its first group show curated by Brian Wills and Lexi Brown. The horizon line has long been a symbol of infinite possibility, and all of the work in the exhibition speaks to this theme...
Michael Deyermond is an artist’s artist, making stuff that makes him happy, and us too, albeit for the fact that some of the sentiments here are darkly appealing and often self-reflexive. This is not art that begs to be loved at the expense of much needed content, but...
Bernice is premiering at the Palm Springs Shortfest next week and the eponymous documentary celebrates the spunky tenured New York art dealer, Bernice Steinbaum as a long-time pioneer of female and minority artists. I’m sitting beside Steinbaum now, taking in her “New...
The Artist as Debtor The role of educational institutions in shaping and defining artists is being questioned and critiqued by the very professors, students and alumni who make up these institutions. One of these critiques, the nationwide movement to organize and...
Hugo Crosthwaite’s newest exhibition is powerful and evocative, but more importantly, perhaps, it speaks to our human frailties, specifically, the ways in which we process grief and hope. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s poem Hymn and the recent abduction and murder of...
Today is the last day to witness iwitness—a large scale public art installation made up of asymmetrical cubic photographs on display in downtown LA's Grand Park by artists Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian. It immediately recalls graffiti artist JR’s black-and-white...
File this under ‘better too late than never’ (i.e., of a piece with the story of my life). You have only two days to see this show; but if you’re in the Beverly Hills vicinity, I encourage you to run to it. This is a fabulous, albeit extremely compact, show in the...
Travis Collinson continues his investigation into his signature style of spare and oblique personas in his second exhibition at Maloney Fine Art. Utilizing a sparseness of space, form and gesture simultaneously, Collinson manages to compress, through this highly...
The New Yorker Nestled among the exhibition reviews and auction reports in contemporary-art journalism last week were scattered items about the Roski School of Art and Design, at the University of Southern California. On Friday, the first-year students in the school’s...
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