Julie Adlerat Campbell Hall Art GalleryJulie Adler’s recent exhibition of paintings, monoprints, etchings, linocuts and more at Campbell Hall Art Gallery suggests a fiercely compelling and singular mind at work. Mining an intensely personal vein and responding to the...
Still Howling – Ron Athey
I wasn’t even sure I would be admitted to the room where most of the performance took place. There was a small throng gathered in the courtyard. Another part of the audience was already assembling in the Billy Wilder Theatre, where the performance would be...
Guest Lecture: F. Scott Hess
The subject matter of several of my recent paintings derives from screwed-up iPhone panorama photographs. For centuries art linear perspective has ordered the space of paintings, determining how we look at an image. In panorama mode my iPhone-5 liberates the mind from...
Marc Selwyn’s Inaugural Opening
"Art luminaries came out to celebrate a new gallery for Marc Selwyn Fine Art: On February 16, 2014, invited members of Los Angeles’ vibrant art scene convened in the newly renovated historic 1940s Al Grimmet’s Garage, that has been transformed into the sleek, new...
Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst put queer consciousness on the front burner
NY TimesIn “Relationship,” a photo exhibition currently on view at the Whitney Biennial, the two have chronicled that process and the evolution of their own love affair. (In a recent preview of the Biennial, Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote that the...
Mary Jo Bole at Jose Drudis Biada Art Gallery
Mary Jo Boleat Jose Drudis Biada Art Gallery/Mount St. Mary's CollegeOne does not necessarily equate tombs with toilets, or more metaphorically speaking, these two types of “evacuation” – one of the body, the other of the soul, yet Mary Jo Bole creates an exquisite,...
Heart of Darkness – Britten’s Billy Budd
From its troubled (I almost want to say stuttering) conception and creation, through its earliest publication – barely stitched together, edited, revised, corrected, re-edited – Melville’s Billy Budd is steeped in ambiguity – ambiguities integral to the dramatic and...
Paige Wery Opens Good Luck Gallery
uncompromising tangPaige Wery’s latest endeavor takes her full-circle back to her interest in self-taught artists with the opening of The Good Luck Gallery, Chinatown, Los Angeles, which will exclusively exhibit non-formally trained artists. The Good Luck Gallery’s...
ARMORY SHOW 2014
And all the Rest: ADAA, Independent, SCOPE, (UN)FAIROn Friday, I started the day off with another VIP event, this time at Scandinavia House hosted by the Nordic consulates. (You’ve got to hand it to the Scandinavians. In addition to everything else they get right,...
Birds of a Feather
Was that a review I just read or did the snooze alarm go off again? The way they box up the art reviews in the Los Angeles Times, it’s sometimes hard to tell. The reviewer, Sharon Mizota’s focus seems to be on formula – which is not inappropriate here: the subject...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers,Troublemaker Dave Hickey blew into town last month. The outspoken art critic held forth at the Grand Central Market, gracing Angelenos with his caustic observations about the corroding art world. There was much tweetin’ and hollerin’ after (and apparently...
TRADING PLACES
When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an...
Psychedelic Shack
If one thinks of the essence of Modernism as being about direct experience rather than recreated experience, the artist who has really continued to expand possibilities is James Turrell. A striking aspect of his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County...
Camera Obscura by Abelardo Morell
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he...
A Chip Off the Old Block
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century....
Profile: Marisol Rendón
As I meandered through Marisol Rendón’s installation, “So, Dragons Do Exist?” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery last summer (this was before I had even glanced at the contrarian, almost self-negating parenthetical subtitle, “Considerations of the Unavoidable...
LONDON CALLING: Body Language
Painting is like the proverbial zombie. It’s supposed to be dead but it won’t lie down. The last 50 years in British art has been something of a paint-splattered war zone. Against the odds of prevailing abstraction, Pop and Conceptualism, painters such as Francis...
BOOKS: (Bed &) Breakfast with Lucian
There is a popular stereotype of the 20th-century artist as a hard-living bon vivant who lives to paint and leaves a trail of broken hearts. Most current versions this type have a brand to maintain. The last thing you can imagine such a person wanting is privacy....