Something special but virtually hidden exists here in SoCal, and it’s a reminder that visual art, despite the occasional headline-grabbing event, is essentially an underground activity operating on the margins of our society. The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery of...
Now that musicals are getting popular again, it’s a good time to revisit the work of Jacques Demy. Although he is considered part of the French new wave, most of his work owes more to Hollywood musicals and live-action fairy-tale films. His first musical (The...
I heard a rumor that some artists went to visit Henri Rousseau and were shocked that he put one of his paintings on the floor for them to walk on because he didn’t have a rug. Was he naive? Crazy? Suffering from low self-esteem? It doesn’t matter. He was unique and so...
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird inversions of mainstream and underground culture, particularly as regards formats—the vinyl record for example. Talking with Rick and Joe Potts and Dennis Duck (all founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society) on...
Since its inception in 2002 The Wende Museum’s corporate park location has had a discreet charm. The easy-to-miss suite is tucked behind a landscaped parking lot in a hive off Slauson in the former Fox Hills Mall— Culver City adjacent. Its charms unfold as you make...
A special place exists within those fleeting moments transitioning from slumber into an awakened state. In those few seconds when dreamscape combines with reality, both a mild confusion and an eerie comfort sets in. Our mind sifts, sorts and makes sense of what is...
Years of hard work and experimentation by April Street have coalesced in her most recent solo exhibition of four paintings and two sculptural installations titled A Vulgar Proof, after an Elizabethan phrase meaning “a common experience.” Dark, sultry and...
In artist-filmmaker Morgan Fisher’s fourth solo show with International Art Objects (formerly China Art Objects), vintage 1930s house paint samples are enlarged to three-by-four-foot panels and rendered in modern acrylic house paint. These color fields are taken from...
The photographs by Miles Coolidge recently on display at ACME, Los Angeles, are magnificently beautiful examples of the photographer’s craft. Simply as aesthetic objects, the photos are compelling: composed according to simple underlying geometries, they nonetheless...
Fischli and Weiss are up to some elaborate shenanigans. Walking in from the street, under the severe brow created by the Ellsworth Kelly block style building-remake of the Matthew Marks Gallery façade, a viewer might think that they were accidentally let in between...
German filmmakers Christine Lang and Constanze Ruhm have thrown movie-making ingredients intelligently into a blender. After 15 minutes of imbibing this concoction, questions as to whether your taste agrees with it, and a curiosity about what specific elements are in...
Small municipal museums are hard pressed to coordinate their programming into coherent wholes; if a local museum doesn’t fill its walls with a single exhibition, its variety of shows comprise confusing, sometimes clangorous gallimaufries. Lancaster’s MOAH has devised...
Americans who know Cuba only through movies (God-father 2, Before Night Falls) and familiarity with a few star Cuban artists (Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta) are guilty of the oxymoron of mainland insularity, a product of Cold War tensions that arose in 1959 with the...
Throughout our evolution we’ve been afraid of the dark. As creatures primarily endowed with encephalic gifts, we aren’t well-equipped to vie with nocturnal animals, full of tooth and claw and with more finely attuned senses. They make quick work of us when we don’t...
In 2040Jaus Gallery Joe Biel, Stack 4 (Dave)It’s good to know artists are constantly thinking, cogitating, peeling the proverbial cultural onion, to transform our human experience into a charged and luminous imaginative landscape. Such is the case at Jaus Gallery this...
Where are the drag queens (or kings, jacks, and aces of spades or 3’s of clubs, for that matter) of yesteryear? Or simply the troupes of maskers and performers and club personalities one might see at punk and post-punk nightclubs and discotheques, underground clubs...
The veteran color theorist has a four decade-plus career, including works in the permanent collections of institutions like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) and the Moderna Museet (Stockholm). Berg is equally versatile in sublime color spectrums and...
Carlson Hattonat Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College Carlson Hatton, Random Neurons Firing, 2014Carlson Hatton’s immense and powerful exhibition of mostly mixed media drawings on view at the Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College is both fantastical and...
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