Everyone has a fascination with the more macabre parts of life. Not that everyone is John Waters, but there’s a reason we all slow down to look when we pass an accident. It’s just human nature to be transfixed by the dark and the deadly, to find it not only shocking...
Pick of the Week: Alissa McKendrick & Diane Kotila
GALLERY ROUNDS: Vanessa Prager
It’s Vanessa Prager versus art history in this confounding and enchanting suite of oil on panel paintings, and her aggressive Impressionism-infused impasto is a knockout. Taking on the foundational figurative tropes of nude, still life, and landscape but proceeding...
A Listening Eye: The Films of Mike Dibb
As one of Britain’s most prolific documentarians, Mike Dibb has directed dozens of filmic portraits of people and places from the 1960s to the present. Through conversations with artists and public intellectuals (David Hockney, Edward Said, and Salvador Dalí),...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Evita Tezeno Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
As the planet enters the beginning of a post-pandemic, post-Trump administration era, it was wonderful to be baptized in optimism from Evita Tezeno’s exhibition, “Better Days” at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery. One sweeping taste of these works results in a...
Stephen Cohen (1948–2021) In Remembrance
Stephen Cohen, a long-time Los Angeles gallerist and the founder of one of Southern California’s most enduring art fairs, PhotoLA, died on February 25th, 2021 from complications related to cancer at the age of 72. A charismatic fixture on the LA art beat, Cohen...
Pick of the Week: Caitlin Keogh Overduin & Co.
With spring just ahead, we are on the precipice of a momentous transition. Rays of hope are beginning to warm the cold landscape of our world, as they have again and again throughout humanity's existence. Caitlin Keogh explores this cyclical nature of history (and our...
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain "Fly in League with The Night" at Tate Britain
A man sits center frame, drowned within an interior sea of red hues, arms spread as he pensively gazes against our direction into the distance of the frame. A woman laughs cross-legged on a stool, mouth wide open as if paused mid-speech or laughter, as a grinning fox...
Sherrie Levine: Sherrie Levine, Sherrie Levine Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Part I: Lana Del Rey Some claimed that Lana Del Rey’s 2017 song “Get Free” was a rip-off of Radiohead’s iconic and self-masturbatory indie ballad “Creep,” which led to a rather unhinged and masculinist lawsuit. It seems that for women artists, homage or...
PHOTOGRAPHING PUNK ROCK Review of Michael Grecco's New Photography Book
If you wanted to get an indoor photo during the first wave of punk rock, you needed a camera that you could adjust the settings on, and you had to learn what the settings were. That didn’t really change until the advent of digital photography, which makes photographs...
Pick of the Week: John Waters Sprüth Magers
Sprüth Magers is currently exhibiting two shows by two of the most notable creatives of the last forty years: Cindy Sherman’s "Tapestries" and John Waters' "Hollywood’s Greatest Hits." Though, if you’re anything like myself, one will leave you elated, and the other,...
Gallery Rounds: Ulala Imai Nonaka Hill
Although "Amazing" is the first exhibition of Ulala Imai's works in Los Angeles and the United States, she has quite a following in Japan. Imai is a prolific painter as the presentation of over thirty paintings at Nonaka Hill demonstrates. She successfully combines...
From the Editor March-April, 2021; Volume 15, issue 4
Dear Reader, It’s been a year now since our world started shrinking; lockdowns and quarantining made our worlds smaller. It was a foregone conclusion that the magazine would also start shrinking. One irony though, is that we gained two editorial pages. But this gain...
Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection Getting Together, Apart
The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness,...
8-bridges Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond
Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save...
Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around Sculptures for a Digital Age
Miami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space. Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable...
Safety First Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions
What sort of working environment will the Los Angeles arts workforce return to once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Or maybe a better question to ask is: How will we honor the skilled work of the preparators, installers, instructors, docents, assistants...
Architecture Must Be “Beautiful” According to Trump Art Brief
Former President Donald Trump left office in disgrace, having incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021, the day Joe Biden was to be certified by Congress as the winner of the 2020 election. Trump made a speech to his crowd of MAGA misfits promising, in the style of...
Eccentricity Isn’t Diversity Decoder
So I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would...