SIGHTS UNSCENE
Fake Nudes Alison Jackson’s “Truth is Dead”
Artists can make the invisible become visible, but that doesn’t mean they have to. Photographers in particular find it necessary to provide visual confirmation of a chosen moment; in the case of some Pulitzer Prize winners, their captured image has become the official...
CODE ORANGE Winner and Finalists for January-February 2021
Congratulations to our winner Sarah Plenge and our finalists. Plenge's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the January/February online issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our...
Bunker Vision Spooked
Fifty years ago, when the Manson murders were daily headline news, the reporting emphasized anything that might pass for “hippie behavior,” while playing down Manson’s intended goal to start a race war. The dog-whistling, race-based law and order tropes of politicians...
James Welling’s “Choreograph” Review of the Photographer's Recent Book
I got to know James Welling over a decade ago when he invited me to teach a graduate seminar in the history of photography at UCLA’s Broad School of the Arts, where he was the director of the photography program. His own photography was a mystery to me then, as it...
Poems "Imagine That" by klipschutz; "The Poet’s Garden" by John Tottenham
Imagine That for YC By klipschutz Rachel Cusk flies first class and drives a hybrid. Waiting at the bus stop I raise my hand. If I change the names is it fiction? What if I keep the names and make up lies? Or is that like saying it’s a poem if it...
ASK BABS Turn A Blind Eye
Dear Babs, I’m a young artist a few years out of grad school. Recently my dad’s close friend asked if he could buy a painting I made about America’s racist prison industrial complex. In the spirit of transparency, he told me he planned to give it as a gift to an old...
COMICS Art-Musement Park
Made in L.A. 2020: a version
Curatorial work began on the fifth biennial in the “Made in L.A.” series long before March 2020, and it might be March 2021 before audiences can see it in its entirety. Yet so emphatic is the exhibition’s insistence on the physical embodiment of ideas, the political...
Reconnoiter: Kevin Duffy
Kevin Duffy is an LA-based actor, filmmaker and writer, who recently performed in Refracted Theater Company’s Homeless Garden—a reimagination of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard set in present-day where climate change and politics coincide. The play was performed...
Kader Attia Regen Projects
Kader Attia’s debut with Regen Projects —a selection of previously exhibited and new works—continues the French-Algerian artist’s critique of modernity as embodied by Western capitalism and the mechanisms and ideologies of colonialism. Attia has frequently examined...
Rodney McMillian Vielmetter Los Angeles
This exhibition is simply horrible: a catalog of horrors, a parade of barbarism made all the more wretched because we have become inured to atrocity, our attention spans irredeemably vaporous. It is both commonplace and theatrical, a fleetingly addictive...
Rachel Rosenthal Roberts Projects
While Rachel Rosenthal is best known for her performance work, the collage works on display in “Thanks: Collage Works from the 1970s,” with their aged surfaces and intersecting themes, reveal an artist whose force of sentiment is firmly grounded and luxuriously...
Yolanda González Bermudez Projects
With “Metamorphosis,” Southern California-based artist Yolanda González offers a haunting solo show of monochrome images powerful enough to overwhelm any technicolor image. Her original “Metamorphosis” series, an experimental series she began in 1995, was created...
The Edge of Order Wonzimer Gallery
The existence of an “edge,” a precipice, an ever-deepening chasm, a transitional space from one reality into the next—be it from spring to summer, enslavement to freedom, life to death—involves a commitment to a new beginning, an awakening of sorts into an alternate...
Adam Pendleton David Kordansky Gallery
Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery unfolds across three exhibition spaces and invites viewers to engage with the different aspects of his unusual and critical practice. Large black-and-white paintings with the repeated phrase “WE ARE...
Pick of the Week: The Lights of Los Angeles Los Angeles
Beauty is all around us. This thought feels simplistic, and given the past year, even wrong. Stuck in our homes, away from family and friends, a city as large and vibrant as Los Angeles becomes terribly claustrophobic. And even for those fortunate enough not to be...
Christmas in the Bunker Free Movies to Hunker Down with during the Holidays
CHRISTMAS IN THE BUNKER With the idea that many readers will be in bunker mode during the holidays, I have rounded up a variety of things that you can watch for free with an internet connection. Some of these were covered in previous dispatches, and some of them are...
