RECONNOITER
Sarah Williams is co-founder and executive director of the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW). What was your background before WCCW, and how did it influence your approach to the organization? I grew up in Hawthorne, CA, left to go to UC Santa Cruz, and came back...
BUNKER VISION
There is an old saying about documentaries: If you are the subject of one, it probably isn’t for the reasons that you think. Perhaps, by the same token, if you are included in a documentary on another subject, it might be for the right reasons. A recent documentary...
ASK BABS
Just One Word: PLASTICS DEAR BABS: I am really feeling the lack of creativity in my current occupation as a therapy/social worker, and am seeking to return to my passions and study either art history, curation, or some combination of the two in graduate school, which...
Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016
Adrian Piper’s retrospective was the largest solo show dedicated to a living American artist MoMA has ever produced, and though its Hammer iteration is a tad smaller, it’s no less of a triumph. A mixture of reams of text, performance, posters, newspaper ads, photos,...
KATSU
Dynamics of style, technique, technology and authorship are at issue in an exhibition of new landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and abstractions by the painter KATSU. That’s not only due to the liberal citations of the Western art canon which feed his...
Vikky Alexander
A stunning expansion upon themes she explored in her last Los Angeles show, Vikky Alexander’s “Vertical Dreams” features four floor-to-ceiling photomurals turning the entire gallery into an immersive meta-collage that asks us to consider how we sanitize, prettify and...
Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley
It takes guts to imagine former president Harry S. Truman as a strange and profligate hero, a man who played a significant role in authoring our now debased socio/political framework, a uniquely polarizing figure who is now the unlikeliest muse in the most recent...
En Plein Error, Brian Kennon
The art collective En Plein Error, comprised of artists Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes and William Wasserman, practices a kind of extemporaneous riffing to create their pastel on paper works, in a process that might be loosely compared to a session of exquisite corpse,...
Christopher Murphy
The current drawings of Christopher Murphy are for the most part unassuming and quiet. Only occasionally do they mesmerize through dramaturgy. Some appeal through inversions, others through thinly populated landscapes, which recall the recurrent theme in American...
Alex Miller
Don’t hate the metaphor, hate the estrangement of Forms, one might say—or at least that’s the phrase that came to me in light of ceramicist/conceptual artist Alex Miller’s debut exhibition. Mounted on one wall, a 36-piece edition of handmade ceramic “dart boards” are...
Lauren Satlowski
Lauren Satlowski’s four new paintings at Odd Ark situate us squarely in our anxious feminist moment. Their landscapes are creepy, with tinges of the natural; their delicious surfaces bounce the gaze around like the mise en scène for Spielberg’s child-android in A.I....
Giovanni Battista Piranesi & Gregory Bennett
New Zealand based digital artist Gregory Bennett is a virtuoso when it comes to utilizing high-end 3D animation software and motion capture to create animated videos in which featureless android bodies inhabit synthetic worlds, wherein they are trapped in perpetual...
ON THE COVER
Christopher Russell graces the cover of our January/February 2019 issue. Russell is one of the top shows of 2018, selected by Staff Writer Ezrha Jean Black on page 30 in our print edition and on our website.
Andy Warhol
“I told them I didn’t believe in art, that I believed in photography.” Andy Warhol In 2014, The Warhol Foundation gifted its hefty archive of 3,600 contact sheets shot by Warhol in the late 1970s and early to mid-’80s to Stanford University, under the care of...
Earthly Delights
As a lover of paintings incorporating bold figure and narrative, I was excited to see Anja Salonen’s new series for her show "Lagomorph Labyrinth" at Sade Gallery. Salonen’s work tends to merge conventional figurative form with the unexpected, resulting in...
Rosa Loy
Rosa Loy's paintings in "So Near and Yet So Far" at Kohn Gallery delineate a mysterious fairytale world desolately populated only by women. Initially, the women appear to be engaged in habitual activities such as farming or playing; but the more you look at them, the...
The Underground Museum: : Deana Lawson
Poetically conveying clues to her photographs' complex themes, "Planes," the title of the Deana Lawson show at The Underground Museum, connotes levels of existence; walls of rooms; and images' physical flatness. Most of the Rochester-born, New York-based artist's...