"WISHFUL THINKIN'," the title of Sarah Cromarty's show at Klowden Mann, indicates its tenor of hope against hope. Cromarty layers cardboard, digital prints, paint, glitter, rhinestones and sundry other materials to create 3D paintings affecting appearances of escapist...
There is something delicious about the commingling of delight and horror, or really any opposition of sensations pushed to their extremes: confectionary sweetness with an aftertaste on the wrong side of savory—the foreshadowing of decay; the sweetness of...
The surrealist impulse in art taps into not merely a human stream of consciousness, but the life and aura of everything around us, from the natural and organic to the built or crafted an inanimate. Nothing is definitively inanimate in the surrealist domain. Warhol saw...
The LA gallery scene was stacked with quite the line-up for openings this weekend, making it difficult to decipher which to hit and which to save for a later date. However, Ron Arad’s debut exhibition of CUBA working title, at Over the Influence Gallery was too...
Presenting Euripides’ The Bacchae against the backdrop of the Getty Villa has to be as challenging in sheer existential terms as it is technically to a theatrical artist. It’s a play that addresses both the essential conditions of the theatre and civilization’s...
Major religions don’t do much image control; with his long hair and white skin, the hippyesque Jesus of the 21st century looks identical to the savior of the 11th century. The Buddha is also presented as the same old, same old; hair or no hair, it’s the smilin’ guy...
Channeling Death Valley into downtown LA, William Lamson has transformed Make Room into "Badwater," an ecologically themed installation as poetically evocative as it is scientifically ingenious. Via an elaborate system of pumps, fans, hoses, timers and other...
Positing achievements in the decorative arts as a viable window into any culture’s zeitgeist, Lari Pittman takes his flair for generating psychosocial motifs to a genuinely exciting new place in his latest collection. As the exhibition title hints, the installation...
There is probably no pianist still breathing who hasn’t been fascinated (and perhaps frustrated) by the 1915 Études of Claude Debussy. It’s a foundational suite in several senses. Students of the instrument may initially approach them (or at least the first couple...
Every September, the art scene really revs up—not that summer was slow. But after Labor Day, art exhibitions heat up as the evenings cool down. The Culver City Arts District swelled with openings Saturday. First stop had us at Roberts Projects for German artist Lenz...
Robert Yarber's spellbinding nocturnal realms feel at once familiar and otherworldly. Each of his paintings is far weirder than the sum of its parts, with generic characters and unplaceable urban locales coalescing into bizarre, morbid scenarios. Yarber's mysterious...
"Secrets for the Moon" at University of La Verne's Harris Gallery unites two artists, Ichiro Irie and Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia. Each employs quotidian materials to create totemic artworks in meditation upon his personal history and cultural roots. Both Irie and Hurtado...
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions closed their summer residency of CAVERNOUS: Young Joon Kwak & Mutant Salon on the last Sunday of August, having nothing fall short of the visually sensual inviting tone to come bask in the beauty of being vulnerable together....
Prints and drawings by three generations of Inuit women offer a fascinating glimpse into remote Canadian Arctic life at the Armory Center for the Arts. "Akunnittinni," the show's Inuktitut title translated as "between us," fittingly summarizes its convergence of a...
Who said being an artist was easy? Today Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known as the top-selling woman artist in the world, but it’s hard to believe how many difficulties she had to overcome before she got to where she is now. Or perhaps, not so hard to...
There she is, as if alive. She is haunting and haunted; a Hollywood Miss Havisham in her crumbling mansion. She was once a real person, a somebody, a fond recollection. But now gone gray in her decaying cinema—with seating just for one—she resurrects herself nightly...
Dear Reader, The sky outside my office window is thick and hazy; the hot air dry and static. Los Angeles temperatures are hitting record highs and there’s no rain forecast for the foreseeable future. There are forest fires all over California, nearly apocalyptic in...
Ushering in the new era of Trump, a sea of pink at the 2017 Women’s March became the first undeniable sign of mass resistance. A resounding response to “grab ’em by the pussy” and other far-flung insults that characterized the presidential election. For a while, the...
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