However ordinary an entity may seem, Torbjørn Rødland will find a way to pose it, light it and accent it so as to produce, as if by alchemy, an uncanny photo that gradually unhinges you the more you gaze. See, for instance, Voodoo Shoe (2017, pictured above), which...
Although it was once relatively straightforward, the relationship between what we refer to as “Nature” and its inverted mirror-image “Culture” has become complicated and problematic. Indeed, the “default position” in the argument as to their reciprocal relationship is...
Dear Reader, Having a food-themed issue in an art magazine seemed a little out of the ordinary when the topic came up. Immediately visions of sugarplums and Wayne Thiebaud cakes came to mind. Then luscious spreads of dead pheasants and fruit bowls followed. Soft...
Although Christopher Reynolds’ art is full of food imagery, few of his installations and performances traffic in actual foodstuffs. “It’s not really about the food, but the food referencing,” the Northern California-based artist says in a phone interview. There is at...
The Food Group, an ongoing project by Ry Rocklen, is a comical exploration into the relationship between mankind and food. Human subjects (friends of Rocklen’s, mostly) dress up in life-sized food costumes à la Fruit of the Loom that are either rented or fabricated by...
On any given Friday, between noon and 2 p.m., you’ll find one of Los Angeles’ best taco trucks parked downtown on 3rd Street in the middle of the Arts District. How do I know this? Because Jonathan Gold says so. “Let’s meet at Guerrilla Tacos,” the LA Times food...
Cannibalism is now a regular thing in the art world. I’m not being metaphorical by referring to the cutthroat competition of an art market mirroring the inhumanity of its elite clientele. I’m talking about actual artists eating people. In 1996 the artist Marco...
Narsiso Martinez shapes richly detailed images of farm workers in oil, charcoal and ink wash—with discarded produce boxes as his canvas. A simple trip to Costco for pizza proved revelatory for the artist, when he found a purple-and-yellow banana box at the store. When...
Known as a pioneer of the farm-to-table dining movement, Michael McCarty founded his first restaurant, Michael’s, in Santa Monica in 1979. Ten years later he would open his second location in Midtown Manhattan. Michael and his wife, the artist Kim McCarty, would...
When is a painting high art, and when is it just nice wallpaper? On May 10, I learned the answer to this question when attending ARTXFOOD’s inaugural art-themed dinner, Hallowed Ground. ARTXFOOD is produced by ArtCubed Los Angeles, which hosted a “part salon, part...
PST AFTERMATH “An investment in the arts is an investment in our future,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti in conjunction with the release of a report on the economic benefits of PST: LA/LA. The initiative “attracted millions of visitors, supported thousands of good-paying...
Food allures our ocular faculties as much as it gratifies our alimentary and salivary organs. We devour visual stimuli with our eyes just as we ingest edibles through our mouths. It thus seems felicitous that the word “taste” applies to aesthetic predilections as well...
Whenever I mention the V.A.R.A to artists, I’m invariably met with a blank stare. The Visual Arts Rights Act, passed by Congress in 1990, grants artists a form of Droit Moral or moral rights, intended to protect artists’ control over the fate of their works. Moral...
About a month ago Virginia Katz cajoled me into leading a discussion at her regular public salon at Eastside International gallery at LA’s Brewery art complex. Since every time an art critic speaks in public an angel loses its wings, I am not really big on the whole...
I think we might have to consider the possibility that fine art is a genre. Or perhaps has become a genre. Someone clever whose name neither I nor Google can retrieve right now once said that philosophy is the spawning ground of the sciences—meaning that the things we...
If you happen to be searching for films that feature food, there are no shortages of places to look. Just about every pop culture magazine and blog has a listicle of food in film. These range from movies like Babette’s Feast (where a dinner is a labor of love), to...
Along with everyone else, I was always thrilled to see another painting of Wayne Thiebaud’s cars screeching up and down the insane hills of San Francisco in one traffic jam after another, melting into another modern painting of man’s insanity. However, when I finally...