Harry Dodge
When does an exhibition title effectively amount to a viewer advisory? I’m not sure Harry Dodge would consider the title of his current show at JOAN gallery, “Works of Love,” an instance of this. It’s not in any sense a caution, and the titles of the individual works...
Asad Faulwell
Orientalist painting fantasies satirically intertwine with characters of anti-colonial resistance in “Les Femmes d’Alger,” Asad Faulwell’s ongoing portrait series recently exhibited at DENK. Drawing upon the rich legacies of Algerian War history, Islamic aesthetics...
Todd Gray
Mining one’s own archive—especially if you are Michael Jackson’s personal photographer—can become a fruitful catalyst for exploration. Todd Gray’s recent works, framed photographs that are collaged together to become in essence bas-relief sculptures, juxtapose images...
Cleon Peterson
The Seattle-born painter, sculptor and graphic designer Cleon Peterson has created a true battlefield experience with his new exhibit “Blood & Soil,” satirically making use of the 19th-century German slogan that expressed an idealization of racial identity and...
Sredstvo Kool
With relations between Russia and Western liberal democracies strained to the point of rupture, the rise of nationalistic fervor and anti-democratic forces on all sides, and notions of dissent and finding a viable way forward taking on greater urgency with each...
Eve Fowler
Gertrude Stein wrote in English, but in a way, Eve Fowler is acting as her translator. For the last decade at least, Fowler has been orienting her work across collage, photography, video and text-based practices in response to Stein’s oeuvre. The beguiling aluminum...
Stephen Prina
The Wilshire district gallery of Sprüth Magers is physically separated from a certain Southard’s Carwash in Galesburg, Illinois, by 1,969 miles. It is in this Los Angeles gallery directly across the street from the LACMA campus where the latest iteration of Stephen...
Michael Maxwell
In the mixed-media works of his exhibition “Neo-American Transcendental,” Michael Maxwell employs materials ranging from the prehistoric to the digital. Clay, natural mineral pigments, plant dyes, wheat paste, quartz crystal, silver and gold leaf, beeswax, encaustic,...
ON THE COVER
Reine Paradis is our cover artist in our September/October 2018 issue on Utopia. Paradis is interviewed by Christopher Michno on page 52 in our print edition and on our website.
Bamboo: Nature’s spirals, cosmic abstractions, and the long dress of eternity
In a city like Los Angeles, where there’s always some fresh starburst to occlude the starburst (or firestorm) that ignited only moments before, it’s easy to lose track of the treasures strewn in our path that will endure long after the firestorms have died down to...
Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) is popularly epitomized by her monumental masterwork The Rose (1958-66), whose counterpart, The Jewel (1959), is on permanent display at LACMA. It's rather misleading, for her diverse oeuvre encompasses far more than just those heftily textured...
Claremont Museum of Art: : Intersecting at the Edge
Three abstract painters converge like an artistic Venn diagram in "Intersecting at the Edge" at the Claremont Museum of Art, where paintings by the late Karl Benjamin, a principal figure of the California Hard-edge painting movement, are displayed alongside...
Staff’s Favorite
Rosha Yaghmai’s installation in a sideroom of its own, Slide Samples (Lures, Myths), is immediately visually striking. With the soft low light, the room is quiet with abstract shapes cast from a slide projection filling all the walls. As your eyes adjust to the...
LA Women Artists on the Run
If you are one of the cool kids (or artists or gallerists), then most likely you were at 3rd street in DTLA last Saturday for a jam-packed and super festive opening. We aren’t talking Hauser, rather its newish next-door neighbor Over the Influence. OTI—with its Hong...
Jonny Negron
Aftermath of Puerto Rico flooding looms large in the backgrounds of Jonny Negron's psychically charged scenes. Indoors and outdoors, water is everywhere. Resembling graphic novel or zine illustrations, Negron's eleven gouache-on-paper paintings in "A Small Map of...
Beacon Arts Building: : Vibrant Matter
The practice of selling art presumes severability. To sell a work from the white walls of a studio or gallery promises a degree of independence: this piece will appeal in another room, at another time. In this way a gallery is an anti-ecology. Its elements do not...
Michael Queenland: Cereals for space migration
Michael Queenland’s installation in Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum conjures up images of a post-apocalyptic future, where humans have gathered up their last resources— boxes and boxes of cereal—and rationed them for their imminent escape to outer space....
