Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a slender prose/poetry collection titled parasocialite. As a cheeky culture correspondent (a Salvadorian born in the DMV) and founder of Car Crash Collective (a late-night lit...
BOOK REVIEW: parasocialite
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Jane Corrigan Sea View
Conveying narratives of girlhood, Jane Corrigan’s gestural oil paintings are like snippets from a coming-of-age book—whimsical and playful, they straddle imagination and reality, showing her subjects situated in domestic or nature scenes, her expressive brushstrokes...
OUTSIDE LA: Will Hutnick Geary Contemporary
Will Hutnick’s practice resists easy categorization. While largely using the language of abstraction, his mixed media paintings also borrow elements of glitch art with seemingly disjointed imagery that is somehow both static and in motion as patterns, shapes, and...
THEATER: LA MYTHMAKING Fear of Kathy Acker
In January I was chatting with Jack Skelley, the author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (FOKA) published last year through Semiotext(e). We spoke about how young writers are connecting with the older generation in the Los Angeles writing scene—it feels a lot like...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Jennifer West Gattopardo
In her multimedia installation at Gattopardo’s new location, Jennifer West combines images of outer space with those of spiderwebs, highlighting their organic and geometric patterns—drawing parallels between stars eons away and glistening dewdrops caught in a web, her...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Rodney Graham Lisson Gallery
Does humor belong in art? The late Canadian multimedia artist Rodney Graham evidently thought it did. But Graham’s humor, on display at the Lisson Gallery through March 23, is of the companionable sort: gentle, slightly self-deprecating, never sarcastic or cutting,...
REMARKS ON COLOR: Slave Ship Ivory March's Hue
To be sure, George Washington was an honest fellow by all accounts, smart and upstanding, and yes, his father did buy him a hatchet when he was six years old—hoping perhaps his son might become a lumberjack, or at the very least, an arborist. Instead, Washington...
ART FOR DUMMIES Sophie Becker and the Ventriloquy Redux
Often seen as an eccentric art form, ventriloquism has resurfaced and gained popularity again in mainstream culture over the past few years, from televised talent competitions (three ventriloquists have won America’s Got Talent: Terry Fator, Paul Zerdin and Darci...
STAYING INSIDE THE LINES Painting AI's Possible Future
Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage...
HYPER-REAL HYBRIDIZATION Patricia Piccinini Finds Beauty in Otherness
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s world is inhabited by creatures that suggest genetic engineering gone awry or the infusion of sentience in hitherto inanimate objects. Her hyper-realistic sculptures combine elements of human form blended with those of animals,...
ABSTRACTION STUDIES George Legrady's Collaborations and Mythic Narratives
Generative AI image synthesis, exemplified by software like Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and similar tools, has captivated widespread attention enabling on-the-fly image creation through text prompts and image prompts. While either text or image quickly...
INFINITE VARIETY David Em Finds Endless Possibilities
Digital art pioneer David Em, whose work has been published and exhibited internationally, was the first to make images with pixels at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1975. He then went on to build articulated 3D creatures with mainframes at the company...
FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills
"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was...
BUNKER VISION I'm Sorry, Dave
The word “robot” first appeared in a Czech play by Karel Čapek from 1920 called R.U.R., to describe humans made of inferior materials that would function as unthinking and unfeeling slaves. The Czech word “robota” translates to “forced labor.” So began the uneasy...
ART BRIEF Gaga for AI
In the past year, galleries have opened shows displaying AI-generated art, so it was no surprise that one of the world’s top galleries, Gagosian, would host AI art shows in New York last year and in LA this January. Bennett Miller may have been an appropriate...
THE DIGITAL Technology is Their Beat
For your next fancy art after-party, I would recommend the following signature cocktail. While somewhat nontraditional and off-menu, this enchanted concoction is guaranteed to please and is crafted with a simple combination of ingredients: two parts childhood...
PEER REVIEW Sula Bermúdez-Silverman on Candice Lin
A sculptor and revisionist historian, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman uses a plethora of sculptural materials, from glass to ready-mades, to achieve her conceptual ends. The Los Angeles–based artist is known for her vibrant, sometimes eerie objects that conjure otherworldly...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon
It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce...