As our planet is gradually warmed and transformed into landscapes and environments once conceivable only in nightmare fantasy, we find ourselves preoccupied with our apprehension and perception of a world we’ve effectively made over – so bound up with our physical...
John Altoon: Works From the Estate
There are some artists you know are great immediately because they provoke such disparate and conflicting emotions simultaneously that they practically throw you physically off balance. John Altoon is one such artist. The most feral of the Ferus Gallery Cool School,...
Gun Crazy: Playing with fire at Liz’s Loft
Let me just start by applauding Liz Gordon and her team for the bravado and sheer celebration of mounting a show titled, Guns, in the current political environment. I was about to say ‘contentious’ – but there’s really nothing contentious (or new) about it. Guns are...
Ry Rocklen: L.A. Relics
The most emblematic of the ‘trophy’ moments in Ry Rocklen’s current show may be the perforated vertical standing locker cabinet, titled Ricky. With its exposed interior copper plating and cross-illuminated by the gallery light, it’s a handsome object that might serve...
Tom Knechtel
The great thing about keeping some distance from the dominant trends in the art world is that you stand a reasonable chance of remaining true to what is most unique about your own art-making: your own eye, ear, voice or hand (all are involved in what flows from the...
‘Are the stars out tonight?’ Harmonic convergence for a new art season
The beginning of another arts and culture season also marks a point where we really start to feel the impact of everything we’ve been experiencing over the preceding orbital/calendar year and start to take its measure. Events move swiftly; you can feel as if you’re...
Henry Taylor
We have abandonment issues lately/forever – desolate, disconsolate and a bit fragile. In Henry Taylor’s painting, that fragility coexists with an incongruous durability – a hard thing that cracks against identity or classification or simply swallows it up. Taylor’s...
Sexy Beast: A Benefit for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles
It’s the first post-Labor Day week-end and we’re approaching mid-September, which means one thing in Los Angeles (and New York, too, I guess – as we head into Fashion Week) – the start of the new arts and entertainment season. LACMA just unveiled an elegant exhibition...
Richard Learoyd: In the Studio
Photographer Richard Learoyd has returned to the ancient roots of his craft to grasp the materiality of that moment of our impact upon the world, specifically with the camera obscura in its most literal definition – the image received on a large sheet of...
No More Parties In L.A. – Kanye West Crashes Into the Art World
I have a confession. At some point between Graduation and 2010 or 2011 (whenever he last recorded with Katy Perry), I lost track of Kanye West. Yes, of course I was peripherally aware of what he might be doing, whether in terms of his own planned record releases or...
CHG 10th Anniversary Exhibition
The art world ‘conversation,’ in many ways, can be a small one. In the post-modern, post-conceptual landscape, anything goes. Yet (Juxtapoz to one side) we’re not typically privy to the kinds of conversations Corey Helford Gallery artists might ignite. Once upon a...
Home Is Where the Horror Is – Guillermo del Toro (Part 1)
We live very close to horror in the early 21st century. But then I wonder how much has really changed since, say, the 1940s (although the northern 75 percent or so of the North American continent was relatively at peace during the 20th century up to that time). The...
The exhausted, inexhaustible, and eternal city – GRIND
Roughly a generation separates me from artist-curator Joshua Nathanson; but we clearly live in very similar moments in very similar cities. (My understanding is that he is based here in L.A., but he was born in Washington, D.C. and studied in New York prior to grad...
Passage
ACME’s late summer group show, Passage, chooses subtlety over ‘statement’, quietly suggesting a spectrum of emerging ideas and directions through its artists’ varied address of notions of passage or transition in their work. In doing so, it also gives a glimpse of the...
Apocalypse On the “Miracle Mile”: Steve De Jarnatt’s Movie Milestone
In the late 1970s there was a running joke surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s much anticipated, but disaster-plagued and seemingly endless Vietnam War-as-American Heart of Darkness project, Apocalypse Now. While Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate was already bleeding...
Arthur Jafa, at MADE IN L.A. 2016, Hammer Museum
As we are posting this, we are informed that Arthur Jafa has not been awarded the Mohn Public Recognition Award; and we can’t help wondering if he might have been at some competitive disadvantage simply because visitors to the Museum were unable to actually flip the...
The Embedded Fragment – Gronk’s Theater of Paint
Long before I had a clue about art, or at least modern or contemporary art, my older brother and I would occasionally be dropped off at twin fantasylands on either side of Central Park that, to our five and six year-old brains, were like complementary sides of what...
Jorge Gutierrez and Mexrrissey: Crossing Borders and Reinventing Culture – or How Mexican Art and Music Saved My Life Again
After a week that seemed to confirm everyone’s worst expectations for the planet, our dubious species, and its cratering political structures (to say nothing of crumbling infrastructure), it seemed almost miraculous to close on a note that, if it didn’t exactly...