Two artists exploring aspects of their Islamic heritage and personal identities converge in a pair of enchanting shows at New Image Art Gallery. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, Brooklyn-based artist Hiba Schahbaz applies her rigorous undergraduate training in...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Watch out! Don't tread on the dead rats; they're part of the show. "Macrosolutions to Megaproblems" is a small but captivating assortment of quirky pieces by Sam Davis and Josh Mannis at M+B. At first, you might be so distracted by Mannis' attention-grabbing paintings...
Wobbly hot pink letters pasted above the threshold of the interior gallery of Walter Maciel spell "Short Stories," the title of Greg Mocilnikar's exhibition. Appearing more like a literary heading than the title of an art exhibition, this seemingly minor gesture sets...
Just as sordid episodes leak bit by bit from grand American narratives, a morbid sense of truculence stealthily emerges from Joshua Hagler's bright palette and superficially quaint old-time imagery. His show "The River Lethe" at the Brand Library encompasses two...
Contorting harlequins bow and sprawl over pastel chairs, rugs, walls and potted houseplants in Sara Berman's paintings. Are these mysteriously leotarded people lost in reverie, engaged in awkward stretching exercises, or merely lolling indolently? It's impossible to...
Many conceptual artists employ sign painting techniques, but few execute such craftsmanship on their own. That's partly what renders Norm Laich so intriguing. Overlapping shows at ICA LA and AWHRHWAR complement one another to provide insight into Laich's work as...
Just inside the house comprising the Women's Center for Creative Work is a cozy den that, except for its moody lighting and nostalgic decor, seems to fit right into its residential setting. Though appearing to have long existed in its current furnished state, this...
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...
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...
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