Art sector efforts to decarbonize have been highly visible over the past three years as galleries and artists have publicly pledged concerted action to reduce exhibition-related emissions: Nonprofit advocacy groups like Gallery Climate Coalition, Art + Climate Action...
CLIMATE CONSCIOUS
Book Review: A Measured Coolness Building + Becoming by Amir Zaki
Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the...
The Zen of Skate Parks and Broken Vessels A Conversation with Amir Zaki, Part 2
CM: The other part of this exhibition (Empty Vessel – Amir Zaki, at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College) are photographs of ceramic vessels. Are they in fact broken? AZ: You brought up the last body of work at ACME, which is important because that...
The Zen of Skate Parks and Broken Vessels A Conversation with Amir Zaki, Part 1
This interview with Amir Zaki was conducted on September 16, 2019, in advance of his exhibition "Empty Vessel" at Orange Coast College's Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion from Sept. 19–Dec. 5, 2019. Christopher Michno: "Formal Matter," the last body of work your exhibited...
Sean Raspet Various Small Fires-LA
Sean Raspet’s debut at VSF-LA is both an invitation to critically examine anthropogenic climate change—and how we are all implicated—and a series of proposed bio- and geo-engineering solutions for ameliorating the effects of the escalating climate crisis. Raspet’s...
Art Is Everything By Yxta Maya Murray DEATH OF A DREAM
Art Is Everything By Yxta Maya Murray 229 pages TriQuarterly Yxta Maya Murray—art writer, law professor, fiction author—draws upon the disparate threads of her writing practice to construct her new novel, Art Is Everything, a kind of Bildungsroman of the Los Angeles...
Kader Attia Regen Projects
Kader Attia’s debut with Regen Projects —a selection of previously exhibited and new works—continues the French-Algerian artist’s critique of modernity as embodied by Western capitalism and the mechanisms and ideologies of colonialism. Attia has frequently examined...
Mildred Howard Parrasch Heijnen
The profoundly moving installation Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine) (1991), positioned to be the first work encountered in Parrasch Heijnen’s career-spanning survey of Mildred Howard, imparts a sense of the Oakland-based...
Film: Hometown Proud Debut Documentary by Tyler Stallings and Naida Osline
Hometown Proud, the debut documentary by Tyler Stallings and Naida Osline, speaks volumes to our current political and cultural environment. The project grew out of their interest in exploring social issues through their individual practices, for Stallings, as a...
Materia Medica François Ghebaly
“Materia Medica,” the summer group show at François Ghebaly, curated by Kelly Akashi, is more than a call to reconsider the relationship between humans and the natural world. The show pointedly issues a rallying cry of refusal against relentlessly destructive human...
Gala Porras-Kim
The urgency of revisiting an archive is found in challenging its presumed objectivity and totalizing vision, thus exposing cracks, biased ideologies, contradictions and gaps to make way for fracturing, reinterpreting, enlarging or otherwise revising our understanding....
Theaster Gates
“Blessed are the meek…” – Gospel of Matthew, 5:5 Has Theaster Gates truly “upcycled” his entire wardrobe as a spiritual gesture and a means of achieving transcendence? Perhaps he has. But in the most literal sense, Gates has taken the raw material of his sartorial...
Brandon Landers
In Brandon Landers’ debut solo exhibition at M+B, the Bakersfield-based, LA-born and raised artist delivers a collection of expressionistic and loosely narrative paintings that draw from his experiences growing up in South Central Los Angeles, yet the works retain an...
CHIACHIO & GIANNONE
Argentine artists Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone who together form the duo Chiachio & Giannone were painters at one point in their careers. Their combined artistic identity has since been forged working in textile, with such labor-intensive techniques as...
Fred Wilson
“The aim of the dreamer…is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world… But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” This quote from James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country is on the wall of...
Shirley Morales and the Constant of Change
This year, the veteran LA gallery ltd los angeles marked the start of its 10th season. In some ways, the gallery’s program looks more like that of a nonprofit than a commercial gallery. They don’t represent artists, per se. Instead of having a roster of 12 to 20...
CÉcile B. Evans
Cécile B. Evans’ stand alone installation, “Something Tactical is Coming,” generates a deliciously satisfying SciFi dystopian theatricality. The bulk of the installation at Chateau Shatto is comprised of a production set from the second episode of her three-part video...
En Plein Error, Brian Kennon
The art collective En Plein Error, comprised of artists Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes and William Wasserman, practices a kind of extemporaneous riffing to create their pastel on paper works, in a process that might be loosely compared to a session of exquisite corpse,...