The entry into Tavares Strachan’s “Invisibles” exhibition is a kind of anteroom (Six Thousand Years, 2018) evoking something like a private library or even a Wunderkammer. It’s wall to wall, floor to ceiling array of acrylic vitrines, each the exact same size, holds...
EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Reader, The death of painting has been declared with either enthusiasm or dejection so many times, as has its corollary, the “improbable” resurrection of the medium, that the tandem seems now like a market gyration—either a panicked sell-off or a spate of giddy...
Michael Williams
“Fructis,” Michael Williams’ first exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery, presents the painter’s familiar wisecracking take on the ephemera of the everyday, as seen in his inkjet paintings, and his formally ambitious “Puzzle” paintings, which take a serious stab at...
The Alien Worlds of Christopher Richmond
Film and video artist Christopher Richmond has been interested in science fiction for as long as he can remember. When he was a kid, he rented videos based solely on the cover art; his favorites were sci-fi. “Any sort of surrealist landscape, I was sold,” he tells me...
Reine Paradis: Surreal Chic
The photographic tableaux of Los Angeles–based Parisian transplant Reine Paradis evoke an ambiguity of place. The central focal point of each is a solo figure, played by Paradis, typically costumed in an A-line mini or similarly chic garment fashioned from...
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...
Pretty in Pink: Christopher Reynolds
Although Christopher Reynolds’ art is full of food imagery, few of his installations and performances traffic in actual foodstuffs. “It’s not really about the food, but the food referencing,” the Northern California-based artist says in a phone interview. There is at...
John O’Reilly
The intimate scale of John O’Reilly’s photomontages belies the broadly ranging ambition and scope of his concerns. The 40-year survey of his work at Zevitas Marcus reveals a consistency of approach spanning the entirety of O’Reilly’s production. The artist, whose work...
KATHERINE SHERWOOD
Twenty-one years ago, Katherine Sherwood suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her without the use of her right hand. As described in a 2012 article she wrote for the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, when she eventually returned to her studio, her practice...
Catherine Opie
Both love letter and indictment, “The Modernist,” Catherine Opie’s new photographic installation and short film, blurrily overlays real places and occurrences with imagined events, creating an alternate near-term history of Los Angeles. Known as a portraitist and...
Michael Lewis Miller
Care for a pickled egg? How about a mayonnaise sandwich? Or maybe you’d prefer apple butter? With these questions and a simple spread of food with which to ply visitors, Michael Lewis Miller gently draws his audiences into his performances, which arise almost...
Tectonic Shift at Nevada Museum of Art
Perhaps the best way to think about “Unsettled,” the ambitious fall exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, is from a planetary perspective. As a complement, a separate project concurrently on view suggests and reinforces that viewpoint. A one-to-one scale model of a...
Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero
“Revolution and Ritual,” while very narrowly focused on three Mexican women photographers, seeks to address in broad strokes changes in ideas about Mexican identity through the work of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero, whose careers together span...
Naida Osline
Culled from five different series of Naida Osline’s photographic work since 2007, “Florescence” examines an arc of her practice that is focused on taxonomies of flora and fauna. The exhibition title, drawn from her photographic series of the same name, can be taken to...
Conceptual Museum: Cesar Cornejo
Cesar Cornejo sees artists as outsiders. They confront things that other people won’t—or can’t—see, the Peruvian-born artist told me in an interview in May, three days after the opening of “Building As Ever,” OCMA’s 2017 California-Pacific Triennial. His site-specific...
2017 California-Pacific Triennial
“Building As Ever,” the 2017 California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, investigates the economic, political and social forces that affect the built environment. Themes of gentrification and dislocation, meditations about home and displacement,...
Architectural Eye Candy
Architect John Bohn rolled into the parking lot off 4th Street and Traction Avenue, where the security guard acknowledged him with a subtle nod as he drove through the gate. Bohn is on the faculty of SCI-Arc, the country’s hippest architecture school, located in the...
RECONNOITER
In the 1980s, Pam and Steve Nagler founded the performance ensemble Shrimps, which toured nationally and performed locally at venues like LACE. Over the years Shrimps’ iterations included Martin Kersels, Weba Garretson and Ryan Hill. The couple recently retired from...