Amir Zaki’s lushly photographed black-and-white landscapes introduce tension between formalist notions of timeless beauty and suspicions of digital photography’s reliability—or lack thereof. These photos of California’s coast, drawn from a series aptly named “Rocks,”...
Vijat Mohindra
Well known as a fashion photographer, Vijat Mohindra has made a career of photographing artsy spreads and celebrity fashion shoots for glossy magazines. He is known also as a chronicler of pop-imp/provocateur Miley Cyrus. His perspective in “Always Believe that...
Marc Horowitz
Marc Horowitz has shifted in the past few years from his early work, bridging performance, social practice, entertainment and social media, into the more traditional practices of painting and sculpture. “Interior, Day (A Door Opens),” his show at Depart Foundation...
Sam Falls
Visual affinities extend throughout Sam Falls’ solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, suggesting relationships between natural phenomena and man-made objects, while also developing a thematic unity for Falls’ heterogeneous production. A pair of texturally rich photographs...
The Mistake Room: Thomas Hirschhorn
Constructed in a labyrinthine series of rooms, each claustrophobic space arranged around a faux fireplace and punctuated by cardboard forms that resemble felled trees, Stand-alone, Thomas Hirschhorn’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, intentionally overwhelms with...
AMOCA: Dirk Staschke
In a collection of 18 ceramic and mixed media sculptures, Dirk Staschke explores the tradition of still life painting that emerged in Europe, specifically in Dutch “Vanitas” paintings, in the 17th Century. Staschke explores themes such as the ephemeral nature of...
RECONNOITER
Aram Moshayedi is a curator at the Hammer Museum. He organized “Made in L.A. 2016” with Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator, Renaissance Society.ARTILLERY: What is your area of curating at the Hammer? Moshayedi: There are no distinct areas of...
James Georgopoulos
With an observer’s detachment in the face of dire predictions of humanity’s demise from the rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence (AI), in “The Earth is Flat,” James Georgopoulos lifts from a trove of pop culture imagery adapted from film and other...
RECONNOITER
Dhyandra Lawson is a curatorial assistant in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). ARTILLERY: Please describe your job at LACMA.Lawson: I support the curatorial work of my departmental colleagues and make time for...
Christopher Richmond
Christopher Richmond’s “Double Fantasy,” a pairing of his videos Panthalassa (2015) and Rendezvous (2016) in his solo debut at Moskowitz Bayse, like much video work, challenges the audience, understandably not wanting to be easy or mere “entertainment.” Brimming with...
California Museum of Photography: Marie Bovo
Marie Bovo’s formally complex, visually gratifying and meditative photographs invite prolonged looking. What is captured in the viewfinder and the subsequent print is a mere ghost of her true subject, and this mediation or distance interposed between photographer and...
Jason Vass: Mark Dutcher
With his new solo show, “Time Machine” at Jason Vass, Mark Dutcher seeks to convey through his paintings various subjective and illusory experiences, starting with a moment of supreme clarity he felt as he stood before the Susan Rothenberg painting Blue Bars at LACMA...
The Ocelots of Foothill Boulevard
The whimsically titled three person exhibition “The Ocelots of Foothill Boulevard” featuring works by Mark Dion, Jessica Rath and Dana Sherwood, investigates the site of an abandoned infirmary located on land that is now a biological research field station. In the 40...
Commonwealth & Council: Kang Seung Lee
In his new project at Commonwealth & Council, “and Child,” Kang Seung Lee plunges deeper into his interest in rules and systems and branching investigation of the power structures of the art world with an analysis of the intersections of aesthetic and financial...
Andy Fedak
Playfully assaulting the construct of the rational, coherent, autonomous individual in his solo exhibition “You Have Nothing To Worry About,” Andy Fedak’s new stereoscopic (3D) film and virtual reality installation and three early “anxiety” videos explore his...
Humble Materials: NuttapHol Ma
On a hot August night in the Pico-Union neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles, Nuttaphol (pronounced nut-tah-pun) Ma welcomed me to The China Outpost, the project the 43-year-old artist calls a nomadic, self-imposed sweatshop, which bleeds into his living space at...
(Un)Reliably Ranking MFA Education
More than any other MFA programs in Southern California—there are in excess of a dozen—CalArts and UCLA have long been associated with art super-stardom. Whether this perception is accurate or a mere distillation of selective anecdotes, it bolsters the mythology of...
Laurel Doody & LAMOA
Alongside Los Angeles’ mainstream exhibition spaces, an eddy of alternative art venues swirl for a time, submerge and disappear, enjoying varying degrees of notice. A few of these combine entrepreneurial efforts along with more altruistic programming, reflecting the...