Michael Govan has given a lot of thought to Los Angeles’ identity as a center for culture. While it may go without saying the opportunity to reshape an institution brought him to LA in 2006, if he is successful in revitalizing the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he...
Liat Yossifor
Propped against the wall of her second-story Hollywood Boulevard studio, three of Liat Yossifor’s gray paintings—each about seven feet by five feet—in various stages of completion sit perched on low wood supports. Yossifor’s high-ceilinged studio feels spacious, if...
Bruce Davidson & Paul Caponigro
Almost since its inception, photography has been characterized by historians and critics as perpetually in crisis. The current divergent trends—a democratizing of the form through digital cameras and social media vs. the ontological investigation of the medium by...
Cool Night
When I arrive at Night Gallery to meet gallerists Mieke Marple and Davida Nemeroff, behind the front desk are champagne bottles and other artifacts leftover from “Sexy Beast,” the Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA) benefit/art auction. The event, which took place...
Nathan Huff
“Domesticating Disturbances,” Nathan Huff’s solo exhibit of drawings and paintings in gouache and sculpture/installation never dogmatically adheres to a set of organizing principles, instead freely adapting ideas to form a unique figurative language. His point of...
Christian Tedeschi: Opposites Attract
Up-and-coming Los Angeles-based artist Christian Tedeschi describes his former boss, Nancy Rubins as “a tornado—so much energy.” The 40-year-old assistant professor and head of sculpture at Cal State Northridge recalls his experience as a studio assistant with a...
Celebrity in the Art World’s Iron Age
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW. Ed Ruscha’s lithograph and the banner image for his 40-year survey at Gagosian Madison Avenue says it all: it was a different art world when Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956. Now, he’s blue chip and according to my editor, a...
Augusta Wood
With 21 new photographs in her second solo show at Angles Gallery, Augusta Wood resumes where she left off in her 2010 body of work, “I have only what I remember,” by delving deeply into personal history. Wood constructs her photographs from multiple images selected...
Claudia Joskowicz
It’s been said all literature is comprised of two stories: man goes on a journey; stranger comes to town. In her two-channel video, Sympathy for the Devil (2011), Claudia Joskowicz examines these alternate sides of the same coin, exploring the exile of two...
Robbert Flick: “Freeways,” at Rose Gallery
When I was just out of school and began my first regular daily commute of the Southern California freeways, I remember stealing glances to either side of the road. I caught brief glimpses of the fleeting vistas, noting how with every quarter mile, my vantage point...
Kim Stringfellow
Kim Stringfellow’s photographs of derelict cabins that sit within the high-desert landscape of the Mojave provide a necessarily familiar entry point into “Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape.” This, the artist’s most...
Kirsten Everberg
With eight new oil-and-enamel paintings, Kirsten Everberg continues her practice of exploring filmic images as a means of exercising her interest in perception, memory and narrative. Visually, her paintings present an eerie absence. In Everberg’s hands, film scenes...
Mark Bradford
In the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the anonymous unmarked storefront of Mark Bradford’s studio betrays nothing to passersby, but the large white security gate which rolls back to reveal a parking lot at the north east end of the property is an unusual...
Facing the Sublime in Water, CA
NOTWITHSTANDING THE RECENT HURRICANE THAT FLOODED New York City's galleries, the mundane act of pouring four liters of sea water from the nearest shoreline and leaving it to evaporate on the gallery floor creates a profoundly moving effect. Emilie Halpern's...
THE ROAD TO DOCUMENTA
I’ve been warned that Llyn Foulkes is preparing furiously for “Documenta 13” and as I get in touch to arrange a meeting, I’m wary, in part, due to his reputation for fractious soliloquies regarding fellow artists, critics, art magazines, and in general, the art world...