In grad school at Cal Arts, I remember a renowned professor telling me there were certain symbols one should always avoid because they were “too loaded” oversaturated with other cultural referents to be read clearly. One of these symbols was the heart, not the...
Bright White, forever the blank page, the empty backdrop, illuminating the dreams and desires of other colors – added to, enhanced, augmented, amplified and enlarged – the beginning of everything and the end of nothing – it should be enough just to be yourself, but...
Slate gray is stoggy, sometimes stingy, and believes himself diplomatic. Presses his suits in the dead of night. Prefers the dawn to the dusk, and rarely works even a minute past five. Is precise and patriotic, though rarely vulgar in his applause. Married for...
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “integrity” as a “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values, and the quality or state of being complete and undivided.” Integrity is not a learned value, and is not culturally determined, but...
Why does brown always get the short end of the stick? If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. It’s not fair – earthy, practical, pragmatic brown is so much more than the leavings of a last meal. Brown is the color of the earth, your Sunday school...
Editor’s Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and...
Red is a color that should never be messed with, diluted, bastardized, cross-pollinated or otherwise appropriated, which calls into question the reason the color oxblood exists at all. If you cut open the belly of an ox, would the seepage of viscera reveal this...
Walking my dogs has become a new form of meditation as I imagine it has for many people confined to their rooms for what feels like an eternity, but as Virginia Woolf once wrote in her private letters: “I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty...
Los Angeles, being what it is—a big, sprawling desert grid with almost as many art galleries these days as there are Starbucks—can seem overwhelming when it comes to actually hopping in the car and making the point to go and see some art. Let’s face it, we sometimes...
Sometimes there is that rare and ineffable dialogue between artists that resists being quantified or easily understood. It’s like snow or the first time you fall in love. It works for no apparent reason, and is wonderful to behold. The current exhibition “Flora &...
It takes guts to imagine former president Harry S. Truman as a strange and profligate hero, a man who played a significant role in authoring our now debased socio/political framework, a uniquely polarizing figure who is now the unlikeliest muse in the most recent...
The paintings of Lenz Geerk are unprepossessing and quietly sublime, his figures poised inside singular moments of divine inscrutability as they consider the world around them, whether it be a dying flower or the pointed edge of a table. This sense of veiled mystery...
Laurie Lipton’s supremely detailed large-scale graphite drawings document the haphazardness of modern life as well as the darker more sinister underbelly of consumerist culture. Looking at these images, one can’t help but be reminded of how the proletariat is...
Sabrina Gschwandtner’s second solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery continues her exploration into intricate quilting motifs, expanding on her already complex imagery with the addition of deaccessioned celluloid film strips of female hands hard at work—sewing,...
Seth Kaufman has made a startling new body of work, and has transitioned from sculpture to photography as effortlessly as a caterpillar transitions into a butterfly. Still rigorous and with a keen attention to detail, these images, which largely deal with themes like...
Cole Case is a man obsessed with: airplanes, the night sky, palm trees, runways, depopulated public spaces and his own private plethora of nostalgic memorabilia. Armed with these iconographic signifiers, Case, in his second solo exhibition with Chimento Contemporary,...
The famous physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Men should study hard what interests them in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” Dave Tourje is a living example of this philosophy as he is interested in practically everything from hot...
In their recent collaborative exhibition, Martin Durazo and Kottie Paloma have created a dialogue that is both socially conscious and willfully playful. Durazo's raw canvas works incorporate an odd array of materials including acrylic paint, found macramé, spray...
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