Byline: Eve Wood

Comic-book artists are sometimes dismissed as just that—common “drawers” as it were rather than fine artists. This recent retrospective of Jack Kirby’s graphic work currently on view at Cal State Northridge’s Mike Curb Gallery sets the record straight and proves that a graphic line can be just as moving, haunting and unsettling as any fine artist’s mark-making (Raymond Pettibon anyone?). Kirby’s genius was creating some of the most memorable character in comic book history including The Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer and the X Men, and this exhibition highlights Kirby’s quintessentially unique style.

Mike Curb Gallery at CSUN

CSUN Art Galleries
18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, CA

Show runs through October 10, 2015

Noah Purifoy made it his life long duty to seek art everywhere in everything, and to do so with tremendous poise and discernment. The retrospective Junk Dada on view at LACMA is breathtakingly inventive and, if nothing else, speaks to the unending seductiveness of the found object. Transformation drives all the work in this exhibition – the idea that something can exist as more than itself, or signify a variety of ideas and ways of being. Works like Untitled (Bed Headboard) 1958 reconfigure a familiar object into a strangely Cubist-like amalgam of shapes, but the show- stoppers here are the desert installations where one can clearly see Purifoy’s incredible commitment to sheer expansiveness.

LACMA

5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Show on view thru Sept. 27, 2015

Deedee Cheriel’s work feels akin to falling headlong into a rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream while drinking a pint of Buffalo Trace Bourbon on a hot New York summer night in Chelsea. Her mostly small paintings of animals reenacting human activities (albeit some surreal) in scenic settings is more than just your “standard animal fare ” however, as these delicately imagined works are also charged through with a deep concern for the world as the artists draws on her Indian roots to imagine a better place for all. Standouts include The Gift, a mixed media on wood panel where a butterfly/man with a tiger’s head becomes the perfect suitor.

Deedee Cheriel: Natural Resource

KP Projects

170 S La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Shows closes August 29, 2015

Gertrude Stein once famously wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” and Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, whose exhibition “Wonder Pop,” consisting of Disney characters and well-known Pop cultural figures drawn in bright colors and recast with gay themes, might respond with “To love is to love is to love,” meaning that all creatures are equal and deserving of tolerance. This show is certainly a good time and purports its own unique brand of decadence. In Ontiveros’ world, Peter Pan smokes a crack pipe and Mickey Mouse rouses old Walt from the dead via the Ouija Board. This is the stuff of nightmares—and dreams come true—just depends on how you choose to look at it.

La Luz De Jesus

4633 Hollywood Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA. 90027

Show runs through August 30, 2015

Entering Joseph Holtzman’s recent Hammer Project feels akin to entering a child’s sacred imaginative landscape, one where all the imaginary friends can not only be seen, but also deeply witnessed on a visceral level. Not all these friends are indeed friendly and some, like the ever inexplicable and elusive Jane Austen, comprise a visual field at once lush and enigmatic, one where the viewer could just as easily float away as be buried under the weight of sheer weightlessness. These are personal paintings of remembrance and whimsy as well as visual embodiments of the passage of time and how we are held in abeyance to our own human experience.

Joseph Holtzman

Hammer Projects

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024

Show runs through Sept. 20, 2015

“The Slick & The Sticky,” a group show co-curated by Vanessa Place, insists adamantly on its own dystopian themes, wherein the works in the exhibition deliberately obfuscate their own suggested meaning. Working off the premise that all language is inherently misleading and unreliable, the works in this show utilize various linguistic tactics including humor and blatant sarcasm to subvert the viewer’s expectations. Highlights include Andrea Longacre-White’s simple yet powerful vinyl wall laminants with phrases like “I Don’t Have Women Problems.” Funny, yet oddly unsettling too.

Various Small Fires
812 North Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90038
Show runs through August 8, 2015

Not that this hasn’t been done before, the theme of “flatness” explored again and again in all its variations, but in its most recent incarnation at David Kordansky Gallery, artists like Tauba Auerbach transform the static spatial plane that is “flatness” into a magical and luminous field of divine disorientation in this group exhibition organized by Karma, New York. Auerbach’s The New Ambidextrous Universe V, (2014) fairly levitates beyond its own physical presence to embody an entirely new way of seeing and understanding wherein a simple plank of wood is divided into segments, reconstituted and reassembled. The viewer must look two and three times to really comprehend the complexity and beauty of this work. Other artists include Richard Artschwager, Will Boone, Jeff Elrod, Robert Grosvenor, Peter Halley, Lee Lozano, John Mason and Charlotte Posenenske.

“Flat World”
David Kordansky Gallery
5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019 
Show runs through August 15, 2015

Mark Bradford’s first solo exhibition “Scorched Earth” at the Hammer Museum is a stunner and not in the typical ways one might expect. These paintings, engendered equally by the 1992 LA uprisings as well as the AIDS epidemic, constitute a visceral visual experience that seems at once highly personal but also universally relevant. An investigation into a painterly process is continued by Bradford’s imagery though deduced slowly through deliberately excavating and reconstituting the central image. Much like history evolves only to be redefined again and again according to the pulse of the times we live in, these paintings transmogrify and recapitulate their own historic moment.  

The Hammer Museum 
“Scorched Earth” Mark Bradford
10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Show runs through Sept. 27, 2015

Ann Chamberlin approaches painting like an alchemist approaches a vile of life-giving succor—with tremendous reverence and passion. The new paintings on view at Lora Schlesinger Gallery mine some of the same archetypal themes she has visited previously. However these new paintings are steeped in the heritage of Mexican culture and each of these images function as a kind of visual talisman of grace, wit and elegance. Works like the enigmatic and seductive Sparklers are particularly winning, yet oddly sad, as though the figures in the image preferred their own isolation to the company of others. 

Lora Schlesinger Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave. #B5b 
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show runs through July 11, 2015

Ochi Projects, a new gallery on Washington Boulevard. hit a home run this week with its first group show curated by Brian Wills and Lexi Brown. The horizon line has long been a symbol of infinite possibility, and all of the work in the exhibition speaks to this theme eloquently, with varying degrees of insight. Claudia Parducci’s luminous painting titled Jet Star, inspired by the New Jersey roller coaster of that name that was submerged in the ocean during hurricane Sandy, is a standout as are Faris McReynold’s two paintings, both rich with metaphor and gorgeously rendered.  

Ochi Projects
3301 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
Show runs through July 25, 2015

Michael Deyermond is an artist’s artist, making stuff that makes him happy, and us too, albeit for the fact that some of the sentiments here are darkly appealing and often self-reflexive. This is not art that begs to be loved at the expense of much needed content, but rather art that speaks with humor and intelligence to the often difficult experience of being alive and creative in a culture that does not value imagination. His penguin series if particularly persuasive with accompanying prescient phrases like “California Let Me Down,” with her sun-drenched beaches and artery clogging highways, yet the “dream” lives on. 

Craig Krull Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B-3 
Santa Monica, California 90404
Show runs through July 11, 2015

Hugo Crosthwaite’s newest exhibition is powerful and evocative, but more importantly, perhaps, it speaks to our human frailties, specifically, the ways in which we process grief and hope. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s poem Hymn and the recent abduction and murder of 43 college students in the Mexican State of Guerrero, Crosthwaite has created a series of drawings and floor sculptures, taken from a shattered mural, that engage the viewer on a deeply emotional and psychic level simultaneously. These works propose human narratives that will never be resolved, fully understood or lived through. The people who populate these images are human in the best and worst sense of the word. They grieve life even as they embrace it.

 Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90034
On view through June 20, 2015

Travis Collinson continues his investigation into his signature style of spare and oblique personas in his second exhibition at Maloney Fine Art. Utilizing a sparseness of space, form and gesture simultaneously, Collinson manages to compress, through this highly stylized approach—a series of intensely personal and emotionally charged vignettes that function as much as portraits of the artist’s own state of mind and relationship to his subjects as they do the subjects themselves.  The muted color palette and truncated bodies  also emphasize the strained intimacy that radiates from each of these oddly enigmatic and beautiful portraits. Highlights include the five images of Andy Warhol and the strangely mysterious “Seth.” 

Maloney Fine Art
2680 South La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 
Show runs through July 3, 2015

Every year the Dept of Cultural Affairs grants awards to Los Angeles based artists whose work reflects the ideologies and concerns of its residents. This year’s exhibition is particularly provocative with artists like Jeff Colson, Miyoshi Barosh and Alexandra Grant representing LA respectively. The show as a whole is really strong, but highlights include Grant’s monolithic paintings entitled “Antigone 3000” which embodies both the luminous boldness of this powerful female icon, while also identifying and even celebrating the ambiguities inherent in the struggle to remain alive and true to oneself. 

Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery

4800 Hollywood Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90027

Show Runs Through June 28, 2015 

There is a stunning archival pigment print in Charlie Rubin’s new exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery titled All Your Dreams Belong To Us. The image, while simple and elegant, is complex in the very best sense of the word. Could it be a tree bleeding real human blood, or a phantasm of nature? Either way, it’s compelling. Mining the familiar territory of deforestation, and all manner of a dying overpopulated planet, Rubin has chosen to “intervene” with color, light and motion. These photos, while dark at their core, ultimately communicate a lightness of being.

Kopeikin Gallery

2766 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA. 90034

Show runs until June 6, 2015

Mineo Mizuno explores the hybridized relationship between the elements as expressed in his uniquely compelling understanding of his materials, both film and ceramics.  The unglazed porcelain vessels (atop a raw wood pedestal) in this exhibition do not so much as punctuate the visual language described in the three videos shot in Japan, New York and California, but encapsulate the idea of the expansion, breadth and trajectory of water, both real and imagined. Mizuno is in love with water and all it signifies and suggests, and this newest body of work is so much more than an ode to an elemental life force, but becomes an investigation of the ways we have come to understand, or misunderstand, our planet. 

Samuel Freeman Gallery
2639 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034