There is something inherently contentious about an exhibition juxtaposing the work of a contemporary artist with another whose work has some place within the art-historical canon, more particularly one of the most resonant antecedents of the late 19th- and early...
Markus Lüpertz & Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Opera as Double Fugue: The Comet / Poppea "Double Consciousness" and historical counterpoint
‘Man proposes, but [God] disposes’—or so went the biblical proverb as distilled more or less through various Christian medieval iterations. In this simultaneously sunlit and dark-star doubling of two operas—George Lewis’s and librettist Douglas Kearney’s dark...
Claire Chambless Carlye Packer
Transformation in its most expansive and contradictory sense was at work throughout Claire Chambless’ exhibition, “Role Play.” Both individually and taken as a choreographed ensemble, the work—while clearly influenced by such abstract surrealists as Miró and...
Griselda Rosas Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
The title of Griselda Rosas’ exhibition, “Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before),” recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, “Once upon a time...,” but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn’t frame so much as foreground the...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Jessie Homer French Various Small Fires
“January in the last extant stable society.” Joan Didion, “In Hollywood” (1973) — included in The White Album (1979) “You can get there from here,” was something like the thought rippling just beneath my immediate observations, coming upon several Jessie Homer...
THE HERE AND NOW OF IT Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape
You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The...
BEST IN SHOW: ARTILLERY 2023 TOP TEN
Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums,...
Kim Jones The Box
The opening for Kim Jones’ exhibition had a kind of homecoming spirit, reflected in its title, “Walking Home.” Several of Jones’ first post-graduate performance pieces in the 1970s were marathon “walks” between various landmarks in Los Angeles, performed in the...
“Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures — curated by Alison M. Gingeras — Blum & Poe The pictures people make of their lives
Portraiture has been a constant in art-making since the waning Middle Ages, and really since art first appeared (though they wouldn’t have called it that), which may extend back into prehistory. I would further conjecture that such early art itself encompassed a kind...
HAND HOLDING SCRIBBLE Karl Haendel at Vielmetter Los Angeles
At least once a week something happens to save my life. Usually it has something to do with some scientific discovery or biotech breakthrough that has managed to save, preserve or forestall further damage to some part of the biosphere. Or some reminder that nature...
Molly Segal Track 16 Gallery
Like many other pictorial artists, Molly Segal is a storyteller. Her preferred medium is watercolor applied in various degrees of thickness to a special plastic-coated paper that is less absorbent than conventional papers, but also more easily re-worked. The titles of...
Virginia Katz:Spent Lights and Passing Skies Long Beach Museum of Art
“Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, . . .” Matthew Arnold, “The Foresaken Merman” “ . . . — you can see / the whole sky pass through this head of mine, the...
Meta-Barbie Waking Up After Greta Gerwig's Midsummer Night's Dream
"I just don't know what to do with myself...." Burt Bacharach / Hal David, 1962 I’m not sure if Barbie is a new kind of cinema, but it’s not the sort of film we’re accustomed to seeing in wide theatrical release on the biggest screens and dressed in the highest of...
Martha Alf — A comic/cosmic phenomenology Martha Alf: Opposites and Contradictions — Michael Kohn Gallery
I came to this show of Martha Alf’s work as a novice. (I mean that almost reverentially—it’s the sort of work that sends me back to a kind of intellectual nunnery where I feel compelled to repent my inattention and failure to carefully and precisely observe.) Alf’s...
BLAIR SAXON-HILL SHRINE
A viewer unfamiliar with Blair Saxon-Hill’s previous work might be inclined toward certain assumptions about the foundations and precedents for her style and approach to her subjects—figurative, abstracted or quasi-symbolic—or even what her subjects might actually be....
Glenda Jackson (1936-2023) Revealing Character and Defining a Moment
It is one of the great regrets of my life to have never seen Glenda Jackson perform live on stage—and there was at least one serious opportunity that somehow (almost inexplicably) passed me by—in a play I loved, directed by the playwright himself. The play was Edward...
Vaginal Davis — Her Private Dancers Vaginal Davis — Macha Family Romance - Marc Selwyn Fine Art
There are two fantastic shows up right now at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills—both devoted to artists who have some claim to the term, legend—not as an honorific exactly, but simply in terms of the way they have lived their lives—bringing the full scope of their...
Framing “Monica” Andrea Pallaoro’s (and Trace Lysette’s) brilliantly 'unfinished' film portrait
Monica may be one of the sparest scripts I have ever seen put to film. The story itself is scarcely more than a classic trope whittled down to its most slender thread—the nostalgia/anti-nostalgia tale filtered through a very specific lens of estrangement. It’s a...