Johanna Breiding’s show of photography and ceramics at Ochi Projects defied singular characterization in favor of an enveloping tsunami of empathic correspondence—a tidal progression of images both intimate yet nothing less than oceanic. The exhibition’s slightly coy...
Johanna Breiding
Karen Carson GAVLAK
The title of Karen Carson’s show of new "bas relief" paintings, exhibited alongside some of the zippered canvas works that marked her debut into the Los Angeles art world almost half a century ago, “Middle Ground” is a kind of conundrum, consistent with the kinds of...
Caroline Kent Kohn Gallery
Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids...
Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020
“Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable….” “I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way...
High Anxiety: A Conversation with Karen Finley
I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma....
Deep Listening By the Light of a “Full Pink Moon”: Opera Povera in Quarantine
The planet, some of us might say, is having a moment. Panic, collapse, disruption—with the tables turned on the principal disrupting species by an errant configuration of protein presumably just doing its thing in the carbon cycle; also course-correction, regrouping,...
Saying Goodbye to the Godfather: John Baldessari (1931–2020)
I learned yesterday—along with most of the Los Angeles art world –that John Baldessari had died. (He had actually died Thursday, but the word filtered out only this week-end.) Long before I knew him or what he represented (not only in Los Angeles, but the world),...
UCLA’s Kristy Edmunds’ Tour de Force
Kristy Edmunds took over the reins of performing arts at UCLA at a time (2010–11) when the kind of avant-garde international theater and festival programming it was famous for seemed to be all but dropping from UCLA’s sightlines. But Edmunds’ purpose and seriousness...
As Is: : Roy Dowell
Roy Dowell seems to be forever attempting to reconcile physical actualities or their aftermaths with moments of apprehension or anticipation, agents or instrumentalities with their symbolic equivalents. Collage is his medium par excellence, but in recent years, his...
The Call of the Wild
By the time my studio visit with Francesca Gabbiani is winding up, the conversation has turned to Griffith Park. We talk about our respective walks, and various neglected areas of the Park—the depleted bird sanctuary and abandoned spaces and cages near the Zoo—and the...
Ezrha Jean Black’s TOP PICKS OF 2018
I make no claim as to the comprehensiveness or objectivity of this selection. Nevertheless, to the extent that it reflects personal priorities, I believe most artists, if not the entire art community, both local and international, acknowledge the existential...
After The Price of Everything
As we raked through ashes in California, reminded that we had already entered an anthro-obscene geological epoch, the most “important” of the Fall 2018 art auctions were already taking place, with records dropping every step of the way—Hopper, Hockney, Jack Whitten,...
Sarah Awad
The title of Sarah Awad’s recent show seems intended to encapsulate its scope, which is as expansive as the painting from which it’s borrowed. However appropriate it might be for that particular painting, applying it to the exhibition as a whole, though, seems...
Hammer Museum’s Annual Gala in the Garden
Is it wrong to feel like dancing on a school night? The gent sitting next to me didn’t even get to cross that bridge—he had to exit early for a drive out to Malibu on a school-related mission. But whatever you thought of Leon Bridges’ laid-back-going-on-languid set,...
Tieken Gallery: : Simone Gad, Barry Gordon, Gus Harper
There is something delicious about the commingling of delight and horror, or really any opposition of sensations pushed to their extremes: confectionary sweetness with an aftertaste on the wrong side of savory—the foreshadowing of decay; the sweetness of...
Harry Dodge
When does an exhibition title effectively amount to a viewer advisory? I’m not sure Harry Dodge would consider the title of his current show at JOAN gallery, “Works of Love,” an instance of this. It’s not in any sense a caution, and the titles of the individual works...
Eileen Cowin
Eileen Cowin’s work has been loosely categorized as mise-en-scène photography. But overall it is far more self-reflexive, deeply deconstructed and concerned with the relations of language to the apprehension and (re-)construction of reality. More recent work has...
After Henry – or Thanks Be to Mark
As Karen Finley wisely counseled me some years ago, an excess of gratitude can strike you dumb (or simply annoyed speechless), which is never a good place to be, especially if you’re on a podium and expected to render judgment, offer smart advice or commentary, or...