“My name is called Disturbance,” as Mick Jagger sang in "Street Fighting Man," and as 2016 careened into 2017, many of us wondered where exactly we stood with respect to what beckoned immediately across the horizon and came to grips with an unsettling notion that we...
Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that...
Doug Aitken – Electric Earth
Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with...
Matthew Rosenquist: Just Keep Walking
Matthew Rosenquist knows his way around the block. I mean that in every sense. He’s acutely attuned to a certain street culture and attitude in common circulation both in L.A. and elsewhere – a suburbanized (and slightly desperate) vernacular observed not only in...
Maria Lassnig: A Painting Survey, 1950 – 2007
In Maria Lassnig’s career, we trace a continuously evolving negotiation between the conscious self and the alternately concrete and conceptualized other. The body of Lassnig’s work – evolving over the course of her long career from her first expressionist essays into...
R. H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30
R. H. Quaytman’s Morning: Chapter 30 has an assertive, unrelenting horizontal presence, but it really represents a kind of constellation – coextensive with the larger universe of associations that populate Quaytman’s entire body of work. That constellation may be...
Jeffrey Vallance: Now More Than Ever
Jeffrey Vallance was already something of a legend when I first became acquainted with his work – an ‘interventionist’ style of conceptual art in which the performance became a kind of deconstructed cultural inquiry. My first impression came by way of captioned...
Concrete Islands
Sometimes the bravest show can be one that parses its meanings seemingly by millimeters in the sheer sense structures to be elucidated between one work and the next. This is in pronounced contrast to the relatively unfiltered cascades of sensation that dominate many...
Guy Richards Smit
How do we put this? A Guy’s gotta paint! And the Guy who’s gotta paint has clearly gotta be obsessed about it! And maybe a few other things besides painting… like SEX! I mean a Guy’s gotta be inspired to paint! And then he’s gotta get through the stuff that fuels,...
Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor has described his figurative painting, which is not infrequently straight portraiture, as landscape; and to press the point, he has taken the further step of mounting the work within a gallery prepared from the floor up, in effect treating the space as...
S/Election – Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom
We Americans live in interesting times. The old Chinese curse has come home to roost long before the country itself has supplanted our economic and cultural hegemony. We have more freedom, more choices generally – but we’re not equally informed or empowered to sort...
LIFE DURING WARTIME: Sadie Barnette, Aaron Fowler, Farrah Karapetian, Shiri Mordechay, Tschabalala Self
“The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, / I’m getting used to it now….” The words are from a 1979 Talking Heads song, “Life During Wartime,” which inspired the title and concept for this group show of five artists – Sadie Barnette, Aaron Fowler, Farrah Karapetian,...
Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler
It is almost an existential question – of art, creation, medium – the ‘still point of the turning world … (w)here the dance is,’ to paraphrase Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” Helen Frankenthaler was already well into her early maturity by 1962, which is where this 25 year...
Fran Siegel: Reconstruction
As our planet is gradually warmed and transformed into landscapes and environments once conceivable only in nightmare fantasy, we find ourselves preoccupied with our apprehension and perception of a world we’ve effectively made over – so bound up with our physical...
John Altoon: Works From the Estate
There are some artists you know are great immediately because they provoke such disparate and conflicting emotions simultaneously that they practically throw you physically off balance. John Altoon is one such artist. The most feral of the Ferus Gallery Cool School,...
Ry Rocklen: L.A. Relics
The most emblematic of the ‘trophy’ moments in Ry Rocklen’s current show may be the perforated vertical standing locker cabinet, titled Ricky. With its exposed interior copper plating and cross-illuminated by the gallery light, it’s a handsome object that might serve...
Tom Knechtel
The great thing about keeping some distance from the dominant trends in the art world is that you stand a reasonable chance of remaining true to what is most unique about your own art-making: your own eye, ear, voice or hand (all are involved in what flows from the...
Henry Taylor
We have abandonment issues lately/forever – desolate, disconsolate and a bit fragile. In Henry Taylor’s painting, that fragility coexists with an incongruous durability – a hard thing that cracks against identity or classification or simply swallows it up. Taylor’s...