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...
Best Places To Escape the LA Art World
1. Dancing With Myself [A Club Called Rhonda; CLINIC AT Couture]Los Globos has a massive footprint on Sunset Boulevard, but A Club Called Rhonda makes it feel almost cozy. Couture, on Cahuenga just below Hollywood Boulevard, actually does manage to draw a bit of...
Richard Learoyd: In the Studio
Photographer Richard Learoyd has returned to the ancient roots of his craft to grasp the materiality of that moment of our impact upon the world, specifically with the camera obscura in its most literal definition – the image received on a large sheet of...
Grappling with Globalism
The downtown Los Angeles arts district has been evolving, somewhat in tandem with adjacent downtown districts, since at least the 1980s. There was a stabilizing shift at the turn of the century when SCI-Arc took over the old Santa Fe rail depot east of Alameda and...
CHG 10th Anniversary Exhibition
The art world ‘conversation,’ in many ways, can be a small one. In the post-modern, post-conceptual landscape, anything goes. Yet (Juxtapoz to one side) we’re not typically privy to the kinds of conversations Corey Helford Gallery artists might ignite. Once upon a...
Passage
ACME’s late summer group show, Passage, chooses subtlety over ‘statement’, quietly suggesting a spectrum of emerging ideas and directions through its artists’ varied address of notions of passage or transition in their work. In doing so, it also gives a glimpse of the...
Arthur Jafa, at MADE IN L.A. 2016, Hammer Museum
As we are posting this, we are informed that Arthur Jafa has not been awarded the Mohn Public Recognition Award; and we can’t help wondering if he might have been at some competitive disadvantage simply because visitors to the Museum were unable to actually flip the...
FOTOFEST 2016 BIENNIAL
The world of contemporary popular culture has largely left the biosphere behind, for a world of limitless extraterrestrial space. It is not so different from the contemporary avant-garde, which remains a cerebral, intramural phenomenon. It takes an extraordinary,...
Linda Arreola
Linda Arreola’s debut as an artist was as a sculptor and installation artist. She’s also an architect; and her show, “Architect of the Abstract,” a survey of work curated by William Moreno from 2005 to 2016, is very much the work of an architect who has crossed over...
Aaron Wrinkle
“69,”Aaron Wrinkle’s exhibition of drawing, painting and related constructions must be considered in the context of what Night Gallery calls “the mausoleum” that frames it. Initially one might think of it as a pavilion, albeit of a hand-hewn urban rusticity that bears...
BEST IN SHOW 2015
We live in interesting times—possibly the end of time, or at least the end of history as humans have conceived it over the last few millennia (an irony Francis Fukuyama never considered in the dislocated thesis for his 1989 essay and 1992 book, nor for that matter...
Ulrich Wulff
A recognizable figure or persona, which may or may not stand in for the artist but, regardless, bears on his relationship to the world and his painterly address of it, emerges in the Berlin-based painter Ulrich Wulff’s most recent show, “Preparations.” Call it the...
RECONNOITER
Joanne Heyler is the founding director of The Broad museum and director and chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation. She has been Eli Broad’s principal art advisor for the past 23 years.Artillery: Have you ever disagreed with a purchasing decision, or the final...
Chris Barnard
Contrary to certain art historical narratives, painting has never waned, but only been ever more rigorously interrogated—usually by the artists engaged with the medium. Chris Barnard is one of those artists mining and turning over the modernist tropes of figural...