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...
Rules of Engagement
The term, “mindful awareness,” is a buzz phrase in current therapeutic and meditation circles (and, as I discovered a year or so ago, the institutional art world—or at least the Hammer Museum, by way of its alliance with UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center). But...
Liza Ryan
The catastrophic intersection of the man-made or engineered environment with nature may be the great subject of 21st century art. As the title of her show implies, Liza Ryan places visual brackets around our notions of boundary—of separation, protection or insulation...
Perception Through Process and the Persuasion of Pathos – A Day at The Getty
I’d taken a photographer friend to The Getty to look at the Light, Paper, Process show curated by Virginia Heckert – a must for any photographer and, for that matter, for anyone interested in process-oriented form and media (which includes myself, in recent months)....
Tom LaDuke
I try to avoid reading too much into titles of paintings because they can rarely be more than the most tenuous captions for something effectively functioning in a language of its own. Occasionally a show’s title underscores a certain theme resonating through the...
Auction House MVP
The auction market, and in particular the salerooms of the two major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have long been a proving ground for the marketplace maturity of every kind of specialty commodity, including fine art. Auction houses have aggressively...