At first glance it appears as if there is nothing there. Then the eye is drawn to a faint shadow on the gallery wall. A silhouette appears, then it is gone. Where did this shadow come from? Is it an illusion? The answer is that the image on the wall is a faint...
During his year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome, Michael Queenland roamed the streets. Rome is a beautiful city to walk in, filled with ruins and monuments, but like any modern city, it is also cluttered with trash. The detritus—what was thrown...
Pascual Sisto's immersive video installation Inside Out is a tour de force for both its technical accomplishments and its compelling, albeit obtuse and ambiguous narrative. Sisto has choreographed an approximately twenty-minute symphony of sound, lights and video,...
In her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Winnipeg-based artist Wanda Koop investigates the idea of dislocation. This dislocation is reflected in the exhibition title, In Absentia, and results from the fact that Koop’s paintings of New York City where actually created...
Mark Steven Greenfield’s works explore the complexities of the African American experience, speaking to personal as well as universal themes. While earlier works explored stereotypes characterized by black cartoon characters and Blackface minstrels, in his current...
I have had the opportunity to visit the Venice Biennale on numerous occasions. In reflecting, I realize that what makes one trip stand out over another is the totality of the experience and not the specificity of the art. How can one not love Venice? Navigating...
In “line-of-site,” Joseph Dumbacher and John Dumbacher have crafted an installation about geometry and perception. It is minimal and simultaneously maximal, suggesting expansive possibilities with limited materials. The brothers (who are fraternal twins) have filled...
There are two points of entry into Fran Siegel's exquisite exhibition, "Lineage Through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil." One is purely visual: admiring the unique way the individual drawings and collages are sewn together and suspended from the ceiling; noticing...
Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s...
In his short video Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), on view at Blum & Poe gallery, Jim Shaw appropriates the style of the opening narration from Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone. In this piece, a wig-wearing narrator delights in relating alluring...
Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington's complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments...
Wake Me Up When It’s Over is a compelling and timely installation featuring selected works from 1998–2016 by the London-based duo Thomson & Craighead. Jon Thomson and Allison Craighead, who have been working together since the mid 1990s, utilize data, information...
Dean Monogenis destroyed nine paintings putting them on display in a work entitled Black Hole. Feeling the need to purge, Monogenis selected older pieces from the gallery's inventory and cut them into strips to be fed into a wood chipper. He then collected the sawdust...
Unexpected Portrait (2016) is a large-scale acrylic-on-canvas painting where a long tube-shaped orange line with dark edges glides across the work defining a cartoon-like head and shoulders. Two simple dots for eyes and a short line for a mouth are similarly...
Brendan Fowler is interested in the relationship between photography and material culture, and his works transform photographic images into something unexpected. He is best known for his "crash piece" series (exhibited at MOMA in New Photography 2013), in which he...
In Blair Saxon-Hill's installation to no ending except ourselves (2016), wall and floor based sculptures fashioned from discarded and broken materials come to life. Making art from found objects is nothing new and while Saxon-Hill's works pay homage both to outsider...
Erika Rothenberg’s “House of Cards” is as timely now as it was when it was first shown in 1992. In our changing political climate, Rothenberg’s satirical, ironic wit and insightful commentary resonate on multiple levels. Organized by themes, the hand-crafted greeting...
Paul Sietsema's works have an aesthetic and intellectual dimensionality and the path through his exhibition is an invitation to put together the pieces of a sophisticated puzzle that juxtaposes the digital and the handmade with a semi-nostalgic nod toward objects from...
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