I crouch down to get a closer look at Kelly Akashi’s blooming burial mound and ponder what it might feel like to photosynthesize. An undulating imprint of the artist’s body bulges beneath the landscape like a bloated corpse. Seedlings sprout through a blanket of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Kelly Akashi
PICK OF THE WEEK: Patrick Jackson François Ghebaly
A series of diaphanous shelves hover with a brooding, eerie sense of stillness that charms and terrifies. Patrick Jackson's exhibition “Liquid Clay” presents two separate but related sculpture-based installations. Occupying most of the gallery space is a series of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: River Styx Sea View
River Styx, curated by Brandy Carstens and Sara Lee Hantman, brings together a range of artists whose work is concerned with the interior and emotive forces of landscape that are spiritual, mythological, and metamorphic. Featured in the show include artists such as...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Alison Saar LA Louver
Alison Saar’s diasporic deities are gestures of remembrance that honor the resilience of Black women. Reconfiguring and reclaiming the image of the Sable Venus, Saar depicts a series of women as spiritually charged warriors that are full of agency. This reclamation is...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Another World Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Captivated by the spiritual and vibrational aspects of the natural world, Agnes Pelton renders the invisible forces that surge through life. While Pelton is not the only artist included in LACMA's survey exhibition "Another World," she is the most compelling and...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Brandon Ndife Matthew Brown
Brandon Ndife's practice is grounded in vital materiality that considers matter as lively and metamorphic, bound to forces and encounters that push and pull, tumbling ceaselessly into rambunctious states of transformation. Biomorphic clusters of industrial and...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Francesca Woodman Danziger Gallery
Forever enchanted by Francesca Woodman’s photographic realms, I trace her contorted, fluttering body in the passing shadows and opaque reflections of her self-portraits–I see a witch, a siren, a spirit, a saint, a veiled apparition. Woodman’s body is simultaneously...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Elaine Cameron-Weir Hannah Hoffman Gallery
For those already acquainted with Elaine Cameron-Weir’s practice, her recent exhibition “Exploded View / Dressing for Windows” at Hannah Hoffman Gallery feels familiarly sterile and sacred, mechanical and magical. Clusters of assemblage sculpture made of concrete,...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Tala Madani The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
To experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of...
The Life (and Death) of an Artist Helen Molesworth's true crimeification of Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta's work is as much about life as it is about death. Attuned to the sacred bond between bodies and land, Mendieta regarded nature as a sensitive and emotive force entangled in culture and politics—a messy assemblage of energies and ideologies embedded in...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Lily Wong Various Small Fires
Lily Wong’s phantasmal figures traverse boundaries that blur celestial realms and built environments, painting a world that evokes fragmented feelings and cosmic confusion spurred by her personal quest for ancestral knowledge and identity. Bodies glow with an...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Catalina Ouyang Night Gallery
There are no straight lines or perfect circles in Physics, there are only currents, vortexes, distorted electromagnetic fields, impossible matter and beings in a reflexive state of becoming—morphing, deforming, sprawling and spilling out with each aberrant encounter....
More Women Six Profiles
We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more. Gala Porras-Kim The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vija Celmins / Robert Gober Matthew Marks Gallery
Water flows ceaselessly through the arteries of Robert Gober's solitary faucet, as if it were a trickling monument to the Sisyphean impossibility of cleanliness. Originally made in response to the AIDS crisis, Gober's handcrafted sink is recontextualized in the age of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Rebecca Morris Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris is an obsessive abstractionist. The grid serves as her compositional playground where shapes and colors frolic and meander. The 21-year survey exhibition "Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022," at the Institute of Contemporary Art...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Prunella Clough Château Shatto
Prunella Clough's paintings glitch, sneeze, and itch in states of spaghettification. Observational renderings culled from the everyday–seemingly subtle yet tidal and awkwardly beautiful–Clough discombobulates the gravitational fields that tether shapes and colors to...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Sharon Ellis Kohn Gallery
There is something sugary about Sharon Ellis’ new psychedelic paintings that are reminiscent of my favorite childhood board game, Candy Land, nostalgic of gingerbread plum trees, the peppermint stick forest, Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. Ellis’ paintings also...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Anina Major Shoshana Wayne Gallery
Vessels are containers–spaces for bodies of volume to dwell, to fill up–shaped by what they have held and what they long to hold. In Anina Major’s solo exhibition “Inheritance” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, fragmented baskets molded from clay operate as metaphorical...