Since 2017, I have been among the 1.7 million people who have participated in the art biennial-cum-treasure hunt to seek out large-scale, site-specific contemporary art installations scattered throughout the Coachella Valley desert, the land of the haves and have-nots. Not in a white cube, locked away in a walled institution, or behind a paywall, Desert X is a great equalizer, breaking...
As fate would have it, the biannual “Spring 2025 ArtNight Pasadena” event is taking place on March 14th—winter’s coldest, dreariest, and rainiest day. Accordingly, you select the handful of venues most likely to feature contemporary work, then set off. An hour and a half and four stops later, you’ve experienced about fourteen seconds worth of satori. It doesn’t seem at all sporting to break out...
Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at the Karma party at Ghengis Cohen, his trucker hat popping up behind a psychic and very beautiful astrologer. I saw James Franco at...
I’m at a bar in Palmdale and it’s nearly empty. From where I am sitting, I can see two men playing chess. Or, rather, they’re not really playing—they’re afraid to make a move. It’s Pawn to E4, followed by the all-too-familiar analysis paralysis: finger steadies the piece, eyes tighten, neck cranes and turtles to check for danger, and then…Pawn back to E2. Let’s start again. Every move...
This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous textile-based technologies of the early modern era, and reflections on the environmental precarity of Los Angeles. There were as...
Trying to Navigate LA Dear Dr. Trainwreck, Can you talk about chasing fame and how that affects friendship? I’m from the Midwest and came out to California for art school. I’m fresh out of school (one year) and was able to get pretty good gallery representation early on so I count myself lucky. But a classmate that graduated at the same time keeps asking me how I did it. I’m happy to share. I’m...
In “First Alienation,” printed matter and machine vision come together in a clearly human context at Timeshare, a co-curated gallery run by six artists in Lincoln Heights. The earliest work included in the show is Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 16mm...
Situating her work at the juncture of word and image—an intermedial locus where, in her case, verbal content is at once borne and engulfed by complex painterly structures —Alexandra Grant has, in fact, had to struggle to achieve a coherent balance between her twinned...
The images in Yorgos Lanthimos’ first photography exhibition were captured while the filmmaker was shooting Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Poor Things (2023), but you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at them. Except for the actress Hunter Schafer in one stark...
Teresa Murta’s hallucinatory fever dream of gestural abstraction is full of organic lines and undulating forms that made me feel like I was finding images in clouds that would begin to take a familiar form before disintegrating before my eyes. Is that a bouquet...
Those of us who have dreamed—which I pray is everyone reading this—know how it goes: A cacophony of vignettes rattle through your unconscious, some a single flash, some endless, though in reality, they’re all only a few seconds in duration. No matter their...
It seems heaven is butter scented. Or at least La Loma Projects is butter scented. And who knew the Pearly Gates were actually in Highland Park? Walking through those gallery doors, you’re hit with a bright light that really does feel like a scene out of a...
Kyle Dunn celebrates the languid vibe of siesta culture through figurative and still-life pieces. The works on view use acrylic to replicate the luminosity of the Old Masters’ oils, giving Vermeer illuminated by the harsh New York summer sun. Siesta (2024)...
Sontag famously wrote about the photograph as a means of securing ownership over an ethereal past. Her words come to mind as one moves through Hailey Heaton’s "Hissyfit," which reckons with the erosion of memory (and therefore history) through dementia. (The...
It’s not uncommon that an art show claims to deconstruct the human form and challenge societal notions of beauty. Derrian Pharr’s innovative “I Am a Bloodstone” makes good on this promise. The otherworldly heroines in Pharr’s works (made with pastels and prisma...
Palm Springs’ annual Modernism Week dominates the city in February, but I caught this quiet, elegant exhibit at the museum’s satellite space. It’s a revelatory history and homage to Frank Lloyd Wright craftsman Manuel Sandoval, a twentieth-century Nicaraguan American...