Artillery Magazine

Byline: Sonia Hauser

  • FRED LONIDIER at Michael Benevento

    FRED LONIDIER
    at Michael Benevento

    When I look at Fred Lonidier’s show “Vacation Village Trade Show,” at Michael Benevento, my mind naturally goes to Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966). Much like Antonioni, whose film is about a photographer who inadvertently captures a murder, Lonidier is interested in the camera, and by extension the photographer, as a knowing entity, both a clarifier and obscurer of reality.

    In “Vacation Village Trade Show,” Lonidier presents a sparse display of film strips paired with text. Scrawled on beige paper that sandwiches the images, the text above reads “What is your relation to these images,” while the one below asks “Are you having an appropriate aesthetic experience?” The trade show in question was an event in 1972 at a public garden in San Diego, where an entrance fee allowed amateur photographers access to models. Lonidier’s photos range from relatively banal and serene scenes of photographers in motion, examining their cameras, and milling around the park, to stark and nefarious shots of hordes of male photographers pointing their cameras at a bikini-clad model who poses and contorts on the grass.

    An ardent leftist, Lonidier got his start documenting anti-Vietnam War protests, and the camera for him has always been a mirror, or perhaps a weapon. Less in the journalistic sense of documentation and more as a means of shielding from and bouncing back the elusive energy that is power relations. His work became trickier (a satisfying knotting) as he added layers of visual remove while maintaining his pointed political analysis. Expanding beyond the photographic image, Lonidier began to use text and performance-based gestures and staged shows in specific locales outside of a gallery context, all the while continuing to document the process. The images and text in his oeuvre, as well as “Vacation Village Trade Show,” depict a meta-photographic narrative. Lonidier is bumping lenses with his subjects.

    In the Benevento office, advertisements for Vivitar lenses line the walls. Lonidier has circled, in red, key phrases on the lenses’ magical powers to seduce. The red circles, paired with newspaper and magazine clippings, suggest a conspiratorial web or a journalist on the trail of evidence (are the two that different?). The tucked-away office is also where Lonidier displays photos from the trade show where he has circled cameras and branded merch from GAF, a camera manufacturer (Lonidier has also made work about GAF’s labor practices). Like in Blow Up, the printed photo becomes evidence for a crime. Instead of merely exposing the oppressive gaze of the camera lens, Lonidier traces a line between it as a commodity sold through the sexualization of women and the preternatural power it possesses to frame, cut off, or linger.

    Fred Lonidier: Valley Village Trade Show
    Michael Benevento
    3712 Beverly Blvd.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90004
    On view through May 17, 2025

  • Michelle Uckotter at Matthew Brown

    Michelle Uckotter
    at Matthew Brown

    There’s something in the Los Angeles air recently that’s been conjuring the ghost of Charles Manson. He has been coming up in conversation frequently (or maybe I am bringing him up). California’s back on the national stage for its hippie-turned-fascist tendencies. Utopian visions morph into murderous cults à la the Zizians. The inherent contradictions of the “Golden State” are getting blown wide open. Another possible culprit for the Manson discourse: Michelle Uckotter’s show “Moviestar” at Matthew Brown.

    At the opening of “Moviestar,” everyone is asked to remove or cover their shoes before stepping on a grimy mustard yellow carpet. I get a whiff of cigarette and briefly wonder if the smell is real as I seem to be within some sort of 1970s set (crowds of people are in fact smoking inside). Sculptures of cardboard boxes with chandeliers haphazardly tumbling out are situated in the room like discarded props—and I catch a glimpse through the crowds of a striking Uckotter painting.

    “Moviestar” at Matthew Brown is just one segment of Uckotter’s takeover (the darling of Frieze week!) of Los Angeles, the others being an identically titled show at Marc Selwyn and a video screening at Now Instant theater in Chinatown. Uckotter has traded in her paintings’ previous recurring attic setting for a middle-class mid-century living room, or perhaps we have simply wandered downstairs. At Matthew Brown, we are in a living room, stepping on its carpet, looking at paintings of a similarly carpeted space. What unfolds in the paintings, adapted from stills from the video, is a night gone off the rails, a crime scene, or maybe just a dark and twisted sexual fantasy. The women of “Moviestar” are in compromising positions, but whether licking a gun, tied up, or doing the tying up, they emanate a manic power.

    I call them paintings because the work does contain oil paint, but Uckotter’s scenes on panel lie somewhere in between drawings and paintings. Pastel is layered atop oil paint, and scratchily articulated figures that from a distance snap together, turn into a controlled chaos of lines and scribbles close up. The oil pastel is waxy, and while matte from straight on, it catches the light when the viewer shifts angles. Paint is treated as if it’s the same substance and emerging from the same tool as the pastel. The boundaries between the two blur, distinguishable only upon careful examination. The sculptural clay-like quality of the pastel produces chalky flecks of byproduct, chunks of which appear at the edges of marks where Uckotter has pressed with great force. Like the white cap of a wave, the excess pastel reveals a turmoil and intensity.

    Michelle Uckotter, The Lady with Gun, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown.

    In The Sot (2025), a woman is splayed out, bisecting the frame, hands and feet tied, a foot pressed against her face. Her shirt has been ripped open to reveal a bare chest. This woman is playing to the camera or perhaps the camera is playing to her. Uckotter’s framing is ripe with a lustful gaze. The violence depicted isn’t quite frightening; it’s evident that this is merely a performance. These girls are “movie stars” acting as victim, killer, musician, or psycho. And I don’t know if I quite buy the verisimilitude. While denied access to any straight-on gaze, we have body language and composition to go off of. The subjects are equipped with an unnatural assuredness.

    Beyond a few scratches, bodies remain intact or are mysteriously slumped over. The implication of body horror gets absorbed into the surrounding scene and furniture. The saturated red carpet furnishing the floor in the paintings bathe the room in a nefarious bloody glow. Glasses, bottles, and decanters, filled with a syrupy red wine, are strewn about. The dingy, green carpet in Dream (2025) is patterned with pink and magenta rose buds that appear like open wounds, with the surrounding carpet turning a bruised yellow and gray. In The Lady with Gun (2025), a lamp, the shade perched at an angle, drips with spots of red. The red resembles scratches on a body, though it’s questionable whether this is blood splatter or the worn-out shade’s stray threads. It’s not the only disturbed lampshade. In The Sot (2025), a fallen shade sits beside its captive companion. Both shade and figure are pink-tinged, their bodies equally exposed. At Marc Selwyn, a lamp gets its own portrait, in which it lets off a thick, snotty, chartreuse glow.

    The Manson murders, the epitomic Los Angeles murder spree of the 20th century, hover over “Moviestar.” What strikes me about the similarities between “Moviestar” and the Manson murders is less visual or temporal—hippies, pig noses, drugs—and more the cinematic collapsing of truth and fiction. The phrase uttered by Hollywood elites in Tate and Polanski’s circles, “live freaky die freaky,” is apt for Uckotter’s girls.

    Michelle Uckotter, Dream, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown.

    I don’t quite know how to situate the relationship between the three parts of the show. If Matthew Brown is a bacchanal of decaying femininity, Marc Selwyn offers the grimy masculine, populated by men with sweat-clumped hair and a single female torso nude. The show at Selwyn is stripped down, having exchanged sculptural ornamentation (only a single chandelier here) for a bare-bones display. The operatic Matthew Brown presentation overshadows it, sidelining it as supporting character.

    Then there’s the video. I almost didn’t want to see it lest it bring about some kind of narrative clarity. There is some amount of inevitable disappointment at getting access to the paintings’ source material. A committed period piece peppered with strategically placed anachronisms, Moviestar (the video) (2025) follows careerist artistic types encountering a psychotic hippie home invasion. The anachronisms in dialogue and dress pleasantly destabilize the precise set dressing. In the painting “The Threesome,” a man, tied up by two women, sports a knuckle tattoo that says “true.” This paradox, the untruth of a historical inaccuracy that says “true,” speaks to the intent of the project at large. It is collapsing time, fictionalizing historical events, and exposing violence’s manifestation of unconscious fantasies. Etched into these paintings is a truth of sorts.

    But it’s only of sorts. What is a director/painter if not a cult leader, promising the truth while delivering an illusion. Pulling the strings, getting others to do your bidding, emotionally molding your underlings. Manic smearings elevated to godly proportions. I’ve joined the Uckotter cult.

    Michelle Uckotter: Moviestar
    Matthew Brown (and parallel exhibition at Marc Selwyn)
    631 N. La Brea Ave.,
    Los Angeles,  CA 90036
    February 13 – March 29, 2025

  • CONVERSION at Cheremoya

    CONVERSION
    at Cheremoya

    The title of the two-person show at Cheremoya, “Conversion,” has a twofold implication: religious and material transformation. Calla Donofrio’s desaturated paintings depict acts of (sometimes sexual) violence that have been censored by parts of the image being blacked out or disrupted by a black cross. Shiny and diligently uniform, the paintings have a materiality to them that meets the sepia-toned flatness in a way that feels unreal, like a digitally rendered dream. In An Eye for an Eye, anonymous hands grip a central figure, covering his mouth and threatening him with a knife. Each limb is indistinguishable and possesses an unnerving level of smoothness, save for the over-articulated veins and cartilage sprouting from the hands. We see the central figure on the verge of getting his eyes gouged out, the sight blocked by a small black cross. 

    At the center of the room, Kento Saisho’s small, blackened sculptures sit on a table covered in sheet metal. Made from steel and enamel and mostly in vessel form, these structures are spiky and menacing despite their fragile, burned appearance. Striking and strange, they ask to be intimately examined. Upon peering into the vessel’s opening, you see that tiny metal spikes dot the insides, like an inverted porcupine. Saisho’s sculptures have undergone a transmutative process. Many of his works include “crucible” in the title, connecting the form to the mode of making and creating a self-reproducing system. Flame also appears in Donofrio’s painting Trinity, where it is siloed in a cinematically cropped box, merely taunting instead of scorching. 

    In contrast to Donofrio’s paintings, Saisho’s sculptures have a real, or simply less literal, sense of movement between danger and frailty, the material and the spiritual. Where Donofrio’s paintings are purgatorial, Saisho’s vessels offer a sorely needed rebirth. The ricochet that occurs between the two artists’ works is initially buoyant—each lends the other a distinct layer—but it peters out eventually. The potential for a mutual material becoming is left unfulfilled. 

    Conversion: Calla Donofrio and Kento Saisho
    Cheremoya
    2700 W. Ave. 34
    Los Angeles, CA 90065
    On view through May 10, 2025

  • ROBERT RUSSELL at Anat Ebgi

    ROBERT RUSSELL
    at Anat Ebgi

    In Robert Russell’s solo show “Stateless Objects,” lush paintings of solitary vessels and kitchenware float like apparitions on the walls of Anat Ebgi. A mix of Judaica—challah platters, kiddush cups, and the like—alongside porcelain teacups produced in pre-Holocaust Germany, these “stateless objects” belonged to people of the North African, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian Jewish diaspora.

    Russell’s paintings are cold; the monotone backgrounds against which the objects sit range from cool grays and blues to blacks. Save for the occasional floral-printed teacup, the objects themselves are sapped of any warmth. Though the work appears highly glossy and dimensional from afar, up close, we are denied the pleasure of sheen or dramatic painterly flourishes. What was thought to be tactile is flattened and mattified.

    The work, particularly those pieces with black backgrounds, gestures toward the Dutch masters’ tulip paintings. Notably, in both black-backgrounded paintings, the frigidly white porcelain ware, adorned with decorative flowers or foliage, comes from Germany and thus contains a looming implication of Holocaust displacement. Russell gives the memento mori of Dutch tulip paintings a new tone. They serve as a reminder of the losses of the Holocaust, but also present an optimism. Unlike the flowers in a floral still life, these decorative flowers do not wilt and die, but are preserved on static porcelain, sustaining an eternal life.

    “Stateless Objects” provides limited conclusions, opting to avoid context, historical or religious. The one instance of shepherding appears in the press release’s claims that the mere act of depiction is “a form of restoration” and “repatriation.” The care taken to paint these objects faithfully is in and of itself a devotional and religious act, a form of honoring ancestral lineage and histories. I don’t quite buy the “restoration” or “repatriation” claims, but I think Russell engages in remembering. And like memory, history is presented through fog (much like the hazy blank backgrounds of these paintings), which can’t offer precision but can offer a freer associative space.

    Robert Russell: Stateless Objects
    Anat Ebgi
    6150 Wilshire Blvd.,
    Los Angeles, CA 90048
    On view through May 10, 2025

  • PAUL THEK at Hannah Hoffman

    PAUL THEK
    at Hannah Hoffman

    I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the gallery’s inaugural exhibition at its new space, an addition to the Melrose Hill pile-on. Upon entering, I am greeted by an intimate room; sisal carpeting and dim light from two orbs create a cocooned, if sparse, domestic space. A single humble Paul Thek painting awaits me.

    “Untitled (rooftops), 1987” is both the name of the show and its sole painting. Less a performatively empty space than a meditation on one painting, the show is understated but direct. I am immediately somatically at ease. Hung nice and low, and perpetually in shadow, this intimately scaled painting depicts the view of the East Village skyline from Thek’s apartment window. Energetically washy and loose, a moody sky in pepto bismol and blue sits atop a golden-hour cityscape, buildings tightening into short flick-of-the-wrist strokes. Despite, or rather in contrast to, the acrylic with which it’s painted, there’s a distinctly old-world European quality to the painting. This East Village could be Paris or Rome.

    Paul Thek was a true flaneur, wandering around Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, consorting with the likes of Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag, picking up odd jobs. Thek was also notably a lapsed Catholic, although perhaps aspirationally devout, in a uniquely tormented gay Catholic way. His work reveals a reverence for and a deep knowledge of spiritual questions in Catholicism, and of its vast well of ephemera, symbology and architecture. In this light, I experience “Untitled (rooftops), 1987” religiously, as if entering a chapel, a devotional effect created by the low lighting and the single painting. There’s a preciousness to the painting because of its isolation; it functions as a sort of shrine. This is not unique to this painting: Thek’s seminal series Technological Reliquaries features beeswax body parts and meat encased in Plexiglas. While he was in Italy, Thek became interested in folk relics and saints’ festivals, which shaped many of his late 1960s sculptures and installations. Thek’s work is by nature eclectic and free, but he always returns to the spiritual.

    As a first show, Hannah Hoffman’s Thek exhibition bravely asserts an understated stillness. I can’t imagine this show will bring in crowds—even if they could find their way past buzzer and iron gates. A show with one painting is gutsy. I can’t blame Hannah Hoffman for showing only this one as the other cityscapes Thek made around the time aren’t, for the most part, very good. He is by no means a great painter. His paintings are hit or miss. Counterintuitively, that is part of the appeal. Thek takes big swings, unconcerned by questions of reception, taste or consistency. Untitled (rooftops) is great precisely because of its casual tastelessness. The colors are delightfully garish. There’s something amateurish or vernacular to both the mode of painting and the subject matter. Unlike much of Thek’s late-career paintings that embrace naivete, going so far as to be hung at the eye level of a child, this painting has a maturity, but one that is painted rather haphazardly and is underhandedly traditional in scope.

    Paul Thek, Untitled (rooftops), 1987. Courtesy of Hannah Hoffman.

    It’s all in the color competition between the yellow and purple. The dynamic between these complementary colors (according to the traditional RYB color model), perfectly split down the middle, creates a tension of taste. The shadows are also in complementary colors of indigo and sharp cheddar-cheese orange. While theoretically scientifically pleasing, Thek’s formulation has a too-muchness to it.

    Untitled (rooftops) was made while Thek was dying of AIDS in his East Village apartment. His subject matter is thus limited to his immediate surroundings. A problem arises around how much we allow context to seep into our reading of the work. I have competing desires about whether or not to romanticize this painting’s timing. The image of Thek on the eve of his deathbed, staring out of his West Village apartment, makes for a sentimental and melodramatic reading of this painting as reflective of the agony and ecstasy of a life’s sunset. I don’t see this impulse as disrespectful, but rather perhaps too easy and teleological. Would this be a good painting under different conditions? Perhaps this is an unaskable question: off-limits.

    In 1981, in response to his sculpture The Tomb, Thek said, “Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.” Does Thek deserve to be buried once more? Beyond the formal appeal of this painting’s tastelessness, its transcendent quality exists in the interplay of presence and absence. There’s a saintly quality—a martyrdom—to Thek, or to any artist who dies of AIDS. The act of conflating the biography with the actual work becomes a guilty pleasure. This type of analysis—fetishization of an artist’s death to AIDS—flatters both artist and reviewer. In this case, Thek’s biography packages the chaos that is his oeuvre. The single painting becomes a stand-in for both his body and a window much like Thek’s own.

    We’ll allow the biographical to the extent that it is also formal: Untitled (rooftops) has a Rear Window quality of escape from confinement by binocular focus on the window’s contents. In direct opposition to the voyeurism of Hitchcock, Thek exhibits a sense of awe and optimism about the world. Instead of the dark underbelly of New York that Hitchcock examines, Thek exposes the light, and instead of human drama, Thek looks at the sublime drama of the skyline. Because death is coming from within, the beyond is allowed to be beautiful.

  • Richard Hawkins at GAGA & Reena Spaulings

    Richard Hawkins
    at GAGA & Reena Spaulings

    In typical Richard Hawkins fashion, his videos “Blood Everywhere” feature unclad male celebrities (Timothée Chalamet and Bill Skarsgård) slowly starting to rot, eyes blackening and blood gushing. Chalamet undergoes a literal “twink death,” while skipping over the actual aging process, immortalized forever in youth. These haunted characters turn into doppelgängers of their former selves. This is mirrored by footage from the film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Chalamet and Skarsgård are in some regard already doppelgängers—Chalamet replicas appear at an unstoppable rate through look-alike contests, while Skarsgård and his siblings are nepo babies (a form of doppelgängerdom).

    Despite a pastiche of uncanny signifiers creating a B-movie campy thrill, the true unease of these videos lies in their form rather than content. Much like a fancam, these videos feel deeply of the gay scopophilic celebrity worship internet. The videos are vertical, probably due to their production on an iPhone or iPad, and thus read as familiar, casual. Hawkins avoids the groan factor of AI. At its best, AI is a poetic collage medium creating the undead.

  • Math Bass at Vielmetter

    Math Bass
    at Vielmetter

    Reminiscent of the visual languages of midcentury graphic design, children’s book illustrations, and corporate branding, Math Bass’s paintings are unnervingly poppy. The language consists of cartoonishly pared-down symbols (alligator, cloud, speech bubble, to name a few) with a grammatical structure, but no fixed definitions, so the viewer is left to give up on interpretation. After getting past the initial hurdle of my visual associations to ubiquitous flat vector graphics, I am drawn in by the paintings’ irregularities. The edges of objects vibrate and what appears straight or smooth is wavy and hand-touched. I am also interested in the visual rhymes. Smoke, speech bubbles, and moons bounce around each other, borrowing, and taking forms, space, and modes of rendering. These paintings reward close looking—abstracted leg-like shapes shine, while the rest of the painting is matte. The audio sculpture opens up an otherwise closed vernacular, creating a phenomenological experience of oneself as shrunken in a tranquil and subsequently frightening forest, an element of fantasy that the paintings alone do not provide.