When The Pit announced a show by the late ceramicist Viola Frey, it piqued my editorial interest. I myself first became aware of Frey when I began taking ceramics courses with other sculptors, who would often speak of her as a totemic influence on their practice and...
There is a moment in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass when the Unicorn says to Alice: "Well, now that we have seen each other…if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.” The private question of whether one sees themselves reflected in the art that is...
One of the performers—if “performer” is the right word—in The Mommy Leaks the Floor, a new work by Asher Hartman staged at New Theater Hollywood (May 16–25), is Pablo, a real-life infant, born earlier this year. Throughout the play, cradled in his mother’s arms on the...
The flattening of high and lowbrow imagery is certainly not new, indeed the painter Jason Fox has been mining this territory since the early 1990s. In his current show at David Kordansky Gallery, “Why Are You Sitting in the Dark?,” Fox refines his enigmatic...
This, remarkably enough, is Carolee Schneemann’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, six years after her passing. Schneemann may be late, but her show isn’t. It may indeed be a case of too little; the sparse hanging (8 wallworks and an installation) barely hints at...
The central question of all ventriloquism is: Who is in charge? We know the puppet is not alive, but a good ventriloquist can move the puppet’s body so naturally and throw their voice so convincingly as to make the audience doubt their first instinct. However, the...
Christine Sun Kim’s work leaves little room for misinterpretation. Clarity, for Kim, is a reality of survival. “American Sigh Language,” the artist’s recent solo exhibition at François Ghebaly, makes it clear: for Kim and other Deaf individuals, intelligibility serves...
Impressionism, with its kitsch trinkets and gift shop ephemera, lives in a realm of surfaces. I’m not alone in thinking this—most of us know Monet through wall calendars, not the Musée. The prevalence of these reproductions make the originals, when seen, difficult to...
On the top floor of The Gaylord Apartments, a spare selection of seven new paintings by Magnus Peterson Horner tingles the optic and haptic senses, even when they’re barely paintings, even when they’re barely there at all. Horner paints people as if sensed through...