This show is all smoke and mirrors, but in a good way. Prima Sakuntabhai plays with transparencies, reflections, and shadows to recapture their great-grand-uncle’s favorite haunts. The elder relative is Pridi Banomyong, a Thai immigrant who adopted revolutionary ideas...
The last time Jamison Edgar curated Matthew McGaughey was at Honor Fraser, where I had VR sex with the Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. I wore goggles with Chip’s POV and had an unforgettable sexual experience with a creepily uncanny version of Joanna through...
The history of photographers capturing the West is as storied as the mythos of manifest destiny. Elise Rasmussen steps knowingly into this lineage and subtly pushes the contemporary momentum of turning towards the sculptural, beginning to break photography’s physical...
While the connection between the works in Actions is as ambiguous as its title, the exhibition braids together three artists worth examining individually. Laurel Nakadate’s installation serves as a wall-sized shrine for bridging time and absence, with altered...
The song Kukukaya, which partly inspired Beatrice Arraes’s solo exhibition, speaks of a game meant for four, but “Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” feels purposely solitary, quiet—a slow reckoning with time, where winning was never the point. Her paintings, saturated in deep...
Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a...
Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional...
Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums...
Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right...
“Well, there were many creatures in the cave. And some of them had their problems, but all of them, they were my friends....You don’t meet friends like this every day, so I’m staying in the cave.” —Wounded Lion, “Creatures in the Cave” I first met Brad Eberhard...
As an urban kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I adored the American Museum of Natural History. The low-lit museum seemed like a palace of wonders to me. In its inner chambers the glowing dioramas of exotic animals in their native habitats appeared like...
Linda Vallejo’s career-spanning exhibition at parrasch heijen is a homecoming of sorts. The gallery is ensconced in the center of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights district, where she was born, and a stone’s throw from the iconic Sears Building — an area where Vallejo spent...
Houshiary's mesmeric abstract canvases depose our human perception of scope and scale, engaging the macro and microscopic; they connect a single breath to the breadth of the sea, carbon's molecular structure to the structural integrity of a star. The intricate pencil...
With scraped knees, tangled sheets, and yesterday’s discarded clothes strewn across the floor, Larry Madrigal’s new evocative paintings at Nicodim showcase the artist at his strongest. In moments where his fluid and textured style strives to move beyond the sexual...
I never feel hotter or more detached (indeed, more American) than in a car, windows down in the August heat. It’s an exercise in movement, longing on an unremarkable plane of asphalt. Each lane is a pulse, where everyone seeks a false salvation. Jane Dickson’s new...
Looking at Darya Diamond’s limp latex sculpture, In Every Dream Home a Heartache (2024), I think of bruised skin, frail shoulders: a tired body collapsed on the floor — phallic, deflated, stamped with marks like a trampled body bag. Throughout “Sugartown,” intimacy...
Not all pop art is created equal. Gabriel Madan’s literally pops off the wall: As in, a colorful macaw plushie is affixed to one of his paintings, a heart-shaped tag reading “I’m a puppet.” I want to stick my hand up its rear and make it talk. Vulgar, yes, but...
Melrose Botanical Garden is not actually a garden, but it might as well be. Tucked between thrift shops and piercing parlors on the avenue, the narrow gallery feels like an oasis. “a field once more,” a group show drawing upon Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of...