Julia Weist’s “Private Eye” is like a neo-noir where the investigator investigates themselves and invites us along. The work traffics in suburban paranoia: messages on vanity plates and yard signs asking us to believe. Today, the taboo of surveillance has faded, and...
Through images of Satan and Darth Vader, and references to the politics of the 1970s, Matthew Brannon will unexpectedly break your heart. His show at David Kordansky Gallery mirrors the sensation of biting the pit at the center of a peach: a bitter core beyond what...
Brushing my hair as a girl, I remember my hand growing heavier with each stroke as I entertained the wicked urge to unearth every girlish tendril in one fell swoop. The manic, menacing quality of Yoo's strange architecture reminds me of these early manifestations of...
Some shows suck, and some shows barely avoid sucking. Austin Lee seems capable of great things while failing by a long mile. The paintings depict brightly hued, crying, Gumby-like cartoon figures. They are clearly intended to be emotive but fail to elicit emotion; the...
Mojotech is Betye Saar's abbreviation for the "magic of technology" and the title of her large-scale installation from 1987 on view at Roberts Projects. Standing at the horizon of Saar's trailing altarpiece, I'm reminded of the language of trees and how they...
This show feels like something that I would have walked in and out of quickly about twenty years ago. The paintings—hazy process-based geometric abstractions—artfully avoid the conventions of painting without actually saying anything. The pink prints look like...
Juicy larvae play amongst feral grasses. Slugs laze on velvety pillows of tufted lichen. Cornucopias of ripened fruits germinate in tendrilled verdant habitats. I can’t help but delight in Piper Bangs’ paintings, resonating with my love of dirt and belief in the magic...
Dear Reader, I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: This, after 18 years, is my last editor’s letter. What an incredible journey it has been. Here’s the good news: Artillery will still carry on! More on that later. I started this magazine with...
The artist-of-color-led arts organization and collective in Inglewood, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), is continuing a legacy of Black-led art spaces in South Los Angeles. Co-founded by multi-hyphenate artists Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz and noé olivas, it...
The Los Angeles River is a permanent topic of fascination for artists in this city. In order to establish the city, bureaucrats and businessmen fought to colonize this humble waterway. They tore it away from Indigenous people, encased it in concrete, then rerouted it...
As a kid, Lucia Monge often gazed at birds through her grandfather’s binoculars, taking in the wonders of nature at an early age. Sometimes the birds looked so extraordinary and colorful that she pondered: Could they be real? Or were they something from a fairy tale?...
A matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris. But she has always given special attention to the music of the...
Centuries before Leonardo da Vinci lived and worked in Italy, a Persian astronomer, physician, geographer and writer was conducting research into the nature of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Zakariya al-Qazwini (d. 1283) wrote and illustrated The Wonders of...
The tedium of a particular self-consciousness ascribed to Generation Z was on full display in The Death of a Star, a performance and self-proclaimed “reality show,” directed by Jasmine Johnson, which had a sold-out four-day run at New Theater Hollywood (NTH) this...
Known for her life-sized stained-glass sculptures of intertwined lawn chairs, Kelly Wall uses sculpture and time to explore perspective in different ways, turning familiar objects into something uncanny and almost disorienting. In her recent outdoor show at Various...
The meeting of Covey Gong and Monique Mouton at Bel Ami is like watching the contact of two elements transforming one another. While their respective works are satisfying on their own, together, Mouton’s mixed media on paper and Gong’s tactful sculptures, spotlights a...
If—in the next couple days—you are keen on communing privately with melancholic beauty (or “tough joy,” as the artist might have it), visit Christopher Culver’s latest suite of charcoal and pastel drawings on paper at Michael Benevento Gallery. Never mind the...
Somewhere between warfare and entertainment, sports as a spectacle is deeply rooted in the ways modern societies organize, present and consume events and expectations. Pacing through "SECONDARY: commencement," there is a sense of nostalgia that belongs to a media...
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