Articles
Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds has made a practice of illuminating Native-American life against dominant culture erasure. In his recent LA-area exhibitions at Garis & Hahn and the Pitzer College Galleries, he focused on activism and history. You tell...
In the dystopian future of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Megasaki City is gripped with the panic over the contagious dog flu. The nefarious Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) exiles all dogs to Trash Island, a place piled with the detritus...
“We’ll play to 700?” John Tottenham asks, but really it’s more of a demand than a question. It’s my second week of trying to combine an interview with him on his drawings of the Manson girls (as he insists, “You don’t have to focus on that series”) and our weekly game...
Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory—where it stays—it’s transmitted by your hands....
Don Bachardy found his lifelong metier at the movies—he was drawn to the larger-than-life faces on the silver screen, especially those of actresses, and began drawing those faces, copying their likenesses from popular movie magazines. Later, when he moved in with...
If one were to Google Canadian artist Eli Langer, most of the results would reference a convoluted legal case against his first show (held at Toronto’s Mercer Union Gallery in 1993) that proclaimed the subject matter not simply to be pornography but child...
Laurie Lipton’s supremely detailed large-scale graphite drawings document the haphazardness of modern life as well as the darker more sinister underbelly of consumerist culture. Looking at these images, one can’t help but be reminded of how the proletariat is...
Gerardo Monterrubio marks his ceramic sculptures with his memories and experiences as an Oaxacan immigrant. Free-flowing drawings upon his pottery relate engrossing autobiographical narratives interlaced with cultural commentary. His work recalls a vast historic...
The image on the wall delivers a message of warmth and messiness. Amanda Charchian calls it 7 Types of Love, Agape, and it presents a disembodied pair of female lips floating against a soft sea of pink, a cloud of blood seeping from the red lipstick. As a photograph,...
2017 has been a brilliant year for the movies. And they were good in so many ways, let me try to count them: They offered novel subject matter, woman falls in love with fish-man in The Shape of Water; a despised ex-athlete gets her cinema redemption in I, Tonya; a...
All weekend, the Westside was ablaze with art. StART Up Fair, located at The Kinney (no relation to our editor!) Hotel in Venice, featured over 67 artists in a series of terrific and eclectic motel-room installations. At Friday’s opening, performance artist Guta Galli...
Traversing pre-history, Mesoamerican cosmology, and sexually free interplanetary-futurism, The Formaldehyde Trip, a live performance with video and songs, creates alternate realms for the overlooked casualties of colonialism. Dedicated to the memory of Bety Cariño, it...
The rendezvous point was a small coffee shop and bar. Along with about 30 other recruits (participants) I was given a lanyard containing a welcome letter and a schematic of Colony 933. I almost missed a small tightly-rolled scroll that outlined a brief modern history...
Last Tuesday night (January 16, 2018), a day before he died, Ed Moses had an art opening of his latest work at a gallery space next to the new Hal’s restaurant in Playa Vista (where you can see a remarkable installation of his painted sliding door screens). Ed wasn’t...
In ancient days of strife and warfare, a death squad of bird-women used the strategies of sound and seduction to destroy their enemies. Homer gave the Sirens a starring role in book 12 of The Odyssey, where they attempt to divert Odysseus from his returning home to...
Sometimes art looks like design, and sometimes design looks like art. It’s hard to know the difference these days as both artists and designers seemingly want to merge one with the other. Either way, the 5th edition of FOG Design + Art was the perfect hybridization....
On Thursday evening, when performance artist Astrid Hadad began telling a glitter-bombed, sombrero-wearing rubber chicken that everything would be okay, I remembered that there was still good in the world. The day’s news had been completely crappy, and I had ridden...
The experience of art in Los Angeles is always both very specific to its localized encounter and acutely conscious of its engagement with the world. As political forces outside California moved to further isolate us in 2017, that dialogue and artists’ sensitivity to...
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