Articles
When I was just out of school and began my first regular daily commute of the Southern California freeways, I remember stealing glances to either side of the road. I caught brief glimpses of the fleeting vistas, noting how with every quarter mile, my vantage point...
The subject matter of several of my recent paintings derives from screwed-up iPhone panorama photographs. For centuries art linear perspective has ordered the space of paintings, determining how we look at an image. In panorama mode my iPhone-5 liberates the mind from...
When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an...
If one thinks of the essence of Modernism as being about direct experience rather than recreated experience, the artist who has really continued to expand possibilities is James Turrell. A striking aspect of his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County...
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he...
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century....
As I meandered through Marisol Rendón’s installation, “So, Dragons Do Exist?” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery last summer (this was before I had even glanced at the contrarian, almost self-negating parenthetical subtitle, “Considerations of the Unavoidable...
So like a few of you (not many more—which was wise—you really didn’t miss anything), I went down to the Grand Central Market at 3rd and Broadway downtown to hear Dave Hickey plug his latest, Pirates and Farmers, subtitled “Essays on Taste,” under MOCA’s auspices—which...
Well the axe has fallen once again on the magnificent American Folk Art building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects. The structure is considered to be an architectural gem having won numerous awards including an American Institute of Architects...
James Welling’s “Flowers” (2004–11) suggest backlit tree branches in bloom against a blank sky. A pure white light appears to pass through these elegant arrangements of shadowy stem, leaf and petal shapes, and in the process is refracted, as if by a prism, into...
Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Through photographic works, videos, installations, performance and writing, she has become known for critically engaging the tropes of art history and modernism, with a particular eye toward resurfacing...
Painted on a small particle board, screwed to a brick wall, above and behind which Berlin’s U-Bahn (here elevated) rumbles to and from its terminus, a figure of indeterminate sex holds a power drill to its head, the bit twirling out the opposite temple in a splash of...
Summer of 1965. The artist’s mother, Resia (also an artist), stands between her two daughters wearing a sleeveless shift with a bold daisy pattern. The horizon line of the Atlantic connects the heads of the three women, who pose, smiling and relaxed, in front of a...
There’s a scene early on in the film The Night of the Iguana (1964) where Richard Burton, playing a jaded ex-priest-turned-tour-guide in Mexico, asks the bus driver to stop on a bridge. The passengers—a group of American matrons—are puzzled. “What are we stopping...
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” at New York’s New Museum is the artist’s first major exhibition in the U.S. in over 25 years. A legendary provocateur, Burden has challenged traditional concepts of art through his galvanizing performance pieces and later...
As the Los Angeles Aqueduct celebrates its 100-year anniversary this month, many art institutions and organizations are showing support in their exhibition programming. Grand Central Art Center (GCAC) in downtown Santa Ana erected a monumental installation in...
Lately, I've noticed mysterious islands along California freeways. The half circumferences of curving transition ramps from one freeway to the next form their perimeters. Many contain terraces of plants native to this arid region, large rock formations, and gravel...
In the middle of the sitting there was a knock at the door. A beautiful woman entered the studio. She did not say a word but went straight to the bathroom. The Grand Painter followed the young woman. He would be back in a few minutes. Then, there was the sound of...
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