z-Past Issues
COMICS
Arthur Simms KARMA
Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to...
Mai-Thu Perret David Kordansky Gallery
There’s a special kind of push-pull pleasure to an exhibition that derives from conceptual interests, but is realized through material experimentation and finesse. Such was the case with Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s appealing new exhibition “Mother Sky.” My first...
Michael Hilsman Various Small Fires
Still life meets prop table in a series of surreal symbolist tableaux, as painter Michael Hilsman inventories his dreams and sets the scene for unguessable actions to come, or inscrutable actions just past. In capacious landscape-based works, Hilsman offers horizon...
Eric Nash KP Projects
Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world. While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with...
Zimmer Frei Wonzimer
Los Angeles is a city of immigrants: over 200 different languages are spoken here. Every immigrant comes to this country with an already established identity. Each has to jettison their old identities and craft new, LA-based ones. Some do so by making art. One way to...
Global Asias USC Pacific Asia Museum
At the entrance to “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnizter and His Family Foundation” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, stand two giant ceramic heads. One features a black-and-white striped neck, red crown and...
Yolanda González Museum of Latin American Art
The quality and diversity of the work of Yolanda González—a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramic sculptor—makes a solo installation of her work long overdue. This current exhibition, with nearly a 100 pieces from the career of the 59-year-old LA–based Chicana...
From the Editor March-April 2023; Volume 17, issue 4
Dear Reader, As long as there are people, there will be portraits. Face it—no pun intended—people are attracted to people. We like to look at ourselves; we like to people-watch; we gaze into our lover’s eyes. Our faces are unique and fascinating: they are who we are....
CODE ORANGE March-April 2023 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner, Tim Sassoon, and our finalists, Sasson's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the March/April 2023 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for...
All That Glitters The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta
One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of myself at the age of five or so, composed by my father. Along with my siblings’ pictures and beyond the sentimentality, these portraits have become distinctive family emblems and historical markers, wrought at a time of...
Uncut and From the Heart Henry Taylor Ditches One Tool for Another
Amid an ocean of color-mad paintings in Henry Taylor’s three-decade retrospective at MOCA is a colorless painted object: a black typewriter case overlaid with text of thick white coarse brushstrokes: I TRY To be Write aint TRY’n to be WHITE Simple rhythmic text...
Brilliant Veils Amir H. Fallah Creates Vibrant Artworks That Question Cultural Boundaries
Entering a room of portraits by Amir H. Fallah, the first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t see their faces: the figures are cloaked. In one, the subject sits draped in a richly patterned blue-and-purple shawl, cradling what looks like a gilded African head in its...
On the Nose Helen Chung Talks Anatomy
The afternoon we agree to meet for a quick Q&A over drinks, Helen Chung arrives at the restaurant slightly late (though not much later than me)—fittingly enough, from a commissioned portrait sitting. Engaged by the process, conversation and the resulting portrait...
Frames Within Frames The Photography of Grant Mudford
Grant Mudford is a photographer with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1944, he studied architecture at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Since the 1980s he has functioned as a...
Spiritual Healing Luis Sahagun's Cathartic Family Portraits
As a practitioner of curanderismo, an ancient Meso-American system of folk medicine, Mexican-born, Chicago-based Luis Sahagun regularly performs limpias, traditional cleansing or “soul-retrieving” rituals. As an artist, he has applied this practice to the creation of...
Africa Around Town “Adornment | Artifact,” Curated by jill moniz
The Getty Villa’s exhibition, “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” offers a stunning display of jewelry and items of personal adornment excavated from burials of royalty and aristocratic individuals from a region that spans what is today southern Egypt and northern...
DECODER That Thing-centric Love
I hope you’ve had this problem: You like some art somewhere but you hate the social machinery around it. You know something is good, but the discourse, the nepotism, the snobs, the takes, the informative six-page features, the art history teachers, the leachers, the...
