z-Past Issues
COMICS
Andrea Bowers Hammer Museum
In swirls of citrus yellow and lipstick red, a neon sign just inside the entrance proclaimed: My Body My Choice, Her Body Her Choice. The words of protest—framed by recycled cardboard to echo the font’s curvaceous forms—seemed to flash a prescient warning the day the...
Working Together The Getty Center
“Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoigne Workshop” is a photography exhibition on view at the Getty Museum that chronicles the history of an extraordinary partnership of Black photographers. Founded in 1972 by Louis Draper, the Kamoigne Workshop was a...
Pope.L Vielmetter Los Angeles
This edition of Pope.L’s thinning theatrics presents a series of immaculate white shacks, their size of a two-holer, containing a carpeted bench, where viewers may test the limitations of their endurance. An unsuspecting and luckless couple may sit together in one of...
Melanie Willhide Von Lintel Gallery
In 2011, Melanie Willhide experienced the theft of her computer and back-up drives. Once these items were recovered, she discovered her files had been corrupted. Rather than abort the project she was working on, she embraced the glitches now embedded in her images and...
Adam Parker Smith The Hole LA
In his current exhibition, the artist’s fifth at this gallery, Adam Parker Smith employs classical sculptural forms in a fresh new way, featuring six large sculptures, approximately 35-feet or one cubit diameter. Working in white Carrara marble on a stone pedestal,...
Sergej Jensen Regen Projects
In his current show, “The Adult Light,” Sergej Jensen seems intent upon demonstrating his capacity for conventional, gestural painting (and for that matter, chromatics), as well as the subtle auto-constructions of stitched and collaged fabrics and pigments he is...
Theodore Svenningsen Torrance Art Museum
Since 1985, Theodore Svenningsen has been working sporadically on “Primitive Structures,” an ongoing series of paintings, mostly black and white, that are seductive at surface level, yet purposefully unsettling upon closer inspection. When viewing the 12 works from...
Warren Neidich Museum of Neon Art
The elusive relationship of the brain and the mind has always fascinated without ever quite being resolvable. It is as though we collectively hold the convoluted gray mass that constitutes the brain in suspension with respect to its relationship to the entity whose...
Alternate Realities Norton Simon Museum
“Alternate Realities” at the Norton Simon Museum presents the work of four California painters from the mid-20th century: John Altoon, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and Emerson Woelffer. These artists formed part of the California version of Abstract...
Russell Crotty
Works on paper by Russell Crotty are a mix of travel journals, celestial cartography, landscape sketches, stream of consciousness narration, auric cross-hatched impressionism, and sculptural installation. Their palette is that of desert and the night; their imagery of...
Portia Munson P.P.O.W. Gallery
Artist, feminist, environmentalist—these themes elegantly converge in her exhibition “Bound Angel” which examines, with perverse pleasure, the darker cultural implications of mass production, the fight for gender equality, and the mounting ecological crisis....
From the Editor July-August, 2022; Volume 16, issue 6
Dear Reader, My late husband was a historical biographer with four published books; three of them were written during our marriage. It was an eye-opener to live with someone who writes for a living. For one thing, it seemed like he did a lot of nothing. He would...
Ways of Reading On the Road with Tim Youd's 100 Novels Project
When I first encountered Tim Youd, he was sitting at a metal table outside an art gallery in Chinatown, tap-tap-tapping away on a portable typewriter, just minding his own business. Most of the crowd didn’t pay him much mind either. Earlier that summer, Youd found...
Publication In The Age of Negation, Part I Humility and Humiliation
Perhaps you remember me… No, that wasn’t right. It was senseless to open a letter of entreaty by suggesting that I was forgettable, especially when I knew only too well that the party in question would remember me. Hello Charlie, it’s your old friend here… No, that...
Book Review: A Measured Coolness Building + Becoming by Amir Zaki
Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the...
Book Review: Heartfelt Moments Portrait of an Artist by Hugo Huerta Marin
Portrait of an Artist By Hugo Huerta Marin 424 pages Prestel What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely...
Book Review: Dystopia Redux Brave New World: A Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham
Brave New World: A Graphic Novel Adapted and Illustrated by Fred Fordham 234 pages Harper Collins Original Text © 1932, 1946 by Aldous Huxley Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world that has such people in’t!...
