Artillery Magazine

Category: z-Past Issues

  • James Welling’s “Choreograph” Review of the Photographer's Recent Book

    James Welling’s “Choreograph”
    Review of the Photographer’s Recent Book

    I got to know James Welling over a decade ago when he invited me to teach a graduate seminar in the history of photography at UCLA’s Broad School of the Arts, where he was the director of the photography program. His own photography was a mystery to me then, as it still is today. I don’t mean that I was confused by his work or had reservations about it. On the contrary, I was dazzled by the intelligence and originality of the art he was producing in a medium so often undermined by its commercial and reportorial uses. A new book of his just published this year, titled Choreograph, is devoted to a single project done over the last six years.

    The image you see here is from this latest project of Welling’s. The image is at first, characteristically, confusing. Welling doesn’t condescend to the viewer by making images easily understood. The composition is blocked out in a woosh of colors—soaring buildings that are orange, a garden in the bleak white of winter. In center stage, two dancers dissolve into a motion blur performing a Merce Cunningham “Event” Welling photographed in 2015. Welling’s goal is not to confuse us but to hold our attention in this medium we are used to understanding at a glimpse.

    The series is titled “Choreograph” because dancers are the anchor of the imagery, the human subject to which our eye goes instinctively in any photograph. The placement of the dancers at the center of this image compels us to start there and work our way out to the edges. One way the visual arts can help viewers find their way in compound, complex compositions like this is through a kind of formalism, a reciprocity of shapes. In this image, the female dancer’s right leg looping up from her torso mimics the abstract iron shapes in green looping down toward her partner. Those iron curves anchor the image in the Chicago Loop neighborhood where this Calder sculpture is found.

    Welling begins each composition with a selection of photographs he has made and plans to combine into a new composition. Once he has decided on the composition, he reduces the parts to black and white and then begins adding color to various areas, isolating each with a monochrome channel in Photoshop. Compelled by the abrupt disconnections between subjects and backgrounds as well as one pure color and another, Welling’s compositions lodge in our minds the way the vivid imagery of a dream does. They puzzle us and compel close looking much as a dream compels memories when we awake.

  • Poems "Imagine That" by klipschutz; "The Poet’s Garden" by John Tottenham

    Poems
    “Imagine That” by klipschutz; “The Poet’s Garden” by John Tottenham

    Imagine That

                     for YC

    By klipschutz

    Rachel Cusk flies first class

    and drives a hybrid.

    Waiting at the bus stop

    I raise my hand.

    If I change the names

    is it fiction?

    What if I keep the names

    and make up lies?

    Or is that like saying it’s a poem

    if it rhymes?

    Thomas Hardy’s pen made hay

    from country towns.

    The Poet’s Garden

    By John Tottenham

    Turning the empty pages

    of all the un-chronicled phases:

    the mythic lift, the staggered decline,

    indelibly etherized in real time.

    All the plans that were never hatched,

    preserved in ink-stained chicken scratch.

    The finer points that will never

    be unscrambled or unfurled,

    circling the drain

    of a chronological netherworld.

    My legacy a burden, not a gift,

    through which no one wants to sift.

  • ASK BABS Turn A Blind Eye

    ASK BABS
    Turn A Blind Eye

    Dear Babs, I’m a young artist a few years out of grad school. Recently my dad’s close friend asked if he could buy a painting I made about America’s racist prison industrial complex. In the spirit of transparency, he told me he planned to give it as a gift to an old business partner. The problem is, the dude in question was a racist governor who helped engineer the horrors my work is about. I really need the money, but I don’t want my art to go to a person I detest. What should I do?

    —Skeptical Sell Out

    Dear Skeptical, Think of this as a chance to test the power of your art and the strength of your convictions.

    You could sell the piece and bet on its transformative power. Who knows, maybe one day the new owner might look at it, see the error of his ways, and become a prison abolitionist. But that’s pretty unlikely.

    You could pull a Hans Haacke and create a contract to accompany the work in perpetuity. Put anything you want in it: make the owner donate future sales from the work to The Innocence Project, require an explanatory text accompany its installation, insist it be loaned to any non-profit art space that wants to show it. While your dad’s gubernatorial chum probably won’t honor the contract, at least its existence might deflect efforts to obscure the message behind your work.

    If it makes you feel any better (and it probably won’t), many well-respected and successful artists who make work with clear progressive agendas find their art owned by truly reprehensible people. Rich assholes want the same art as their rich friends, even when it contradicts their vomitous politics—and they’ll do anything to get it. But in this instance, you get to choose, and that’s quite an opportunity to stand by your convictions.

    If, in the end, you decide not to sell, at least you’ll have a good story for years to come. You stood firm when times were tough and did what you thought was right for you and your work. And that, in the end, is priceless.

  • COMICS Art-Musement Park

    COMICS
    Art-Musement Park

  • Made in L.A. 2020: a version

    Made in L.A. 2020: a version

    Curatorial work began on the fifth biennial in the “Made in L.A.” series long before March 2020, and it might be March 2021 before audiences can see it in its entirety. Yet so emphatic is the exhibition’s insistence on the physical embodiment of ideas, the political context of cultural encounters, and the existential imperative for humanistic, history-minded narratives of character and emotion, that it seems the ultimate tailor-made survey for this moment. Ironically, it is also emblematic of the times in that most of it remains inaccessible to the public except for a couple of outdoor and offsite installations, performative works reconfigured for the internet, and a big gorgeous book. Across all these platforms, plans and promises, and within the oeuvre of every artist included, across myriad mediums and styles, the overarching dynamic of a version is, essentially and satisfyingly, storytelling.

    The exhibition is installed at both the Hammer and the Huntington, and all 30 artists are included at both locations, so there are two “versions” of the show (get it?). And in fact, the unique architectural settings and experiential contexts of the two venues each lends the works on display their own distinct versions of messaging against divergent backdrops—one a vast sweeping white-box hall hosting ambitious art on a commensurate scale; the other an intimate and classical paradigm of genteel Euro-Western style and art historical paradox. 

    There is a lot to love at both locations. At the Hammer, you feel the giddiness of big, juicy, edificial sculpture in works like Aria Dean’s mirrored video-art cage and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s carpeted soundbooth on the bridge. Nicola L.’s house-sized purple faux fur multi-user suit sculpture is no longer interactive, which is a shame as it screams to be touched. Patrick Jackson’s “Proposal for a Monument” (2020) combines the scene-stealing landscape incursion of dramatic metal with a sly lack of nomenclature and a hidden private place. It’s installed with a lamppost linking it to MacArthur Park—an offsite location where a suite of billboards by Larry Johnson are currently installed. Original paintings by Jackson are installed at the Hammer in proximity to the sculpture—as are enriched, folk-infused urban genre paintings set in similar locations by Jill Mulleady. It all serves to keep the world outside top of mind, even as the offsite installations keep the museum present in the public imagination.

    Patrick Jackson. House of Double, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.

    Patrick Jackson also has one of the most affecting sculptural installations at the Huntington, as his pair of lifelike, life-sized sculptures of a young bearded man lying on the floor in a quiet room, juxtaposed with an 1859 sculpture by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer from their permanent collection. Its stone depiction of a paradigm of white, female, mythological beauty surveys the plight of the prone and mysterious modern figures at her feet with placid disinterest, and yet her neglect, as an emblem of Western culture, is not benign. Actually, this note of instructive dissonance is struck repeatedly in the Huntington version, and that dynamic of counterpoint offers the most outright enjoyable aspect of the biennial.

    At the Huntington, Umar Rashid aka Frohawk Two Feathers, has a pair of explicitly anti-colonialist tableaux, whose pre-Raphaelite swagger combines social critique with fantasy and humor. Sculptor Ann Greene Kelly shows a confection made of the elements of classical furniture remade into something witty, antagonistic to functionality, and subversive of polite historical antechambers. These works are installed in the entrance, against an ornate stained glass panel and craftsman architectural detail symbolizing the very past the contemporary voices are picking on. When Ser Serpas sets up an array of reclaimed random materials from an ordinary neighborhood and lays them out in a clean, luxurious glass room at the Hammer, it feels like sociology and surrealism; when she does the same embedded in a dusty flowerbed at the Huntington, it feels post-apocalyptic. A piece that’s the same in both places (a period micro-story video by Mathias Poledna) challenges its own temporal gaps as well as mirroring between the venues and offering a perfect starting point for inevitable, encouraging comparisons. 

    At times quite personal, frequently socio-political, especially on issues of gender, race, identity and commerce, and always with profound empathy, without exception, each work carries the gravitas and courage to dismantle cultural crosscurrents, unearth and reclaim heritages, throw off the yoke of fetishized colonialism, and offer correctives. These artists are so dedicated to their technique and craft that their ideas are not only articulated but embodied in beautiful, majestic, unsettling, tangible objects and salient, resonant character studies and narrative arcs. It’s a snapshot survey, but it tells a singular story—e pluribus unum, out of many, one LA.

    Umar Rashid, The Waters of Flint. Source of All Things, 2018. Collection of Marlene Picard.

    It was organized by independent curators Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler, with the Hammer’s Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, assistant curator of performance. And performance is centrally represented across the biennial. Except that, yeah… all of that has been reconfigured for online, well, “versions.” Harmony Holiday is turning a James Baldwin video excavation into a teleplay. Niloufar Emamifar is writing a site-specific theater piece. Ligia Lewis’ “deader than dead”(2020) is a 20-minute, four-person dance, spoken word and music video work using multi-camera editing and set pieces which are installed in the Hammer galleries like artifacts. Kahlil Joseph BLKNWS (2019) video and sculpture works are installed in six (so far) Black-owned businesses around town. The artist Justen LeRoy’s SON (2020) podcast will soon start releasing episodes, combining interviews, insights and musical interludes. 

    While it’s these dramatic, cross-platform works that get the lion’s share of early attention, there is so much soul in the straightforwardly brilliant, portrait-based paintings by Mario Ayala, Fulton Leroy Washington aka MR. WASH, Monica Majoli, Brandon D. Landers, Alexandra Noel and especially Katja Seib, whose witchy, sketchy, operatic magic realism is just the thing. Eccentric tapestries by Christina Forrer; mural and film-based actions by Hedi El Kholti; diverse photography by Buck Ellison, Reynaldo Rivera and Diane Severin Nguyen; reflective, headline-grabbing collage by Kandis Williams, and heavy-metaphor video by Jeffrey Stuker, all make the case for a proliferation of talented, hard-working, original-minded artists working now, here in Los Angeles. 

    Sabrina Tarasoff’s labyrinthian “Beyond Baroque” (2020) installation at the Huntington is the Gesamtkunstwerk crescendo of the whole project. It’s based on a legendary, storied group of pioneering west side poets and engineered into a quarter-mile, claustrophobic cabinet of curiosity, charm, deviance, discomfort, dildos, humor and abject horror. Everything you think you know about LA, it seems to suggest, is a psychotic fiction and at the same time, deeply true and lovely. 

  • Reconnoiter: Kevin Duffy

    Reconnoiter: Kevin Duffy

    Kevin Duffy is an LA-based actor, filmmaker and writer, who recently performed in Refracted Theater Company’s Homeless Garden—a re­imagination of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard set in present-day where climate change and politics coincide. The play was performed live in New York City using a technique called panto-theater, where audience members listen to pre-recorded audio of the play on headphones while watching actors perform live at a distance.

    ARTILLERY: Can you describe the showings of the play and how the live performances came together?

    KEVIN DUFFY: It was socially distanced, COVID-compliant. We performed in two public parks in New York City. The audio of the play was pre-recorded, so it was like a soundtrack in a movie. The audience was about 50 people, which was limited by the number of headsets we had, and the audience and actors were listening to the same audio in the headsets. In Prospect Park, which was the first performance—we were among the trees—which was great for the play, and the next week we did it in Central Park. The sets were the environment.

    Photo by Kayla Williamson.

    What were the logistics of rehearsal for the actors regarding COVID?

    We had two days of rehearsal in person and we rehearsed by Zoom individually with the director beforehand.

    How did panto-theater differ from other theater experiences you’ve had as an actor?

    We wanted it to be a theater experience but it did feel a lot like dance because there was so much focus on the movement. I guess I had an advantage because I’ve done dance and I’m really comfortable with movement. It was like performing to a musical score except the score was actual audio to the play.

    Did you find the movements were more exaggerated in regards to dance or typical theater?

    That was part of the process; the director didn’t want them to be too dance-y but we are in this very strange situation in which we are wearing masks, have headphones on, and have to communicate physically with people who are at a distance outdoors. So you do have to adjust the scale of the performance to the environment.

    Photo by Kayla Williamson.

    How do you see the future of theater progressing in light of COVID?

    You hear about productions that are ramping up and different attempts to do theater in safer environments. Hopefully the theater-makers can acknowledge this is what’s going on and make that work for the piece. So instead of pretending that everything’s normal and I’m just standing behind plexiglass, wearing a mask, if that’s the case then it becomes part of the set or part of the design. So in this case the way the director incorporated that is by having us outdoors, by having us in a natural environment, which really worked with this particular play.

    Recordings of the performance of Homeless Garden are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Website: https://www.refractedco.com/homeless-garden.

  • Kader Attia Regen Projects

    Kader Attia
    Regen Projects

    Kader Attia’s debut with Regen Projects  —a selection of previously exhibited and new works—continues the French-Algerian artist’s critique of modernity as embodied by Western capitalism and the mechanisms and ideologies of colonialism.

    Attia has frequently examined the particularities of French-Algerian colonial history, while implicating global colonial structures writ large. “The Valley of Dreams” takes its point of departure from these conceptual grounds, with a series of three works installed in close proximity, in what is the most coherently developed portion of the show.Rochers Carrés (2007/2020), presented here as a lightbox, depicts two Algerian youths looking north across the Mediterranean from an Algerian breakwater. This is juxtaposed with the variously sized refrigerators of Untitled Skyline (2007), covered in a mosaic of mirrored tiles, evoking the image of a gleaming modern city. Like the glittering nocturnal skyline of New York City, it reflects the dreams projected upon it.The Dead Sea (2016), an installation of clothing that spreads from a corner of the gallery, conveys the perils of crossing the Mediterranean in search of refuge and opportunity. Together, these three implicate the dream of migration, wherein the sea becomes a graveyard, and the remaining traces—the very clothing off migrants’ backs—collect on the shores of Europe.

    Kader Attia, The Dead Sea (detail), 2015. Courtesy Regen Projects.

    Attia asserts, without much elaboration through the objects presented here, an “analogy between California, New Mexico, Texas, and North Africa,” suggesting similarities of climate and patterns of migration and its attendant dangers, from which we may draw inferences regarding the cross-border disparities and analogies between sites of colonial and neocolonial relations.

    The remaining works in “The Valley of Dreams” (all dated 2020) reprise various aspects of Attia’s critique of colonialism and interest in the notion of repair. A series of Berber ceramic vessels, once shattered, now repaired with a brilliant blue epoxy—the color selected for its association with the Tuareg people—emphasizes Attia’s interest in the Japanese tradition of kintsugi—the repair of pottery while preserving the visible scar. This same blue pigment appears along the folds of kraft paper—discarded powdered milk packages delivered to North Africa by NGOs—that has been crumpled and spread out to resemble what might be a topographical map.

    Yet, Attia does not adequately address the context of Southern California or the neocolonial structures of the US The strength of postcolonial analysis derives from elaboration of the particularities of site, which Attia has done elsewhere—and here, in relation to North Africa and Europe. Though parallels from varied examples may be drawn—and the similarities between migration to Europe and the US are well observed—the lack of research on the specifics of this site makes this exhibition feel like an import.

  • Rodney McMillian  Vielmetter Los Angeles

    Rodney McMillian 
    Vielmetter Los Angeles

    This exhibition is simply horrible:  a catalog of horrors, a parade of barbarism made all the more wretched because we have become inured to atrocity, our attention spans irredeemably vaporous. It is both commonplace and theatrical, a fleetingly addictive entertainment. For this particular presentation, Rodney McMillian is our impresario of the Grand Guignol: he presents for all-comers. Most viewers will consider themselves informed after viewing such provocative work and refer to it conversationally, while others might nod. For a very small minority of patrons, however, the horror remains and resonates long after leaving the exhibition because, for them, it is a wound that never heals.

    McMillian has traditionally considered race in his varied works—abstraction, installation, video, sculpture—and those works are incisive and dolefully contemplative, but this exhibition, symptomatically titled “Body Politic,” is rawly unmediated. It seethes. There is revulsion, there is contempt, there is distrust, and nothing is held back.

    Many of the paintings include text—shakily lettered and slashed with color—and nonchalantly recite atrocities committed upon Black bodies. These are works of anger and disgust but it is the works done in all black—mute and imperious Rorschachs— recite that are most arresting and lastingly communicative.

    Rodney McMillian, Mississippi Appendectomy,”2020. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo by Brica Wilcox.

    Cell I (2017–20) a crushed smoky butterfly, and Cell II (2018–20) a broken crystal, are dense matte black schematics that swallow light. They suggest both architectural plans of secret and forbidden locations; sites where inhuman actions are performed, and human biological cells, polygons of our very humanness laid out and schematized. It is in these suggestive fragments, both as visibly microscopic and structurally fabricated, that McMillian excavates the cornerstone of American history with an appetite for the ruination of Black bodies, minds, economies and futures.

    Similarly harrowing, but extruded and eerily present are Untitled (Heart) (2018-19), Untitled (Entrails) (2019–20 )and Black Dick (2017–20), all configured of fabric, chicken wire and historical taint. Heart, a crumpled valve coarsely folded in upon itself, suggests not only a statistical report on racial disparities of life expectancy but the daily uptick in heart rate at the near-daily suspicions and discourtesies regularly encountered. Entrails is a snare, a serpent and long tether that harnesses and binds in employment, advancement and trust. Black Dick is a dehumanization, a fetishization, and with apologies to the BBC, a traditional lynching souvenir. 

    There is a rage in this exhibition but few will become enraged by it. Only those very few, that small segment of the population for whom this exhibition is a historical ID card.

    And if you are of the mind that “You people should just get over it, that was so long ago” try remembering an earthen dam in Mississippi and three dead civil rights workers with upstanding citizens looking down at their murdered bodies, then recall a street in Minneapolis.

  • Rachel Rosenthal Roberts Projects

    Rachel Rosenthal
    Roberts Projects

    While Rachel Rosenthal is best known  for her performance work, the collage works on display in “Thanks: Collage Works from the 1970s,” with their aged surfaces and intersecting themes, reveal an artist whose force of sentiment is firmly grounded and luxuriously generous. Performed in an elaborate ritual where an audience was gathered and, one after another, selected members were given a lit taper and provided with a reason for the artist’s gratitude, “Thanks” restored an order that was up until then an open account.

    The collages are about relationships between the artist and others including family, they are reflections on her own life with its displacement and encounters and they are about working on a paper surface with the lines, gestures and mark-making derived from the moment of art that she was living.

    The collage, 5 Decades (1975), is both a birthday card to herself marking off 50 years as well as an enigma, possibly an attempt at crystal divination. A photo-based image of three women and a man standing for a portrait with golf clubs is split horizontally keeping their feet firmly resting at the bottom of the vertical sheet, while the four torsos and heads are at the top of the sheet. Above the heads, two upside-down five-pointed stars are drawn. In between is a tangle of linear elements looking like noodled threads with a red star in the center. On either side of this textured column are a series of carefully drawn and numbered minerals or rocks, almost as though they were specimens in a collection. While the narrative may not be immediately clear, the intimate and thoughtful delineation of the relationships with the images within is palpable, like a magic spell.

    Rachel Rosenthal, Dibidi, 1975. Courtesy of Rachel Rosenthal Estate and Roberts Projects. Photo by Alan Shaffer.

    In another work from the series, “MARA,” 1975, a faded and dated image of a woman is centered; around the outside of the extended rectangular page a garland of hair has been affixed. Within the bounds of the page, a flurry of crosshatched and smudged lines build up an atmosphere without ever coalescing into an image. Whoever the artist is portraying, it is clearly someone that inspires strong feelings. For anyone familiar with Rosenthal’s characteristically shaved head, the importance of hair is obvious, and the sacrifice of cutting and then offering it an important symbolic gesture.

    Rachel Rosenthal is best known for her work in performance and as a leading figure in the LA women’s art movement, but she has also worked in the visual arts, in animal rescue, and as a community organizer. ​“​Thanks” provide​s​ viewers with a chance to look beyond her work as a performer and begin to see the breadth of her poetic reach.

  • Yolanda González Bermudez Projects

    Yolanda González
    Bermudez Projects

    With “Metamorphosis,” Southern California-based artist Yolanda González offers a haunting solo show of monochrome images powerful enough to overwhelm any technicolor image. 

    Her original “Metamorphosis” series, an experimental series she began in 1995, was created after a residency program in Japan. This and a new series, “Metamorphosis II,” fuse the culture of Japan with her Chicana heritage. Her leaching of color from what could have  been vibrant paintings coincided initially with the loss of her close friend Cella Coffin, and mirrors the stark personal darkness González herself experienced. 

    The 2020 iteration was created to honor her late mother, Yolanda Lopez González, but also reflects the current pandemic. Like the images themselves—turning inward, expanding outward—González has said she found herself returning to the same emotional space as with the earlier death of a loved one. The intensity of this new series is somehow both bleak and inspirational. With their twisted, inverted, puzzle-like shapes, her paintings feel muscular, aching, explosive. They are vital and complex, riven with sorrow, and raw with hope and longing. 

    The title of the series evokes the artist’s palette transformation from bright color to this barren yet beautiful black and white, as well as the transformation of the body from life to death, and the passage of the soul. González paints images that shiver and reach, transcend and reference; these are works that move the viewer into a dimension that is no longer physical but spiritual.

    Yolanda González, Crossroads, 2020. Courtesy Bermmudez Projects.

    One of the most compelling works here is Reaching for Sanity (1993). It depicts an outstretched hand, digits distended, palm open. But, as if the palm was being read, the fingers reveal themselves to contain three faces attached to one knotted body, two more strongly visible than the third, forming impressions of suffering or rest: a small but visceral moment in a life, or a multitude of moments within that life, during the ultimate rite of passage.

    González’ No is similarly structured: a pretzel of a body with four human heads, one of which is nearly featureless and dark, as if shrouded, and one which is bisected, Picasso-like, lips separate. There is also a simian-like head, which seems to embrace the other beings, a universal mother. There is a sense of the embryonic, of gestation, as well as overall transformation.

    In the artist’s piece No. 2, there is a clearly delineated dominant face on a body askew, shaped as if it were a floating cloud. This is a face awash in knowledge, in grief, in understanding. Behind it, a fainter image, more anguished; and a darkened oval. Body parts float and seem interchangeable – breast, arm, ears, and what may be a penis, from which the cloud shape itself seems to have emerged.

    Consisting of some 30 artworks in all, González’ “Metamorphosis” is an evolution into, through and out of darkness, offering the perfect, swirling, broken, all-knowing face of change and passage for the current, still-pandemic world.

  • The Edge of Order Wonzimer Gallery

    The Edge of Order
    Wonzimer Gallery

    The existence of an “edge,” a precipice,  an ever-deepening chasm, a transitional space from one reality into the next—be it from spring to summer, enslavement to freedom, life to death—involves a commitment to a new beginning, an awakening of sorts into an alternate way of being. That is the hallmark of human existence—that change is inevitable. Conversely, as human beings, we are constantly attempting to ascribe order to our lives, to make some sense of the nonsensical, to divine the unknown. In the exhibition “The Edge of Order,” on view at Wonzimer Gallery, these two seemingly incontrovertible impulses are visually translated by Todd Williamson and Christina Craemer.

    Although similar in theme, Williamson and Craemer adopt very different approaches to this subject. Williamson’s large-scale paintings feel nearly monolithic in their physicality and the sheer weight of their presence. In Magnificent Obsession (2020), for example, a deeply saturated red, reminiscent of Rothko’s complex palette, appears to seep into the picture frame with a single line of lighter crimson dividing the two halves of the image. As with Rothko’s luminous color field studies, Willamson’s paintings careen into near-spiritual territories, raising questions of subjectivity and our relationship to the living world. Is this small red line a division between two worlds, or a portal through our psyches to the other side of comprehension? Either way, in the end, it does not matter as the sheer expansiveness of the broadening field of red sweeps us deeper into the image.

    Christina Craemer, Mirari Line, 2020. Courtesy Wonzimer Gallery.

    Christina Craemer’s works are also imbued with a transcendent quality albeit drawn from completely different sources. Craemer’s Mirari Line (2020), as with all of her work in the show, celebrates the movement of paint, mimicking a waterfall at various stages. In this image, the sudden heft of white paint appears to “fall” from the top of the canvas, downward, much the way a waterfall builds up speed at the top, to crash violently at the bottom. The violence of nature is implied here as the tension at the top of the painting dissipates into a ghostly convergence at the bottom. 

    As our human consciousness continues to expand and retract, and we “edge” nearer our own understanding of our place in the cosmos, art that investigates the impulse toward spiritual awakening, feels more necessary than ever. 

  • Adam Pendleton David Kordansky Gallery

    Adam Pendleton
    David Kordansky Gallery

    Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition  at David Kordansky Gallery unfolds across three exhibition spaces and invites viewers to engage with the different aspects of his unusual and critical practice. Large black-and-white paintings with the repeated phrase “WE ARE NOT,” hang in one large space. In the smaller rear gallery behind it, Pendleton exhibits grids of framed collages on mylar. Finally, in a custom-built tall screening room designed for a vertically-formatted projection, he presents What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham, A Portrait, (2018–19), a 19-minute video about the dancer Kyle Abraham.

    Pendleton’s paintings are powerful and direct as well as poetic, expressive and gestural. He begins with a fragment of a phrase that is often selected from a historical treatise or speech, like those by Malcolm X, and explores in a Dadaist manner, the representation of the words through the fracturing and recombining of the phrase. Through successive layering of “we,” “are” and “not” spray-painted over and over again in multiple sizes, tones of black and white, and opacities, he creates a symphonic rhythm of words that suggest different implications and meanings depending on what order they are read in. 

    Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2020. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery.

    The paintings begin to make even more sense when seen in conjunction with Pendleton’s mylar collages. Presented as large grids of between 15 and 36 works, these pieces are filled with appropriated images and texts culled from art historical and political sources obscured with handwritten marks and gestural erasures. Their graphic quality reiterates the urgency of their collective message. The subtext in all of Pendelton’s work is an exploration of issues of race as well as the relationships between blackness and abstraction. Pendleton melds together numerous voices and image fragments, choreographing them into quasi-narratives that weave through time to elucidate and challenge racial biases. The overall effect is intentionally didactic and bombastic. Pendleton has something to say and says it loudly. Though not subtle, the works are never preachy but Pendleton is interested in exposing as well as educating. The works become a conversation between past and present, maker and viewer.

    Taking the idea of conversation further, Pendleton also presents a short video in an enclosed screening room where he interviews the dancer Kyle Abraham as he twirls and reflects on Pendleton’s questions. Though Pendleton is never seen, the video unfolds as a conversation that ebbs and flows like a dance. It eventually splits, dividing the screen vertically in thirds, presenting Abraham’s fragmented body out of sequence. At first, the video seems disconnected from the collages and paintings, but as the third in a series of video portraits presented in the context of his static work, it becomes clear that this medium allows Pendleton to create moving paintings that sequence actions and words. The spoken texts expand upon his explorations of time and memory, but more importantly, give presence to the Black body that is alluded to in the other works.

  • CODE ORANGE July-August 2018 Winner & Finalists

    CODE ORANGE
    July-August 2018 Winner & Finalists

     

    Congratulations to our winner Jayme Odgers and our finalists. Jayme’s photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the July/August 2018 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our September/October 2018 online-only photography column Code Orange.

     

    CODE ORANGE is a web-based photography column and opportunity to have your work published in the magazine, curated by LA artist and photographer Laura London. Chosen entries will be published online in Artillery and finalists will appear online. CODE ORANGE is a documentary photography project and outlet for artists to express how they feel about the current state of the world.

    Tumultuous times like ours have historically produced some of the most interesting, captivating, and timeless art; we hope to find and share similar works today. Images submitted should capture how our country and the world are affected by political, environmental change, social, personal, universal, identity issues. Photographs can be produced using a film or digital camera or smartphone. Black-and-white and or color images are accepted.

    Ten photos are selected by London, one winner and nine finalists. The winner will receive a one-year subscription to Artillery. Their photo will appear on our homepage website for two months and winner and finalists will appear in our weekly Gallery Rounds newsletter, along with our Instagram post.

    Good luck and we look forward to seeing your photographic submission!

    DEADLINE for our September/October issue: October 21, 2018

    Specifications for photo submissions:
    • Only one photo per person
    • FOR WEB: 72 dpi; 600 pixels wide. (hang onto your original large file in case you are selected for publication)
    • Include: Artist Name, Title, Date, Place, and Medium (in that specific order)
    • Email your photograph entry to lauralondon@artillerymag.com