Dear Reader, Happy Birthday to Artillery for turning 15 this year! And to celebrate this milestone we are covering how the world is going to hell! The climate crisis is our September theme and it wasn’t an impromptu decision or stop-the-presses situation because of...
From the Editor
CODE ORANGE September-October 2021 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner Erik Olson and our finalists. Erik's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the September/October online and print edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how...
Drip Dry: Our Relationship with Water
Beatriz Jaramillo has had water on her mind ever since she can remember. The Colombian-born Los Angeles–based artist spent her childhood in what sounds like an idyllic wonderland—wandering around the tropical rainforest that surrounded her family’s home. She remembers...
An Interview with T.J. Demos Climate Breakdown and Capitalism
T.J. Demos is Professor in Art History and Visual Culture as well as Founder and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Last year, he published Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing a book exploring...
A REAL HORROR SHOW Ecological Dystopia in Contemporary Art
Our apocalypse is self-inflicted. We gouge at our wounds in acts of self-harm. Our collective anxiety festers as disaster takes hold, yet we remain paralyzed by fear, unable to face our reality. Implausible flames dance on the ocean’s surface; acres of California...
Hugo Hopping and The Winter Office Nature As Infrastructure
I became aware of LA artist Hugo Hopping in 2009, when his conceptual work appeared in the exhibition “Post American L.A.,” curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas for the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Since then his trajectory has taken him to base his practice...
Zaria Forman: Fear and Awe Showcasing Beauty and Fragility
Climate change is a crisis that we must all recognize and work together to mitigate. For artists engaging with climate content, their activism manifests in many different ways. Some choose to showcase the devastating evidence of global warming, while...
Ron Athey at the ICA Los Angeles “Queer Communion”
I’m on the freeway traveling through the San Fernando Valley to see the Ron Athey exhibition of art, documentation and ephemera called “Queer Communion” at the ICA in downtown Los Angeles. All of the LA tropes are in place: It’s a sunny and clear June day, the hills...
Stripping Away the Veil Art Brief
The art world has been a secretive, opaque business for centuries. Secondary market transactions are rarely transparent and auction houses are often silent about the identity of the ultimate seller and buyer (provenances are full of phrases such as “from a private...
Prayer Against Turbulence Decoder
You know when an airplane goes from just rattling back and forth to when it feels like the engines stopped and you drop, like, 20, 50, who knows how many feet and then picks up rattling again? I hate that. I don’t want to die. The nice thing about turbulence is it...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Birth of a Foothill Fire, San Gabriel Valley, CA, 2019
The Abandoned Sea Bunker Vision
A term that has gained a lot of currency in the past couple of decades is “abandoned.” There are hundreds of social media accounts dedicated to abandoned things. New websites and art books about them keep springing up. Abandoned things from the mid-20th century are...
The Silver Lake Reds Provenance
There’s no better way to procrastinate with your new pandemic dog than by bringing them to the dog park. And in Los Angeles, there is no shortage of beautiful locations to sweat under the merciless desert sun. One such haunt is the Silver Lake dog park, which abuts...
Shoptalk: LA Art News Fair reports and Compound Long Beach
Felix Fair Report In some ways the fairs and openings that packed the last week in July were a turning point for Los Angeles. It was the first such convergence since February 2020, with the pandemic shutdown following quickly in March. Would people actually show up...
LA Fall Preview Upcoming Exhibitions
California African American Museum LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze September 8, 2021–March 20, 2022 The Getty Center Fluxus Means Change: Jean Brown’s Avant-Garde Archive September 14, 2021–January 2, 2022 Hammer Museum No Humans Involved...
ASK BABS LABELS FOR ARTISTS
Dear Babs, Certain grants, contests, programs, and such ask me to define myself as an “emerging” or “established” artist. How does one decide which label fits? —Dick in Del Mar Dear Dick, Other fields have terms for newbies. Professional baseball players—and cops—are...
Intergalactix: against isolation/ contra el aislamiento Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Step into “Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the first thing you’ll see is a largish, flattish, squarish stone smack in the middle of a white-walled room decked with wicker beds of tenon...
Poems "Dostoevsky Takes a Selfie" By Clint Margrave; "Take It Easy" By John Tottenham
Dostoevsky Takes a Selfie By Clint Margrave I’m not surprised to find him in the underground, but I am surprised to find him in L.A. He sits across from me on the metro in shorts and tennis shoes, taking a selfie. I want to ask him what he’s doing here. Too...