To experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Tala Madani
PICK OF THE WEEK: Lily Wong Various Small Fires
Lily Wong’s phantasmal figures traverse boundaries that blur celestial realms and built environments, painting a world that evokes fragmented feelings and cosmic confusion spurred by her personal quest for ancestral knowledge and identity. Bodies glow with an...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Catalina Ouyang Night Gallery
There are no straight lines or perfect circles in Physics, there are only currents, vortexes, distorted electromagnetic fields, impossible matter and beings in a reflexive state of becoming—morphing, deforming, sprawling and spilling out with each aberrant encounter....
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vija Celmins / Robert Gober Matthew Marks Gallery
Water flows ceaselessly through the arteries of Robert Gober's solitary faucet, as if it were a trickling monument to the Sisyphean impossibility of cleanliness. Originally made in response to the AIDS crisis, Gober's handcrafted sink is recontextualized in the age of...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Rebecca Morris Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris is an obsessive abstractionist. The grid serves as her compositional playground where shapes and colors frolic and meander. The 21-year survey exhibition "Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022," at the Institute of Contemporary Art...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Prunella Clough Château Shatto
Prunella Clough's paintings glitch, sneeze, and itch in states of spaghettification. Observational renderings culled from the everyday–seemingly subtle yet tidal and awkwardly beautiful–Clough discombobulates the gravitational fields that tether shapes and colors to...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Sharon Ellis Kohn Gallery
There is something sugary about Sharon Ellis’ new psychedelic paintings that are reminiscent of my favorite childhood board game, Candy Land, nostalgic of gingerbread plum trees, the peppermint stick forest, Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. Ellis’ paintings also...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Anina Major Shoshana Wayne Gallery
Vessels are containers–spaces for bodies of volume to dwell, to fill up–shaped by what they have held and what they long to hold. In Anina Major’s solo exhibition “Inheritance” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, fragmented baskets molded from clay operate as metaphorical...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Shana Hoehn Make Room Los Angeles
An ouroboros of hair and vomit surges through an arched body; vulvic lilypads share a tender moment of caress; aluminum breasts perched above erect flower stocks posture as suits of armor, guardians, gargoyles; a tantalizing cocoon drips from above; a nest of braids,...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Paul Mpagi Sepuya Vielmetter Los Angeles
Just as Diego Velázquez’s "Las Meninas" (1656) troubled differentiations between life and painting, Paul Mpagi Sepuya confuses the boundaries that separate life and photography, questioning what is intended to be seen and concealed. In his recent exhibition at...
PICK OF THE WEEK: A Minor Constellation Chris Sharp
I’ve always enjoyed the playful and uninhibited spirit of summer group shows, unbridled by the circuits and agendas of the art market. Chirs Sharp’s exhibition, “A Minor Constellation”, perfectly exemplifies this kind of delightful candidness. The show features a...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Casey Kauffmann & John de Leon Martin Human Resources LA
Artists Casey Kauffmann and John de Leon Martin have created a super-collage at Human Resources, Los Angeles. A messy collision of screens, drawings and passionfruit vines engulf the gallery space with the intention to bamboozle. The duet’s maximalist installation...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Sam Anderson Tanya Leighton
Having gone through a recent breakup, the theme of Sam Anderson's show, "Lunch Hour," felt all too familiar as the artist examines cyclical narratives of desire and disappointment. At first glance, the show at Tanya Leighton gallery feels like a departure for those...
PICK OF THE WEEK: The Tale Their Terror Tells Lyles & King
The enchanting lure of a hole, the tender scuttle of a bug, the mysterious vibrations of the forest, the pungent bloom of a corpse flower, the mutability of our fleshy bodies in decay—these are things that have fascinated and bonded my years of friendship with Geena...
PICK OF THE WEEK: The Condition of Being Addressable Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
At the ICA Los Angeles, curators Marcelle Joseph and Legacy Russell have assembled 25 artists whose practices engage with the construction of identity and the self as subject –or, as Judith Butler puts it, The Condition of Being Addressable. This international and...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Mika Rottenberg Hauser & Wirth
A grotesque feeling of excitement and misery shivers through me whenever I encounter Mika Rottenberg’s work. Her stories of monstrous mechanisms of hypercapitalism are infused with a queasy comedy that reminds me of Julia Kristeva’s “laughter of the apocalypse”...
PICK OF THE WEEK: American Artist REDCAT
Octavia E. Butler's speculative fictional imagining of Los Angeles seems to inch closer and closer to nonfiction as our apocalyptic reality grows louder and hotter by the day. At REDCAT, the exhibition of new work by American Artist shows how Butler’s words are so...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Jeffrey Meris Matthew Brown
Cold sheets of perforated metal gnaw quietly at severed plaster limbs inside Matthew Brown’s La Brea gallery. Despite the unsettling horrors this description might conjure, Jeffrey Meris’ exhibition, "be ever wonderful," is deceptively healing and hopeful. A series...