Having participated in multiple shows each year over her nearly 40-year career, Kim Abeles challenged herself to consider ˌterə ˈfɜːmə (terra firma) at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College as possibly her last solo exhibition. “Terra firma means...
Attending a Daniel Rolnik event, you'll encounter many bizarre characters, Rolnik being the most amusing. I met Rolnik four years ago at a party in a vacant Beverly Hills house where he had helped organize a pop-up exhibition. His art world debut role was as a writer...
It’s not every day that a public university art museum, outside the Hammer Museum, features an amazing show with cutting-edge artists. So when I saw the "Second Wave" exhibition at UC Riverside where I attend graduate school, I just had to chat with UCR ARTSblock...
Jack Brogan is a fabricator. He makes things. Challenged with the whim, fancy and far-reaching concepts of the artist, Brogan, 86, will produce a dimensional object. His influence will never be truly known nor appreciated. ARTILLERY: Your proficiency in new materials...
The auction market, and in particular the salerooms of the two major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have long been a proving ground for the marketplace maturity of every kind of specialty commodity, including fine art. Auction houses have aggressively...
Marnie Weber is a Los Angeles multimedia artist who works in photography, sculpture, costume, film and performance. She is also the leader of Spirit Girls, an alt-rock music and performance group. Taken together, her work explores issues of gender and mysticism in...
Something special but virtually hidden exists here in SoCal, and it’s a reminder that visual art, despite the occasional headline-grabbing event, is essentially an underground activity operating on the margins of our society. The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery of...
Painted on a small particle board, screwed to a brick wall, above and behind which Berlin’s U-Bahn (here elevated) rumbles to and from its terminus, a figure of indeterminate sex holds a power drill to its head, the bit twirling out the opposite temple in a splash of...
Throughout his 1982 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman returns over and over to a single passage from Marx’s Communist Manifesto: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept...
It was in 2009, while teaching art workshops in Ciudad Juárez, that artist Elina Chauvet became aware of the numbers of women and girls disappearing from the city’s streets. She was shocked by the many posters on phone poles and boards pleading for help locating...
In the 20th century there has long been a long tradition of artists extending their visions beyond the studio walls to encompass a wider range of ideas and modes of thinking, wherein artists like Wallace Berman with his magazine Semina in the ’60s, or much later in...
Meeting Marycarmen Arroyo Macias in MexiCali was a fortuitous event; she lent me her camera in a pinch to photograph potential performance locations for the MexiCali Biennial 13, in which we were both included. When I asked about her work for the show, she told me the...
Miguel Osuna’s grandly decaying storefront studio at 4th and Spring streets is a workshop, a think tank, a popular spot on the monthly downtown art walk and a place where skateboarders get exposed to the ’70s electronic sounds of Jean Michel Jarre—what he might be...
Geographical border zones figure prominently in the work of Julio César Morales, particularly those separating the U.S., where he lives, from Mexico, where he was born. In “Undocumented Interventions,” an ongoing series of watercolor and ink drawings, Morales presents...
Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia loves to create objects expressing hybridized meanings, calling attention to how things are not as simple as they first appear. For “by Deborah Calderwood,” his first solo exhibition at CB1 gallery in downtown Los Angeles, he presented...