There is just something about Chase Hall’s mark-making. He covers the faces of his subjects in stylized patterns that resemble African masks before staining the cotton with coffee. The artist’s marks make a lifeguard’s flotation device resemble an African shield....
Chase Hall
Haunting House at Departure Lounge
The last time Jamison Edgar curated Matthew McGaughey was at Honor Fraser, where I had VR sex with the Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. I wore goggles with Chip’s POV and had an unforgettable sexual experience with a creepily uncanny version of Joanna through...
Shiva Ahmadi at Shoshana Wayne
A welcome break from hordes of contemporary painters retreading 60’s rear-guard aesthetics, Shiva Ahmadi is instead reminiscent of her near-contemporary Wangechi Mutu. Here are the same flowing watercolor lines radiating thick tendrils of hair, the same cosmic mother...
Sabine Moritz at Gagosian
Staggeringly reactionary paintings for a staggeringly reactionary world, Sabine Moritz serves up “lyrical abstractions” (this is a genre, not an assessment) with the warm Crayola-explosion palette of early Jasper Johns and the paint handling of a tamer and more...
Elise Rasmussen at Night Gallery
The history of photographers capturing the West is as storied as the mythos of manifest destiny. Elise Rasmussen steps knowingly into this lineage and subtly pushes the contemporary momentum of turning towards the sculptural, beginning to break photography’s physical...
“Actions” at Sarah Brook Gallery
While the connection between the works in Actions is as ambiguous as its title, the exhibition braids together three artists worth examining individually. Laurel Nakadate’s installation serves as a wall-sized shrine for bridging time and absence, with altered...
Beatrice Arraes at Sea View
The song Kukukaya, which partly inspired Beatrice Arraes’s solo exhibition, speaks of a game meant for four, but “Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” feels purposely solitary, quiet—a slow reckoning with time, where winning was never the point. Her paintings, saturated in deep...
Rocky Morton Shatto Gallery
These paintings feature drip-like tendrils of paint, blown by a leaf-blower and sprawled across the canvas at all angles. Areas of the surface are covered at random but, more or less, evenly, like static. The process-based stochasticism is all too predictable. This...
J. Parker Valentine at Bel Ami
The one large abstract drawing here, wedged precisely in between the ceiling and floor, explores a relationship between geometric form and explorative mark-making. The light touch is enticing, but the sketchy linework feels too beholden to the diagonal lines and ovals...
Alexander Reben at Charlie James Gallery
The central piece here is four split-flap displays showing AI-generated text and a large HD TV displaying images based on those texts. The problem is that AI images are already familiar enough to be corny. The upscale production values do not help, and the jokey...
Larry Johnson/curated by Larry Johnson at Reena Spaulings/ O-Town House
In two exhibitions spanning galleries some twenty-minutes apart depending on traffic, Larry Johnson presents his own work alongside that of two other gay artists of a certain age and a certain generation, who lived through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early...
Aria Dean at Château Shatto
In her still-young career, Aria Dean has shown a remarkable knack for giving the institution exactly what it wants: shrewd work that stings the nerve of the moment without quite stabbing it. In activating the virtual as a conduit for Black radical thought, Dean’s...
Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art at Wonzimer Gallery
This show at Wonzimer Gallery, organized by contributing artist Marcie Begleiter, is inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a work that constitutes a parallel exhibition to the show she curated. The Voynich is a mysterious codex from around the year 1410 by an unknown...
Duncan Hannah at The Journal Gallery
In the early years of cinema, actors were treated as crew members working the conveyor belt of industrialized studio systems. But by the silent-film era of the 1910s, the star system had begun to take hold, with close-ups articulating a visual language of desire...
The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison] Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires
Organized in concert with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, this re-mounting of Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970–71) — in keeping with the entirety of the Harrison collective’s output — is less about a “collision” (per PST’s...
Cai Guo-Qiang and cAI™ at the Los Angeles Coliseum
At dusk on September fifteenth, nearly 5,000 spectators gathered on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum to view WE ARE: EXPLOSION EVENT FOR PST ART, a monumental daytime fireworks display by Cai Guo-Qiang* and his custom artificial intelligence model cAI™....
Nate Lowman at David Zwirner
I’ll admit that before attending a press walkthrough for Nate Lowman’s “Parking” at David Zwirner a few weeks ago, I wasn’t familiar with Lowman’s oeuvre. The paintings first appeared to me thumbnail-size, attached to my iPhone invitation. I noted glowing, riparian...
Lotus L. Kang at Commonwealth and Council
To experience lack is to be reminded of the boundaries of the self, of others. Lacking realizes the unassailable distance between you and everything you don’t and won’t ever have. Therein to lack enlivens desire, or does desire require a lack of something? Kang’s...