In today’s media saturated world, exhibitions of beautifully printed, small-scale, black and white photographs tend to fall through the cracks. As Mark Ruwedel proves in “Rivers Run Through It,” quiet and subtle pictures of nature can be more seductive and meaningful...
At Alias Books East, in Atwater Village, hangs an unfinished piece of sky. The artist and musician Matt Fishbeck made it by scrabbling a piece of denim-colored stick of oil pastel onto a board. The painting hovers on Alias Books East’s west-facing “art wall” next to...
Fay Ray often says her work is about the construction of identity, which is something a lot of artists say. But in “I AM THE HOUSE” Ray takes that premise in sublime new directions, in a series of sculptures and photo-based works that through formal materials, actions...
Alison Saar’s “Topsy Turvy,” her new exhibition at LA Louver, looks to the sixties for strength: the 1860s. Painted on linen and canvas, carved in wood, and shaped from tin, Topsy the slave girl from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Civil War era novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin looks...
Matthew Sweesy’s “Nocturnes” and Jesse Edwards’ “Hot Town,” currently at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, are exercises in nostalgia. The two artists, while working in different mediums and styles, have a strikingly optimistic quality. Whether it’s the pop culture references...
Kerry Tribe’s film Standardized Patient, which was commissioned by SFMoMA in 2017 and is currently at 1301PE, is a filmic expression of thoughtful storytelling centered on a controlled social environment that is often unexplored within the wooly conceptual arts—the...
The sweep and scope of the Laguna Art Museum’s extensive Tony DeLap retrospective encompass several remarkable elements, including the artist’s large hybrid constructions, which feature unusual juxtapositions of shapes and materials, and his curved standing and...
The Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion has organized a long-overdue posthumous retrospective for Los Angeles artist Jim DeFrance. Grouped largely by artistic series, the exhibition encompasses nearly six decades of his career. Seen altogether, this surprisingly...
Light and Space Art, one of the few significant movements to originate in Southern California, conflates the forms of Minimalism with the use of light as the actual medium of the artwork. Yet, even with all of the recent interest in the legacy of So Cal art, we have...
The opening movement of “Soul Recordings” is a polka-dot revelry, a bedazzled wake-up call, a cymbal-clap altarpiece, a plastic-bead trumpet blast, and a monster of a skull-ringed, glitter-bombed orchestral chord breaking in fuchsia major. This is Ebony G. Patterson’s...
Pascual Sisto's immersive video installation Inside Out is a tour de force for both its technical accomplishments and its compelling, albeit obtuse and ambiguous narrative. Sisto has choreographed an approximately twenty-minute symphony of sound, lights and video,...
Dion Johnson's abstract paintings inhabit hairline margins between technologic and handmade. The ten examples in "Feel the Sky," Johnson's decadal retrospective at Azusa Pacific University, chart his pictorial evolution while affirming his enduring interests. From...
In her last show with Rosenstein, Gisela Colon presented her first large free-standing object, a Parabolic Monolith that curved gracefully towards the gallery’s high ceiling and loomed over visitors. For Colon this was a notable translation of her light-and-space...
Curated by artist and photographer Arden Surdam, “Belt Friction,” the current group exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery, explores themes about the complexities of touch and categorizations of human contact. Belying the precision and stakes of the obscure engineering...
A simple reconfiguring of space at Wilding Cran has yielded a tiny, jewelbox of a gallery for small yet impactful exhibitions. Black Over White by Brazilian artist Maria Lynch is part of Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, the vast project supported by the Getty Foundation...
Some of us respect what makes people different from one another. By withholding judgment of others, we avoid enveloping them in our own contexts, selfishly assuming their futurities. Yet psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz asserts, “Wherever known reality stops, where...
Georganne Deen did not become disillusioned by recent geopolitical events—she’s been feeling that way for a long time. It’s just that her newest paintings reflect certain newly topical aspects within the widening gyre of social entropy, expressing in both style and...
Is a collage comprised of assembled painted canvases a collage, a painting, or assemblage art? Does the semantics even matter? “Jabberwocky,” Josh Jefferson’s exhibition at Zevitas Marcus, plays with these boundaries. Jefferson created the collages (the gallery has...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!