Looking at Darya Diamond’s limp latex sculpture, In Every Dream Home a Heartache (2024), I think of bruised skin, frail shoulders: a tired body collapsed on the floor — phallic, deflated, stamped with marks like a trampled body bag. Throughout “Sugartown,” intimacy...
Curated to pose as a mirror to society’s collapse, "Scupper"’s artists address a spectrum of social ills from preservatives in food to inadequate healthcare. The six-page press release does a better job than some of the works themselves at justifying their presence in...
A mechanical broom wielded by a robotic arm sweeps across the floor under the corner of a custom-made carpet shaped like India. In an adjoining room, an enormous inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man lies face-down adjacent to a neon sign which reads “DIASPORA.” A...
Don’t let the cute animals fool you; these paintings are not so innocent. A vague sense of foreboding permeates these otherwise joyful works. In Iadevaia’s last show, climate apocalypse hovered in his portentous smokey-pink...
Not all pop art is created equal. Gabriel Madan’s literally pops off the wall: As in, a colorful macaw plushie is affixed to one of his paintings, a heart-shaped tag reading “I’m a puppet.” I want to stick my hand up its rear and make it talk. Vulgar, yes, but...
Melrose Botanical Garden is not actually a garden, but it might as well be. Tucked between thrift shops and piercing parlors on the avenue, the narrow gallery feels like an oasis. “a field once more,” a group show drawing upon Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of...
Michael E. Smith’s unassuming, poetic sculptures are late capitalist Zen koans: riddles with no answer but which nevertheless spark a moment of satori. For instance, a milk carton covered in mirrors seems to suggest that we are all the lost children. But is this a...
Oscar Tuazon’s activist art project LAWS: Los Angeles Water School combines high concept with a rigorous materiality. Machined folds and facets shape The Evening Redness in the West (2024) a C-print printed on an aluminum sheet that mimics the way coated analog photo...
I’m not sure I completely understand Oshay Green’s obliquely-named sculptures made of deconstructed leather couches, or how they relate to a series of embossed wooden slabs and a haunting wall work that imposes itself over the gallery like a giant spider. A legible...
Jeffrey Deitch reimagines his 1992 exhibition, “Post Human,” with a dialogue between the 90s works and newer ones, presenting dueling visions for the future of humanity and the self. The show is an opportunity to see Paul McCarthy's The Garden (1991-1992) and Charles...
This show has some of the best paintings that Rema Ghuloum has made, but that might be a problem. She’s honed this language—obsessively detailed, rainbow-hued, color field paintings—past the point of perfection. These paintings glow, but the unfinished, muddy, and...
The word trippy comes to mind here, but it might not actually apply. The quasi-mythological take on nature and the vibrating, prismatic color naturally suggest psychedelia but, overall, these are too controlled to be visionary. They feel, at times, like a collision of...
Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024),...
At the entrance of the gallery, viewers are confronted by a massive wall work by Moffat Takdiwa, bhiro ne bepa (pen and paper) (2023), constructed from the detritus of late-stage capitalism and post-colonialist society. The artist embraces the texture and materiality...
I love seeing an artist push the boundaries of the medium. Becky Tucker does exactly that with stoneware creations that are —FIRE. They look like Clive Barker created the Cenobites from Hellraiser in a kiln lit by hell’s inferno. The most imposing pieces are a trio of...
Liz Larner’s wall works evoke the weathered, mysterious exteriors of unearthed petrified wood. Suspended layers of obsidian, sage, amber, and indigo feel almost magnetized, capable of reshaping the viewer the way magnetic forces reshape landforms. The tautly stretched...
Julia Weist’s “Private Eye” is like a neo-noir where the investigator investigates themselves and invites us along. The work traffics in suburban paranoia: messages on vanity plates and yard signs asking us to believe. Today, the taboo of surveillance has faded, and...
Through images of Satan and Darth Vader, and references to the politics of the 1970s, Matthew Brannon will unexpectedly break your heart. His show at David Kordansky Gallery mirrors the sensation of biting the pit at the center of a peach: a bitter core beyond what...
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