Sometimes a drawing is not a drawing. For example, when an artist transcends rendering and goes for something entirely more direct. In the case of Flora Kao and her unique, evocative architectural rubbings, her method of depiction is itself a tactile, durational,...
"Bhabharosi," the title of Simphiwe Ndzube's show and several works therein, is a neologism the artist coined from the words "barbarous" and "rose" in isiXhosa, his native language, to refer to his protagonists. As insinuated, a mood of bittersweetness transfuses the...
Known for his immersive cake-like installations, Scott Hove’s latest makings offer wry commentary upon the demise of today’s political, economic, and ecological landscapes in “Last Ticket for the Beauty Train,” a two-part exhibition presented by KP Projects. On...
There are two points of entry into Fran Siegel's exquisite exhibition, "Lineage Through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil." One is purely visual: admiring the unique way the individual drawings and collages are sewn together and suspended from the ceiling; noticing...
We are accustomed to sight as an experience of things coming into clearer focus the longer we look at them. Images seem fuzzy, we stare, maybe squint a bit, and they sharpen up. One of the special features of paintings by Peter Lodato is that they enact the opposite....
With three distinct exhibition spaces within its massive Boyle Heights gallery, Ibid Gallery has reserved its smallest space, a jewel box of a venue, for the most engaging work on view, an exhibition entitled “slow relief” (the title of this show and all of the works...
Abstract but character-driven, tertiary and bright, super flat and deeply funny, the paintings and sculptural installations in Andy Kolar’s “Easy now.” speak to conceptual and material concerns in a uniquely satisfying, engaging dialect of modern color theory. The...
Alluding to the postmodern architecture of her Polish homeland, Monika Sosnowska’s first solo show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles is comprised of six structural installations, which despite their rigid physicality and mass, are warped with drama, yet seem...
Collectively, the works that make up “Interstitial,” now on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, read like the detritus one might find in an abandoned time capsule. Curated by John David O'Brien (a regular Artillery contributor), the exhibition houses an...
Only one visitor enters Alejandro Iñárritu’s installation CARNE y ARENA at a time. If you’re lucky enough to get a ticket, you’ll begin in a startlingly cold room lit by hard fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Beat-up sneakers and water bottles lie underneath metal...
The strategic manipulation and disorientation of material: concrete, paper, ink, and fiber, link the four distinct series displayed in Analia Saban’s “Folds and Faults.” As the exhibition title alludes, each work either weaves these materials together or ruptures them...
Sabrina Gschwandtner’s second solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery continues her exploration into intricate quilting motifs, expanding on her already complex imagery with the addition of deaccessioned celluloid film strips of female hands hard at work—sewing,...
Exploring the dialectic relationship between environments—both built and natural—and the figures that occupy those spaces, “Vernacular Environments, Part 1” brings to light the complexities and temporality of the vernacular. A film of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty...
Kristen Morgin’s recent works at Marc Selwyn Fine Art break all the rules, and Los Angeles, the city she’s called home for over 30 years, is her muse and partner-in-crime. Abandoning traditional techniques, the artist creates delicate sculptures with painted, unfired...
In his latest video installation “Weed Killer” (2017), Patrick Staff approaches the topic of identity by juxtaposing the cancer patient’s experience with that of the transgender person’s and examining the ravaging effects that pharmaceuticals can have upon the...
Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington's complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments...
Mercifully averted, the television writers’ strike was urgent news in Los Angeles, where total triviality-immersion is our raison d’être, and its media coverage was breathless. This would have wryly charmed Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. His 1985...
Jessie Homer French's paintings nullify categories like sophistication and naiveté; embodying aspects of both, they fit into neither. As implied by the show's title, "Food Chain," harsh realities figure prominently in French's depictions of subjects that include...
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