The point of departure for Pat Steir's exhibition “Painted Rain” at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and...
The precarious balance of society and nature, and man’s place within the magnetism of both is the central theme of Stephen Seemayer’s “Dark Side of Paradise” at Bermudez Projects. The collection of 26 paintings and nine studies are an ode to the shadow self and the...
The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable”—Margaret Lazzari’s series of works devoted to her traumatic struggle with breast cancer, “The Cancer Series,” fits right into that category. More than 30 works of...
The Marilyn Nance exhibition at Roberts Projects beautifully demonstrates the phenomenon known as six degrees of separation—the idea that all people are six or fewer connections away from each other. Nance was 21 when she was chosen to be the United States’ official...
Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture. In Wrought:...
Carolyn Castaño's “Otros Seres” (Other Beings) exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery is an exhilarating eyeful of stealth environmental disaster. Castaño, of Colombian-American heritage, is well-known for her early extravagant and provocative Garden Heads...
Feathers, fur, gills, horns, tails (spiked and scaled), claws, talons, hooves, and forked tongues are some of the characteristics that adorn Evangeline AdaLioryn's strange amalgamations. The locust of the exhibition, "Her Labyrinth," presents an assemblage of...
Now known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing , written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson iterates the definition of resilience by stating: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught...
Blood is unsightly in the flesh. Witnessing a bleeding person, one might turn away—or worse, be overcome with nausea and faint. For a substance essential to our functioning, to life itself, its image provokes extreme distress. If we were to trust our physiological...
Appearing as if they are on the verge of moving, Yuji Ueda’s ceramic vessels are complex, layered and their own abstracted compositions, both planned through his methodical process yet a surprise from the firing process. Based in Shigaraki, Japan—a place famous for...
In “Biel Lieb,” Olivia van Kuiken’s inaugural exhibition at Château Shatto, oil paintings of untamed, bold color and mark-making swing between styles of ink wash, graphic novel, pixel and gestures on the verge of becoming scripture, spellbinding the gallery. Fuchsia,...
Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a slender prose/poetry collection titled parasocialite. As a cheeky culture correspondent (a Salvadorian born in the DMV) and founder of Car Crash Collective (a late-night lit...
Will Hutnick’s practice resists easy categorization. While largely using the language of abstraction, his mixed media paintings also borrow elements of glitch art with seemingly disjointed imagery that is somehow both static and in motion as patterns, shapes, and...
In January I was chatting with Jack Skelley, the author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (FOKA) published last year through Semiotext(e). We spoke about how young writers are connecting with the older generation in the Los Angeles writing scene—it feels a lot like...
Last week, an abandoned home in the hills of Mt. Washington, once infested by raccoons and possums, transformed into "Revel Hall," a temporary exhibition space showcasing Amelia Lockwood's raw, altar-like and talismanic ceramics alongside Chris Lux's admirably crooked...
Does humor belong in art? The late Canadian multimedia artist Rodney Graham evidently thought it did. But Graham’s humor, on display at the Lisson Gallery through March 23, is of the companionable sort: gentle, slightly self-deprecating, never sarcastic or cutting,...
The title of Griselda Rosas’ exhibition, “Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before),” recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, “Once upon a time...,” but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn’t frame so much as foreground the...
Photographer Todd Gray is a rule breaker. In this brave new art world he has fashioned for us, gone are the two-dimensional, singular perspective, rectangular photographs that hung on the walls these past 200 years. In their place, Gray presents something entirely...
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