Wild, wonderful and wistful—this survey of Pipilotti Rist at the Geffen Contemporary is long overdue in this town, where she has rarely been shown. “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is a trippy series of multimedia installations with videos and immersive projections...
The show’s original incarnation was the culmination of the artist’s residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University’s Lansing campus from August 2020 through May 2021. Fastening onto the campus’s most prominent landmark—the statue of Michigan State’s...
LA-based multimedia artist Michael C. McMillen is known for his immersive, meticulous, set-like installations that make you feel like you’re trespassing on all-too-familiar scenes from the recent past. Life-like props and details, some fabricated and some found––a...
Sean Raspet’s debut at VSF-LA is both an invitation to critically examine anthropogenic climate change—and how we are all implicated—and a series of proposed bio- and geo-engineering solutions for ameliorating the effects of the escalating climate crisis. Raspet’s...
While technically strictly paintings, a new suite of large-scale portraits by YoYo Lander involve extensive collage—crucially, collage executed not from spliced photographs or culled ephemera, but from an endless trove of her own watercolor washes on paper. While in a...
A full moon hangs demurely in the upper left of Serena Potter’s painting Nighttiming (2019) like a wheel of Babybel cheese. Beneath it, on the crest of a forested hill, a scene of lunar revelry: a man and woman in office attire, and another woman in striped pajamas...
Historically, art and politics have often been intertwined. In Dada, Futurism and Russian Constructivism, as well as in some Conceptual art practices and works by individual artists such as Sister Corita Kent, text and image have emblazoned artworks with calls to...
Considering the breadth of the work of Judy Baca—a muralist, painter, sculptor and art activist—a comprehensive installation of her work is long past due. The current exhibition contains approximately 120 pieces from the 40-plus-year oeuvre of the LA Chicana artist....
Known for her works made of laser-cut marquetry, Alison Elizabeth Taylor captivates viewers with her skill and close consideration of minute details. Combining the medium more commonly seen in decorative arts with painted wood and photographic prints, Taylor has...
The centuries-old practice of Kintsugi, a Japanese technique of mending broken pottery with gold, honors the flaws in the ceramic piece. The artist Jim Melchert, who taught English in Japan for four years, has long appreciated and employed that aesthetic. For more...
Nothing really happens in Sun & Sea, an opera set during a time in which we may expect ‘things’ will more or less stop happening altogether; or in any case, when things only happen to us—excepting possibly those wealthy enough to have provided themselves...
Robin F. Williams’ latest solo show Out Lookers at P·P·O·W teeters between dream and nightmare. It’s unnerving and off-putting with witches, ghosts and trolls whose eyes burn like balls of fire. At the same time, it’s exciting, inviting and challenges us to embrace...
In his essay on photography entitled “The Decisive Moment,” Henri Cartier Bresson describes the intricacies of portraiture and the subject. He writes that the ideal portrait is a “true reflection of a person’s world – which is as much outside him as inside him.” We...
The two dozen or so paintings Bronx-based artist Tiffany Alfonseca made during a summer residency at the Mistake Room not only represent a kind of reimagined family photo album, but are intentionally rendered with fidelity to those source materials and their awkward...
Who is apologizing, and to whom? A large light installation on Victoria Square in Athens states: “We apologize for the discontent and stress that this may have caused you.” Who is included in—or excluded by—the ‘we’ and the ‘you’, respectively? What is ‘this’? Victoria is a heavily policed area, as it is home to many refugees, sex workers and substance users. It isn’t clear from the work itself if it’s apologizing to or for these populations, but the material consequence of the installation is an even heavier police presence in the area, resulting in increased harassment of the Square’s locals. On the official website for the artwork, a footnote reads: “Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience that may arise from the presence of the installation in Victoria Square. We understand that even a small shift from our everyday itinerary and routine may be annoying…”. Brushing off increased policing as an “inconvenience” and a “small shift” demonstrates the disconnectedness of this supposedly socially engaged work of art, that’s based on research made “in collaboration with old and new residents from the Victoria Square neighborhood”. The piece is co-commissioned by Counterpoints Arts who, despite a focus on “arts, migration and cultural change,” evidently failed to recognize the threat that police violence poses to people within and beyond Victoria.
The Korean Peninsula is a region rooted in duality. It is a land both literally and ideologically split down the middle, a lasting result of Cold War-era proxy wars, Western imperialist action, and an on-going brutal dictatorship. And even before the interventions...
Three vastly different solo exhibitions make up the current exhibition at Gabba Gallery. Vivid and dense color is the keystone of Judy Ostro’s abstract patterned work in Never Too Late. Both mosaic and kaleidoscope, Ostro draws the eye and keeps viewers unbalanced in...
Grief comes in countless forms. There are as many ways to feel the peculiar sensation of loss as there are things to lose. One can lose another, something external, and just the same – or just as differently –one can lose oneself. With bereavement, there is no wrong...
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