Two lush summer shows are blossoming online at Torrance Art Museum. Both exhibitions are visual stunners; and they continue the museum’s ongoing aesthetic for cutting edge, culturally resonating art. Semblance | Sunshine co-curated by Josh Hashemzadeh and the Torrance...
Rodrigo Valenzuela pursues a robust and multivalent practice that encompasses lavishly produced and materially rich photography, sculpture, installation and video. At the same time, these pursuits are equally centered on a semiotic, politically engaged post-capitalist...
Kate Newby is an artist of the immediate and quotidian. Her work is rooted in place, which she defines through the conditions, actions, and events that occur there. Her investment in the local is often expressed through site-specificity. This exhibition gives its...
We live in a time when the value of the work of art in society has changed radically. In February, the whole mercantile mechanism of the art world was in full swing, and by the end of March, with the global pandemic, life as we have known it had more or less stopped....
The collage-paintings of Anne Austin Pearce are unabashedly beautiful. Born, raised and educated in Lawrence, Kansas, Pearce was associate professor of art at Missouri's Rockhurst University until this year, when she assumed an associate professorship of studio art at...
Currently on display at the Center of Contemporary Art in Santa Fe is the 30-year survey of Mark Spencer’s paintings. Entitled "Beings," this is a rare and all too brief opportunity to experience an important artist. Some artists' practice is to work slowly and...
The outdoor entryway to Various Small Fires is a narrow corridor often used for sound installations. This long passageway opens up into a large gravel back yard perfect for exhibiting sculptures. In "Variation in Mass 1-3," Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon creates an...
Kathleen Ryan’s second solo show at François Ghebaly, "Bad Fruit," is a masterclass in contemporary object-making. In her massive fruit sculptures, the duality of decay and the cycle of life is on display as Ryan combines the industrial with the natural, the glamorous...
The repetitive quality of the overall patterns in the grids in Ave Pildas' show at Tufenkian Fine Arts create an almost animated effect, a little like standing in one place over a long period of time and blinking slowly. The different figures traverse the space that...
Rina Banerjee's assemblages are fantastical potpourris of color, texture and cultural references. The title of her 20-year retrospective, "Make Me a Summary of the World," encapsulates her ambition of laying bare the fluid interdependency of ostensibly discrete...
"Los Angeles is a city without a past," urban geographer Michael Dear once declared, referring to the city's penchant for effacing its own history. Yet an enthralling exhibition at the Hilbert Museum attests that LA does, indeed, have a past, one recorded in vibrant...
Both vibrant in color and visceral in texture, Evan Nesbit, now at Roberts Projects in Culver City here works on burlap, a continuation of the artist’s use of materials to pull viewers into the depths of his vivid palette. Nesbit’s abstract works deal in illusion,...
Lucio Fontana, the Argentine-born Italian artist best known for his slashed, punctured canvases and lumpy ceramic sculpture, had another less acknowledged side to his oeuvre- his “spatial environments”. Created in the last 20 years of his life, these ephemeral...
Fragmentary castoffs and debris from the LA River texturize Jennifer West's current show, "Future Forgetting," whose title was inspired by Norman Klein's 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, a treatise on how Los Angeles...
For Richard Prince, well known for his appropriationist works from the 1980s and 1990s, the discovery of Instagram opened a new window onto old methodologies. It was only after watching his daughter post to Tumbler that he came to understand the possibilities of...
As an exhibition I had intended to see on what should’ve been a busy night, Durden and Ray’s Another Dimension was high on my list. As things turned out, the show itself entered another dimension, in the limbo of closings-before-they-opened, as we practiced social...
In life (1922-1995), Cameron's art was often overshadowed by her colorful bohemian persona as occultist and wife of Jack Parsons. But one need know nothing about her to appreciate her drawings and paintings, each of which exudes an intense bewitching presence. Some of...
Nicolas Party's imaginary world contains no wilderness, only bright graphic artifice based loosely on nature and historical art. In his depopulated landscapes such as Trees (all works 2020), tree trunks and branches are smooth cylinders whose leaves fall like confetti...
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