Jewel-like translucency and vibrant hues set off the disturbing nature of sculptures by Rona Pondick at Zevitas Marcus, where luminous human heads are frozen in resin blocks or attached to freakish creatural bodies. Several pieces, such as Encased Yellow Green...
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with...
The 19th-century landscape painter Albert Bierstadt may have been a deer whisperer, able to corral an entire herd to pose for "Among the Sierra Nevada, California," but let's be real. The deer are fake. In Emma Webster's recent foray into landscape painting, she takes...
George Braque's simple act of stenciling the words “BAL” and “BACH” onto two of his Analytic Cubist paintings in 1911 launched a trend in modern and contemporary art so pervasive, there is no way he could have imagined the ramifications. The use of text in art has...
David Hockney recycles work from one medium into another, reinventing his own methodologies in the process. His versatility is highlighted in his show titled "Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]... Continued," where landscape paintings,...
Why, exactly, is Laura Owens’ art so compelling? This is a question I’ve been asking myself since I was in art school. Elusiveness seems intrinsic to her work’s magic, which in my mind boils down to two intertwined notions: possibility and freedom. Owens’ eclectic art...
Cécile B. Evans’ stand alone installation, “Something Tactical is Coming,” generates a deliciously satisfying SciFi dystopian theatricality. The bulk of the installation at Chateau Shatto is comprised of a production set from the second episode of her three-part video...
It is not as simple as a pixels-for-brushstrokes exchange, but there’s no getting around how Petra Cortright’s new digital compositions are in a heated conversation with paintings. Yes, the gestures she enacts on her computer or touch-screen tablet function in the...
Helen Rae’s lavishly executed drawings, saturated with colors, patterns and prints, exemplify the power of mere visuals to communicate. Rae, who was born deaf and is nonverbal, speaks vibrantly and voluminously through her evocative drawings currently exhibiting at...
At first glance the passionately colored mandala-like images of June Edmonds and the softly nuanced black-and-white drawings on photographs by A.M. Rousseau couldn’t appear to be more distant from one another. Underlying both of these artists’ work however is an...
The term “Valley Girl” was introduced to popular culture in the early 1980s via a record by Frank Zappa and a film starring Nicolas Cage. It referred to young women from the San Fernando Valley who were portrayed as “ditzy,” “airheaded,” and committed to conspicuous...
Sara Gernsbacher’s wall works are not paintings. They are compositions of simple colors and shapes that suggest, rather than indicate, juxtapositions, combinations, interconnections, meldings and separations. Spray painted, trimmed and further layered, they evoke a...
“Inter-Natural,” the title of Patricia Piccinini’s solo exhibition, links two ideas, “inter” implying spaces between, and “natural” the realm of unspoiled nature. For over two decades, the Australian artist has been exploring just this liminal space, where nature...
The two-person exhibition, “The End & The Beginning,” with works by Berlin-based, Canadian visual artist Alice Gibney and multimedia American artist Sarah Irvin, addresses themes of life and death. Irvin’s work in the exhibit revolves around her experience of...
Beverly Pepper's renown for large-scale outdoor sculptures makes her lesser-known small works seem particularly fresh and intimate. "New Particles from the Sun" features 25 modestly-sized indoor sculptures, mostly on pedestals, and a larger one in the courtyard at...
“Parergon,” a two-part exhibition at Blum & Poe, puts a spotlight on an influential yet unfamiliar era of Japanese contemporary art of the 1980s and ’90s that was shaped by political, economic, and social upheaval. Curated by Mika Yoshitake, the show offers a...
One transparent parabolic-lens sculpture by Fred Eversley offers a dynamic experience. Ten offer something closer to awe. Individually, they call forth orbicular celestial bodies; en masse, they encompass a galaxy of evocations. Each of his untitled resin sculptures...
Drawing parallels between seashells, glass and the human body, Kelly Akashi's exhibition, "Figure Shifter," is a mystical mise-en-scène whose cryptic press release reads as a brief fairytale written in the first person by some mythical spiritual entity. This dimly lit...