It takes guts to imagine former president Harry S. Truman as a strange and profligate hero, a man who played a significant role in authoring our now debased socio/political framework, a uniquely polarizing figure who is now the unlikeliest muse in the most recent...
The art collective En Plein Error, comprised of artists Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes and William Wasserman, practices a kind of extemporaneous riffing to create their pastel on paper works, in a process that might be loosely compared to a session of exquisite corpse,...
The current drawings of Christopher Murphy are for the most part unassuming and quiet. Only occasionally do they mesmerize through dramaturgy. Some appeal through inversions, others through thinly populated landscapes, which recall the recurrent theme in American...
Don’t hate the metaphor, hate the estrangement of Forms, one might say—or at least that’s the phrase that came to me in light of ceramicist/conceptual artist Alex Miller’s debut exhibition. Mounted on one wall, a 36-piece edition of handmade ceramic “dart boards” are...
Lauren Satlowski’s four new paintings at Odd Ark situate us squarely in our anxious feminist moment. Their landscapes are creepy, with tinges of the natural; their delicious surfaces bounce the gaze around like the mise en scène for Spielberg’s child-android in A.I....
New Zealand based digital artist Gregory Bennett is a virtuoso when it comes to utilizing high-end 3D animation software and motion capture to create animated videos in which featureless android bodies inhabit synthetic worlds, wherein they are trapped in perpetual...
“I told them I didn’t believe in art, that I believed in photography.” Andy Warhol In 2014, The Warhol Foundation gifted its hefty archive of 3,600 contact sheets shot by Warhol in the late 1970s and early to mid-’80s to Stanford University, under the care of...
Rosa Loy's paintings in "So Near and Yet So Far" at Kohn Gallery delineate a mysterious fairytale world desolately populated only by women. Initially, the women appear to be engaged in habitual activities such as farming or playing; but the more you look at them, the...
Poetically conveying clues to her photographs' complex themes, "Planes," the title of the Deana Lawson show at The Underground Museum, connotes levels of existence; walls of rooms; and images' physical flatness. Most of the Rochester-born, New York-based artist's...
Cleverly titled "Tryouts for the Human Race," Max Hooper Schneider's show features only four works, each of which exists as a wondrous self-contained realm inside Jenny's, a diminutive Silver Lake gallery whose absence of outward signage makes the sight inside all the...
Reuven Israel's compelling exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian, titled "In Four Acts," is concerned with variation and transformation. His beautifully crafted floor-based sculptures are amalgamations of pieces of painted oak of approximately 6 to 12 inches in length by 1...
"Objects of Desire: Reflections on the African Still Life" is a tour de force of technical versatility, showcasing Meleko Mokgosi's multifarious painting skills alongside written testaments of his art's heady conceptual foundations. Mokgosi's paintings and sculptures...
When in 1851 the French writer Victor Hugo rose up against the coup d'état initiated by Napoleon III, the police were looking for him. Hugo had to flee Paris, the city in which his first child Leopold passed away in infancy and his beloved nineteen-year old daughter...
Ostensibly a presentation of individual large-scale mixed media sculptural works, Aaron Fowler’s current exhibition is more like a series of pocket universes. Occupying the entireties of two art galleries on opposite sides of the city, Fowler presents these monumental...
Calling all Kimberly Brooks fans: A short time remains to catch "Fever Dreams," her mid-career survey at Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery. More than 20 pieces, from small studies to watercolors on paper to large-scale oil paintings, sketch Brooks' artistic...
Iraqi-born, Los Angeles artist Susu Attar opened an expansive exhibition on October 20th filling LA’s very own The Mistake Room with dynamic paintings made on long scrolls of white paper. Entitled Isthmus, TMR Deputy Director Kris Kuramitsu curated the wonderfully...
Uneasy undercurrents seep from Jo Ann Callis' delusively simple images. Her versatile talent for finding eeriness in the everyday is amply demonstrated in "Now and Then" at ROSEGALLERY. This manifold selection of paintings, sculptures and photographs from the 1970's...
The entry into Tavares Strachan’s “Invisibles” exhibition is a kind of anteroom (Six Thousand Years, 2018) evoking something like a private library or even a Wunderkammer. It’s wall to wall, floor to ceiling array of acrylic vitrines, each the exact same size, holds...