Challenging traditional conceptions of photography, Klea McKenna creates embossed photograms based on haptic, rather than visual, impressions. In a darkroom, she generates each image by pressing light-sensitive paper against an object and thus capturing the item's...
Lita Albuquerque’s Auric Field paintings have graced museums and galleries throughout the Southland and beyond since 1998. With each meditative piece featuring a black background, surrounding a gold or silver-leafed circle, which itself has a blue aura, the effect...
It is not uncommon for an artist to begin with images from a personal archive amassed over time and use these fragments as a range of raw material. Anthony Giannini's mixed media paintings are all about recontextualization. He draws from a wide range of sources...
Two artists exploring aspects of their Islamic heritage and personal identities converge in a pair of enchanting shows at New Image Art Gallery. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, Brooklyn-based artist Hiba Schahbaz applies her rigorous undergraduate training in...
"WISHFUL THINKIN'," the title of Sarah Cromarty's show at Klowden Mann, indicates its tenor of hope against hope. Cromarty layers cardboard, digital prints, paint, glitter, rhinestones and sundry other materials to create 3D paintings affecting appearances of escapist...
There is something delicious about the commingling of delight and horror, or really any opposition of sensations pushed to their extremes: confectionary sweetness with an aftertaste on the wrong side of savory—the foreshadowing of decay; the sweetness of...
Channeling Death Valley into downtown LA, William Lamson has transformed Make Room into "Badwater," an ecologically themed installation as poetically evocative as it is scientifically ingenious. Via an elaborate system of pumps, fans, hoses, timers and other...
Positing achievements in the decorative arts as a viable window into any culture’s zeitgeist, Lari Pittman takes his flair for generating psychosocial motifs to a genuinely exciting new place in his latest collection. As the exhibition title hints, the installation...
Robert Yarber's spellbinding nocturnal realms feel at once familiar and otherworldly. Each of his paintings is far weirder than the sum of its parts, with generic characters and unplaceable urban locales coalescing into bizarre, morbid scenarios. Yarber's mysterious...
"Secrets for the Moon" at University of La Verne's Harris Gallery unites two artists, Ichiro Irie and Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia. Each employs quotidian materials to create totemic artworks in meditation upon his personal history and cultural roots. Both Irie and Hurtado...
Prints and drawings by three generations of Inuit women offer a fascinating glimpse into remote Canadian Arctic life at the Armory Center for the Arts. "Akunnittinni," the show's Inuktitut title translated as "between us," fittingly summarizes its convergence of a...
There she is, as if alive. She is haunting and haunted; a Hollywood Miss Havisham in her crumbling mansion. She was once a real person, a somebody, a fond recollection. But now gone gray in her decaying cinema—with seating just for one—she resurrects herself nightly...
John Divola is fascinated with the ruins we leave behind. He’s a trespasser by trade, wandering into suburban homes that have been abandoned or condemned, using his camera to document forgotten living rooms that have been stripped of human comforts and left to random...
When does an exhibition title effectively amount to a viewer advisory? I’m not sure Harry Dodge would consider the title of his current show at JOAN gallery, “Works of Love,” an instance of this. It’s not in any sense a caution, and the titles of the individual works...
Orientalist painting fantasies satirically intertwine with characters of anti-colonial resistance in “Les Femmes d’Alger,” Asad Faulwell’s ongoing portrait series recently exhibited at DENK. Drawing upon the rich legacies of Algerian War history, Islamic aesthetics...
Mining one’s own archive—especially if you are Michael Jackson’s personal photographer—can become a fruitful catalyst for exploration. Todd Gray’s recent works, framed photographs that are collaged together to become in essence bas-relief sculptures, juxtapose images...
The Seattle-born painter, sculptor and graphic designer Cleon Peterson has created a true battlefield experience with his new exhibit “Blood & Soil,” satirically making use of the 19th-century German slogan that expressed an idealization of racial identity and...
With relations between Russia and Western liberal democracies strained to the point of rupture, the rise of nationalistic fervor and anti-democratic forces on all sides, and notions of dissent and finding a viable way forward taking on greater urgency with each...
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