When I walked into OURCHETYPES (2018), an installation by Jade Gordon and Megan Whitmarsh at the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition “Made in L.A.,” I felt as though I had entered a bubble. The soft purple carpeted floors, the ambient voices emanating from the video...
Just as sordid episodes leak bit by bit from grand American narratives, a morbid sense of truculence stealthily emerges from Joshua Hagler's bright palette and superficially quaint old-time imagery. His show "The River Lethe" at the Brand Library encompasses two...
Across a series of ethereal vignettes in Sophie von Hellermann’s new series, the petri dish operates as both a quirky formal motif and a sophisticated allegorical framework. Each of the mostly large-scale paintings (all acrylic on canvas, all 2018), display a picture...
Contorting harlequins bow and sprawl over pastel chairs, rugs, walls and potted houseplants in Sara Berman's paintings. Are these mysteriously leotarded people lost in reverie, engaged in awkward stretching exercises, or merely lolling indolently? It's impossible to...
Imagining an art object made entirely without thought and therefore completely physical is a fascinating exercise. On the other hand, trying to imagine as art something that was entirely wrought by thought without a physical trace (and therefore practice) is equally...
Many conceptual artists employ sign painting techniques, but few execute such craftsmanship on their own. That's partly what renders Norm Laich so intriguing. Overlapping shows at ICA LA and AWHRHWAR complement one another to provide insight into Laich's work as...
Fairies, pixies, anthropomorphic animals, porn actors, newspaper ads, strange symbols, beings from outer space, and leering mystics inhabit colorful, dissolute settings in mostly small-scale works on paper and canvas. These mixed media paintings and drawings by E’wao...
Just inside the house comprising the Women's Center for Creative Work is a cozy den that, except for its moody lighting and nostalgic decor, seems to fit right into its residential setting. Though appearing to have long existed in its current furnished state, this...
"Spotlight—Selections from Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel" is small, but splendid. The exhibit attracts through its display of exuberant colors, masterful artistic skill, and political relevance. It consists of two large-scale paintings from Wiley’s “World...
However ordinary an entity may seem, Torbjørn Rødland will find a way to pose it, light it and accent it so as to produce, as if by alchemy, an uncanny photo that gradually unhinges you the more you gaze. See, for instance, Voodoo Shoe (2017, pictured above), which...
Although it was once relatively straightforward, the relationship between what we refer to as “Nature” and its inverted mirror-image “Culture” has become complicated and problematic. Indeed, the “default position” in the argument as to their reciprocal relationship is...
It is always a thrill to see the Annual City of LA (COLA) exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG). The exhibition is a celebration of a year-long unrestricted fellowship awarded by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to a small group of...
The aesthetics and content of we still here, there (2018), Lauren Halsey’s current installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, are deeply rooted in Afrofuturism—a cultural philosophy that merges magical realism, science fiction and technoculture to...
Eileen Cowin’s work has been loosely categorized as mise-en-scène photography. But overall it is far more self-reflexive, deeply deconstructed and concerned with the relations of language to the apprehension and (re-)construction of reality. More recent work has...
A vague yet piercing look of confrontational horror animates the face of a woman, zaftig and underdressed, with piercing blue eyes, an exaggerated frown, and the upswept hair and ruddy complexion of a latter-day Vermeer milkmaid. Because of art history, and especially...
What does it mean for the life of an artwork when it can be experienced in dramatically different contexts, as a constellation rather than a point on a map? What happens when the legibility of a work is radically challenged by a shift in viewing conditions; do those...
There’s a fabulous tabula-rasa quality present in “The Shape of Cloth.” Leveraging her experience as a masterful furniture designer, Irish-expat Mary Little presents eight existing unbleached canvas sculptures and a single site-specific piece for her exhibition at...
The intimate scale of John O’Reilly’s photomontages belies the broadly ranging ambition and scope of his concerns. The 40-year survey of his work at Zevitas Marcus reveals a consistency of approach spanning the entirety of O’Reilly’s production. The artist, whose work...
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