During his year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome, Michael Queenland roamed the streets. Rome is a beautiful city to walk in, filled with ruins and monuments, but like any modern city, it is also cluttered with trash. The detritus—what was thrown...
In the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism developed as an aesthetically pure style, stripped of the political content of 1930s Depression-era art, memorably dismissed by Arshile Gorky as “Poor art for poor people.” That attitude persisted until a counter-reaction set...
The opening movement of “Soul Recordings” is a polka-dot revelry, a bedazzled wake-up call, a cymbal-clap altarpiece, a plastic-bead trumpet blast, and a monster of a skull-ringed, glitter-bombed orchestral chord breaking in fuchsia major. This is Ebony G. Patterson’s...
"Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths," Daniel Boorstin declared in his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Seemingly truer than ever in our post-truth era, this notion offers an apt point of...
Pascual Sisto's immersive video installation Inside Out is a tour de force for both its technical accomplishments and its compelling, albeit obtuse and ambiguous narrative. Sisto has choreographed an approximately twenty-minute symphony of sound, lights and video,...
Did you know that PST isn't quite over? A few shows remain. If you missed key offerings, your best redress might be at Commonwealth & Council, whose main gallery Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza have metamorphosed into a futurological forum for meditation on Latino...
Dion Johnson's abstract paintings inhabit hairline margins between technologic and handmade. The ten examples in "Feel the Sky," Johnson's decadal retrospective at Azusa Pacific University, chart his pictorial evolution while affirming his enduring interests. From...
Given the fact that most spend their lives swathed in textiles, it's amazing how dismissively cloth is viewed. Concern for one's apparel is frequently considered a frivolous feminine purview; garments are treated as utilitarian throwaways to be manufactured in foreign...
In her last show with Rosenstein, Gisela Colon presented her first large free-standing object, a Parabolic Monolith that curved gracefully towards the gallery’s high ceiling and loomed over visitors. For Colon this was a notable translation of her light-and-space...
To striking effect, Finish Fetish painting binds erotic fetish photography in Alex Couwenberg and Steve Diet Goedde's exhibition at Coagula Curatorial. Titled simply "Collaboration," this show tenders surprisingly fecund explorations into how brightly hued abstract...
Curated by artist and photographer Arden Surdam, “Belt Friction,” the current group exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery, explores themes about the complexities of touch and categorizations of human contact. Belying the precision and stakes of the obscure engineering...
A must-see for abstract painting devotees, Xylor Jane's show at Parrasch Heijnen is aptly titled "Magic Square for Earthlings." Adhering to logic so bizarre as to have issued from outer space, her enchanting pictures do indeed appear to possess kinetic thaumaturgy as...
A simple reconfiguring of space at Wilding Cran has yielded a tiny, jewelbox of a gallery for small yet impactful exhibitions. Black Over White by Brazilian artist Maria Lynch is part of Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, the vast project supported by the Getty Foundation...
Jen DeNike and Katherine Bradford have converted Anat Ebgi's small secondary space, AE2, into a mysterious bipartite chamber dominated by the theme of people at sea. Superficially, these two divergent artists' collaboration seems surprising. Yet their palettes...
Some of us respect what makes people different from one another. By withholding judgment of others, we avoid enveloping them in our own contexts, selfishly assuming their futurities. Yet psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz asserts, “Wherever known reality stops, where...
Via her expressionistic brush, Judith Linhares teases latent absurdity and uncanniness from hackneyed pictorial genres. Female nudes, sublime landscapes, exotic animals and floral still lifes are jumbled and transposed into worlds of outré wildness. The Pasadena-born,...
Georganne Deen did not become disillusioned by recent geopolitical events—she’s been feeling that way for a long time. It’s just that her newest paintings reflect certain newly topical aspects within the widening gyre of social entropy, expressing in both style and...
The late Mike Kelley's "Kandors 1999-2011" at Hauser & Wirth is literally and figuratively tenebrous. Deviating from Kelley's typical folksiness, this show exudes a clinical coolness. "Kandors" was his final major series. It centers on the fictional metropolis...
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