Care for a pickled egg? How about a mayonnaise sandwich? Or maybe you’d prefer apple butter? With these questions and a simple spread of food with which to ply visitors, Michael Lewis Miller gently draws his audiences into his performances, which arise almost...
Known for her minimal interventions in public spaces, creating subtle shifts in environments, either visually or with sound, New Orleans-based Zarouhie Abdalian has garnered significant acclaim. With four components considering the concept of work, “To History”...
In his recent work, Jesse Benson uses appropriation to dismantle “appropriate” interpretation. But unlike other painters who might pursue this goal through dramatic, even offensive subject matter, Benson does something subtler, de-familiarizing recognizable, seemingly...
Emily Counts' sculptures appear suspended at an intriguing juncture of covetable fashion and female shamanism. Of motley materials and contrasting forms, Counts' esoteric abstract shapes evoke mystical amulets or dreamcatchers; while their candy-hued glossy surfaces...
There’s a lot to learn from Ellen Gallagher’s new exhibition. For example, it turns out Herman Melville was an Afrofuturist. And that the Atlantic Ocean is the original abstract expressionist. Also, that it is possible to make a map of something you can never see. On...
Each painting currently displayed at Zevitas Marcus evokes the satisfyingly voyeuristic sensation of Sarah McEneaney or Ann Toebbe allowing you to peer through a window or skylight into her studio or home. This show's compendious title, "Home Work," bespeaks...
Rallying against overwhelmingly white, male perspectives in art history, “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the California African American Museum (CAAM) is not to be missed. The exhibition highlights the stylistically varied work of over 30...
The provocation of vulnerability has long been a mainstay of impactful art. Video and film media, given their reliance on the staging of exposure and emotional confrontation, are no exception. An exhibition...
In Andi Magenheimer’s “HpPy BRdDY,” a smiling and limbless dinosaur’s engorged human breasts graze the reflecting water below, imperturbably still while a rhododendron sheds its petals endlessly from the shore, the sunset curving into and around the creature’s...
It's unique to see a distant artist delving deeply into our obscure local lore. In his current show at Gagosian, New York-based painter Walton Ford travels far back in time to the land of the Natural History Museum and La Brea Tar Pits. The exhibition's title,...
Spiritual aspirations present this fundamental dilemma: we exist as physical beings in a material world of far more palpable empirical reality than anything incorporeal, with pragmatic demands inevitably more urgent than intangibles. Without surplus resources, how...
Lynda Benglis' sculptures are motley in makeup, manifold in their evocations of natural features and visceral gestures. Variously forged of steel, bronze, polyurethane, chicken wire, handmade paper, glitter and clay, her splanchnic forms droop, lean, ooze, peel,...
Admirers of feminist artist Miriam Schapiro’s (1923-2015) work may be surprised to learn that this influential woman who founded the Feminist Art program at CalArts with artist Judy Chicago and helped organize Womanhouse (1972), an installation project with over 25...
So often is the label Surrealism tacked onto fantasy art that, in descriptions of contemporary work, it's become practically synonymous with utopian scenes or lowbrow. Kelly McLane's loose dystopic pictures are the opposite of such reductionistic definitions; yet she...
In her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Winnipeg-based artist Wanda Koop investigates the idea of dislocation. This dislocation is reflected in the exhibition title, In Absentia, and results from the fact that Koop’s paintings of New York City where actually created...
In a corridor just inside Ghebaly Gallery, a faded sign, barely legible for its low contrast, reads "Déjà Vu." This isn't merely a placard bearing the title of Sayre Gomez' show; it's an integral painting whose dual function niftily preludes the awaiting parade of...
USC Fisher Museum's "James hd Brown: Life and Work in Mexico" is one of the few PST: LA/LA shows devoted to a SoCal-born expatriate. Born in Glendale in 1951, Brown settled in Oaxaca in 1995 after having lived in Europe and New York. This exhibition is ingrained with...
It’s often said that the victor writes the history, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that men, and society in general, have been victorious in writing an exclusionary narrative after ignoring women for centuries. Art history books, museums and other established...
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