Kristen Morgin’s recent works at Marc Selwyn Fine Art break all the rules, and Los Angeles, the city she’s called home for over 30 years, is her muse and partner-in-crime. Abandoning traditional techniques, the artist creates delicate sculptures with painted, unfired...
A black rain cloud hangs at the doorstep of Shulamit Nazarian’s compelling group show, "Broken Language." The rain cloud—No Pressure (2016) by Wendy White—is a flat, aluminum-composite cartoon of a cloud that hovers at waist-height from the ceiling by nylon rope and...
Kerry James Marshall’s current retrospective at MoCA is less a ‘Pick-of-the-Week’ than a Must of the Year. Regardless of the particulars of each individual’s experience, it is a show that compels serious reevaluation of the historical canon of Western painting (and...
In his latest video installation “Weed Killer” (2017), Patrick Staff approaches the topic of identity by juxtaposing the cancer patient’s experience with that of the transgender person’s and examining the ravaging effects that pharmaceuticals can have upon the...
Periodically, we hear complaints (or alternatively, sighs of gratitude) from one quarter or another that painting is dead; or sometimes more specifically, that abstract painting is dead. At this point it’s far more likely the planet will die before abstract painting....
Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington's complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments...
Mercifully averted, the television writers’ strike was urgent news in Los Angeles, where total triviality-immersion is our raison d’être, and its media coverage was breathless. This would have wryly charmed Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. His 1985...
There’s an enormous tension between the two shows currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museum; yet each resonates all the more powerfully for the juxtaposition. While Material As Metaphor is emphatically abstract, and Keepin’ It Clean explicitly grounded in...
We see the future differently in recent years, as the future presses relentlessly into the present – way beyond ‘future-shock,’ as termed by the futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, into a kind of ‘present shock.’ This manifests in any number of ways, including the way...
Jessie Homer French's paintings nullify categories like sophistication and naiveté; embodying aspects of both, they fit into neither. As implied by the show's title, "Food Chain," harsh realities figure prominently in French's depictions of subjects that include...
Not long ago, I recommended a show, entitled, Concrete Islands (plural), which, although it didn’t exactly shy from the allusion to J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of contemporary urban life, was more specifically inspired by Marcel Broodthaers and the concrete...
The exhibition equivalent of grandmother’s tablespoon of castor oil, It is obvious from the map is unpleasant to consume but leaves one feeling positively virtuous (if in the vein of sadder-but-wiser) for having endured it. Visually, it displays more virtue than...
You might call Liz Young a conceptual artist. One would certainly address some of her earlier work in such terms; and on a certain level, she still is – except that in her hands, the ‘concept’ is really a kind of generative nucleus of ideas, assuming form organically,...
Manuel Ocampo and Irene Iré accomplish the often-difficult task of formulating a joint show that appears cohesive without sacrificing the styles of either artist. Their different styles of abstract and figurative, colorful and subdued seem to be engaged in a...
As its title implies, Amino Acids reaches towards a place elemental and foundational, and implicitly existential – the conditions and pre-conditions of life (or even before life), the processes that generate it; and the conditions of life’s mouldering remains – what...
Mark Twain is generally credited with the quote, “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.” The artist of this exhibition also likes dogs—and cats, owls and even the odd tyrannosaur. As charming as a Saint-Saëns composition and sardonic as an Orwell...
Chicano art is at once a unified cultural expression and an ever-changing record of social and geographic situation. But regional inflections invariably emerge—and, certainly in the case of Chicano art in Los Angeles, regional inflection has profoundly impacted...
The origins of Color Field—one of the more intriguing forms of contemporary abstract painting—seem to lie in 19th-century Romanticism, particularly in a few radically reductive watercolors by J.M.W. Turner. In 2015, when some of these were exhibited at the Getty...