It's amazing how much effort, skill and intellect Neil Raitt directs towards donning the ornate trappings of kitsch. Visitors enter his installation through a painstakingly contrived threshold whose tree-shaped outline resembles that of a rearview mirror air...
"Bhabharosi," the title of Simphiwe Ndzube's show and several works therein, is a neologism the artist coined from the words "barbarous" and "rose" in isiXhosa, his native language, to refer to his protagonists. As insinuated, a mood of bittersweetness transfuses the...
While Americans condemn Mexican lawlessness, much illegal drug trade south of the border is driven by U.S. demand. In his PST: LA/LA show titled "Artempatía" (Empathy Art), Mexico City artist Emiliano Gironella Parra imports a sampling of the horrors we usually only...
Known for his immersive cake-like installations, Scott Hove’s latest makings offer wry commentary upon the demise of today’s political, economic, and ecological landscapes in “Last Ticket for the Beauty Train,” a two-part exhibition presented by KP Projects. On...
County fairs usually aren't noted for their art; but this year's is an exception, with Millard Sheets Art Center hosting a fine PST LA/LA exhibition, "Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez: One Path Two Journeys." Hernández and Valdez were, respectively, members of...
There are two points of entry into Fran Siegel's exquisite exhibition, "Lineage Through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil." One is purely visual: admiring the unique way the individual drawings and collages are sewn together and suspended from the ceiling; noticing...
In his short video Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), on view at Blum & Poe gallery, Jim Shaw appropriates the style of the opening narration from Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone. In this piece, a wig-wearing narrator delights in relating alluring...
There are a number of emotional responses to walking through a graveyard: firstly, satisfaction that one is walking at all and not an insensate resident; another, for those seduced by death and rejected by the quick, is the camaraderie of obliging, complementary...
Culled from five different series of Naida Osline’s photographic work since 2007, “Florescence” examines an arc of her practice that is focused on taxonomies of flora and fauna. The exhibition title, drawn from her photographic series of the same name, can be taken to...
Roughly four years ago, Paul McCarthy opened the sprawling installation “WS” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, platforming (and rupturing) the domestic fantasy at the center of Disney’s Snow White fairy tale while playing out a vivisection of its narrative on...
Generally, rubbish is quickly dispatched and secreted from public consciousness—or at least ignored. Constance Mallinson, however, revels in discards’ improbable pulchritude while questioning society’s prodigious dispersion of throwaway images, ideas and sundries. In...
Peter Alexander’s true subject has always been light—both in his earlier, luminescent cast-resin sculptures, which he abandoned for several decades for health reasons, and in these captivating LAX series paintings from the 1990s. In the first half of the galleries...
Monet’s haystacks, Baldessari’s discs, Warhol’s everything—there are a number of artists who have worked in series specifically plotted as “the same picture in different colors” throughout art history, for diverse reasons—phenomenological comparison, critique of...
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection of Arms and Armor is one of the most encyclopedic in the world. Not only does it house more than 14,000 objects that range from the Fifth through the 19th century, but it’s the Museum’s most visited gallery with...
In Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” we meet a small, strange creature lurking on the narrator’s stairway and in his foyer. No animal, but a spool affixed to wooden crosspieces and trailing bits of thread, it’s a “broken-down remnant” composed of scraps, an...
Curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, and inspired by Anthony Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), the loosely Africa-centric, two-artist exhibition at Richard Taittinger Gallery, “Ethics in a World of Strangers: Nirveda Alleck and...
We are accustomed to sight as an experience of things coming into clearer focus the longer we look at them. Images seem fuzzy, we stare, maybe squint a bit, and they sharpen up. One of the special features of paintings by Peter Lodato is that they enact the opposite....
Straddling all sorts of categories, Nick Lowe's pictures are defined by their byzantine intermediacy between stretched canvases and works on paper, paintings and drawings, fanciful dreamscapes and pedestrian scenes. Lowe possesses an uncanny knack for agglomerating...
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