The Queen of Los Angeles will not allow her history to be erased, and neither will Barbara Carrasco’s 1981 mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective. Censored swiftly after its completion by the commissioners, the mural collected dust in storage for decades and is...
Barbara Carrasco
Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz at Highways Performance Space
Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz defied time and space with her sci-fi thriller disguised as a dance, “Rain Glass Vortex.” In the performance, Cruz wrestled with her dance partners: her walker, Pluto, and her leg braces. She moved her arms and core in jerky, robotic movements....
Prima Sakuntabhai at The Fulcrum Press
This show is all smoke and mirrors, but in a good way. Prima Sakuntabhai plays with transparencies, reflections, and shadows to recapture their great-grand-uncle’s favorite haunts. The elder relative is Pridi Banomyong, a Thai immigrant who adopted revolutionary ideas...
Duelling Reviews: Joseph Beuys at The Broad
The 40-Year Funeral By Pat Williams There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two...
Olivia Mole at Gattopardo
The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the...
Jingze Du at Steve Turner
Jingze Du’s exhibition “True Colors” features the most well-executed oils in recent memory and all of them are of cute animals. The animals are mostly uninflected white, and their cuteness is eerie and synthetic. The painting itself is restricted to points of defining...
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris at Walter Maciel Gallery
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel...
Hiroshi Sugimoto at Lisson Gallery
The entrance to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” is partially blocked by a curved wooden wall. The wall commands recognition, separating the exhibition from the outside world. It immediately invites the visitor to...
Lauren Bon at Honor Fraser
If the sculpture of concrete’s last big cultural “moment” (sometime in the 2010s) was typified by figurative and abstract cement statuary that merely winked at its Home Depot provenance, Lauren Bon foregrounds this material in all its blunt, obdurate force. “Concrete...
Matthew Lax at Human Resources
On a rainy Saturday in early November, I spent the better part of an hour sitting cross-legged inside an XL dog crate. I did so in order to watch the screens mounted to the crate’s interior that broadcast Matthew Lax’s two-channel video, A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG,...
Gustav Metzger at Hauser & Wirth
The re-examination—some would say reawakening—of radical artistic movements in the postwar era has exposed the technological as well as ideological stew out of which the digital activism of today’s art emerged. The performance and conceptual art of the 1960s...
Walead Beshty at Regen Projects
Walead Beshty brings five distinct bodies of work together in his exhibition “Profit and Loss” at Regen Projects. In each of these projects, Beshty recasts familiar urban materials (vinyl, newspaper, cement) to expose the undercurrent of suffering and desperation in...
PICCLE P at Sunset Blvd., et al
It is a high season for Piccle P. People with no prior special interest in street art keep bringing him up on their stories and reels, asking about the work, and pointing out Piccles while driving—though they don’t know his name. “The heart guy,” they call him—because...
Tim Presley at SADE
I know when it’s time to eat my words and admit that, perhaps, I was wrong. A few years ago, I proclaimed (often) that I hated portraiture. In my defense, this was a period of overabundance, when Chloe Wise reigned supreme, and I was sick of seeing beautiful, posed...
Richard Hawkins at GAGA & Reena Spaulings
In typical Richard Hawkins fashion, his videos “Blood Everywhere” feature unclad male celebrities (Timothée Chalamet and Bill Skarsgård) slowly starting to rot, eyes blackening and blood gushing. Chalamet undergoes a literal “twink death,” while skipping over the...
Math Bass at Vielmetter
Reminiscent of the visual languages of midcentury graphic design, children’s book illustrations, and corporate branding, Math Bass’s paintings are unnervingly poppy. The language consists of cartoonishly pared-down symbols (alligator, cloud, speech bubble, to name a...
Chase Hall at David Kordansky
There is just something about Chase Hall’s mark-making. He covers the faces of his subjects in stylized patterns that resemble African masks before staining the cotton with coffee. The artist’s marks make a lifeguard’s flotation device resemble an African shield....
Haunting House at Departure Lounge
The last time Jamison Edgar curated Matthew McGaughey was at Honor Fraser, where I had VR sex with the Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. I wore goggles with Chip’s POV and had an unforgettable sexual experience with a creepily uncanny version of Joanna through...
