The idea of a failed utopia is certainly nothing new as those of us who live in any bustling city like Los Angeles will tell you, but the way in which this failure is understood can, and must be, redefined according to the state of disintegration we have become...
A tram cable traverses The Project Room, a tiny cube tucked behind the main gallery space of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. LACE, on Hollywood Boulevard, is the perfect location for educating the public about Los Angeles contemporary art. Sheltered from the...
Mining the territory of surrealism, juxtaposing everyday objects to create metaphoric meanings; Alexis Smith, in collaboration with poet Amy Gerstler, have created a visual journey that encompasses a wide array of associations—some witty, some violent. Working mostly...
When an extraordinary windstorm on November 30, 2011 in the San Gabriel Valley decimated the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, artists helped replenish its 235 felled trees by auctioning works they created from them. Box Collective, a group of...
Small Green Door located in East LA is a full-service creative studio by day and has for the last couple of months opened up as a space for local artists to interact, create and exhibit their work. This month, Manwell Quiza and Leo Estevez put together a show that is...
Robert Mapplethorpe's recent retrospective at LACMA is stunning in its breadth and cohesiveness. What comes across most profoundly is the artist's sensitivity to his subjects. When looking at these images one senses the artist's own investment in these relationships....
Swedish artist Joakim Ojanen creates paintings and ceramic sculptures that are quirky and compassionate. His part-human / part-animal creatures have distinct personalities and are full of feeling and emotion. Though the overall sentiment is a kind of melancholy,...
Shirley Tse is one my favorite artists working in Los Angeles today and her fifth exhibition at Shoshana Wayne is once again astonishingly inventive, moving and full of wonder. Reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois' strangely magnificent totems of the 1950s, Tse's...
In "Allusive Moment," a group show centered on nostalgia, a slow creaking sound fills the gallery and precedes—even preempts—visual encounters with works in the show. The creaking sounds like it might come from the wood beams or floorboards of a childhood home, except...
Joakim Ojanen's playfully enigmatic ceramic sculptures are strangely endearing. Throughout the exhibition, the artist has set up a series of intimate vignettes using small-scale ceramic figures of people with bald heads and duckbill faces engaged in the various and...
The air in Ecaterina Vrana's exhibition partakes heavily of oil odors. Like many other contemporary painters, she applies copious quantities of paint in various ways, slathering it like Spackle, squeezing it out in toothpaste-like ropes, engraving it, and stippling it...
There is a feud taking place at CB1 Gallery; it sets in conflict the looking-glass and the hour-glass—our waning but resistant vigor versus our inexorable putrefaction. In her exhibition, revealingly titled in lower case the self-portrait sessions, Susan Silas...
Cindy Sherman's stunning retrospective at The Broad constitutes a compendium of fiercely iconic imagery that has, for decades, influenced our cultural vision of how women are represented in the media. The exhibition spans 20 years and represents the largest holding...
Street photography is one of the great genres of modernist photography, peaking at mid-century with the work of Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Helen Levitt and others who used the camera to capture the strange little extemporaneous moments one experiences walking city...
Agnes Martin, the great Abstract Expressionist painter (1912–2004), believed in cosmic connection. She labored over her famous grid paintings almost her entire professional life, except for a difficult break from 1968 until the early 1970s, and in them she strove to...
The international group of artists in “Beyond 2°” question the multidimensional impact of natural resource exploitation, in distinct cases, in different global locations, and in damning portraits of corporate gain at the cost of human rights and the environment. The...
Marilyn Minter’s is an art of amplification. This befits a painter and sometime photographer who came of age in New York in the 1970s; her frames of reference are feminism, the AIDS epidemic, photorealism and the Pictures Generation, equally. Minter’s work of the last...
Vestiges of the past can be found all over the West; dead and dying towns are replete with inklings of historic spirit in the forms of half-buried artifacts, wild animals and deserted buildings. Entering Catherine Fairbanks’ exhibition,” Two Chimneys” evoked the...
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