I’m looking at Second Sight (2016) by Christina McPhee, which carries the same title as her solo exhibition currently on view at Cerritos Art Gallery. This work is an abstract, dense and expressive work on paper: there are marks upon marks, which create a layered...
Sometimes the bravest show can be one that parses its meanings seemingly by millimeters in the sheer sense structures to be elucidated between one work and the next. This is in pronounced contrast to the relatively unfiltered cascades of sensation that dominate many...
"A Noiseless Patient Spider" at Vacancy is an experimental mix of sculpture, painting, assemblage, and installation. It’s surprising for a show in such a small space to pull off so many varying aspects, yet "Patient Spider" does just that. Linnea Kniaz interacts with...
Exiting Electric Earth, Doug Aitken’s immersive, multichannel narrative installation first presented in 1999 and immediately confronting Twilight (2016), an eerie, translucent ghost-like freestanding replica of a now obsolete pay phone that pulsates from light to dark...
Henry Taylor has described his figurative painting, which is not infrequently straight portraiture, as landscape; and to press the point, he has taken the further step of mounting the work within a gallery prepared from the floor up, in effect treating the space as...
Visual affinities extend throughout Sam Falls’ solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, suggesting relationships between natural phenomena and man-made objects, while also developing a thematic unity for Falls’ heterogeneous production. A pair of texturally rich photographs...
A descendent of samurai-era Bizen sword makers, Miya Ando was first introduced to metalworking as a child while living in a Japanese Buddhist Temple. In homage to her ancestral heritage, she has since looked to this medium (whose impermanent properties convey the...
Through her show, “Paper or Plastic?”, at the innovative Mixografia studio, Analia Saban breathes new life into plastic grocery bags while highlighting their vapidity as an aging commercial technology.In earlier bodies of work, Saban cast mundane objects in pure paint...
The black-and-white photographs of Carina Brandes, which capture her ritualistically enigmatic performances for a self-timed camera, suffer a paradoxical fate: they’re modestly powerful images grounded in a uniquely European sensibility, but ultimately leave little...
Standing erect on pedestals, Colette Robbins’ seven skeletal sculptures twist and bend like limbs, frown and gape like skulls, and yet they are clearly not figurative. Rather, the ethereal totems coax the mind to create fiction from their abstract...
For over 35 years Karla Klarins has painted the built landscape, now presented in a survey exhibition entitled “Subdividing the Landscape.” In the early 1980s she gained attention for her expressive and unique sculptural relief paintings of downtown Los Angeles...
While earlier exhibitions used horse racing as a point of departure and a metaphor, perhaps, for the handicapping aspect of the art world, “FROM HERE,” recently on view at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, focuses on artist Sadie Barnette’s impressions of her...
In Ellen Cantor’s restaging of Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women, the landmark show that she originally curated in 1993 at the David Zwirner Gallery, there are the obvious standouts: Yoko Ono’s Object in Three Parts—Revolution (1966),...
“Please recall the name Medea,” asks the narrator in the opening minutes of Cara Benedetto’s video currently on view at Night Gallery. While conjuring the Greek mythological character who avenges her husband’s betrayal by killing their children, the video pans down...
We Americans live in interesting times. The old Chinese curse has come home to roost long before the country itself has supplanted our economic and cultural hegemony. We have more freedom, more choices generally – but we’re not equally informed or empowered to sort...
“The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, / I’m getting used to it now….” The words are from a 1979 Talking Heads song, “Life During Wartime,” which inspired the title and concept for this group show of five artists – Sadie Barnette, Aaron Fowler, Farrah Karapetian,...
Constructed in a labyrinthine series of rooms, each claustrophobic space arranged around a faux fireplace and punctuated by cardboard forms that resemble felled trees, Stand-alone, Thomas Hirschhorn’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, intentionally overwhelms with...
It is almost an existential question – of art, creation, medium – the ‘still point of the turning world … (w)here the dance is,’ to paraphrase Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” Helen Frankenthaler was already well into her early maturity by 1962, which is where this 25 year...
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