Rachel Lauren KasterRachel Kaster creates startlingly effective visual conversations between seemingly disparate objects including glass, found wood and bronze. Many of Kaster’s visual relationships depend on tangible visceral associations; glass is so fragile, yet...

Jaime Scholnick: Redesigned, Repurposed, Re-everythinged
The first object one encounters upon entering Jaime Scholnick’s exhibition at CB1 Gallery is Redesigned, Repurposed, Re-everythinged (2014), a computer numerical control-milled walnut sculpture replica of Styrofoam packaging material that protects a MacBook Pro during...

Ai Weiwei: According to What?
“Ai Weiwei: According to What?” at the Brooklyn Museum opens the parameters for making and defining art by referencing contemporary China and the artist’s struggles as a political dissident.Ai’s relentless tweets, blogs, and photographic chronicling are an ongoing...
Night Terrors And Day Dreams at The Loft at Liz’s
Night Terrors And Day Dreams Edgar Allen Poe, the undisputed master of darkness once said, “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night,” suggesting that the light can be a necessary benediction just as the dark...
Mary Weatherford at David Kordansky Gallery
Mary Weatherford Mary Weatherford’s first exhibition at David Kordansky finds its roots in the powerful gestural mark making of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. These powerful large-scale paintings conflate the loose semi autonomic gestural...
Maura Bendett at Edward Cella Art + Architecture
Maura Bendettat Edward Cella Art + Architecture In this her newest exhibition at Edward Cella, aptly titled “Vespid Empire,” Maura Bendett has hit the ball not only out of the park but well into the stratosphere. In nature, vespids are colonial nesting wasps, and...

The Party Rolls Along: Whitney Biennial
Except for those closely involved with it, I can’t imagine many people actually look forward to the Whitney Biennial. It feels like one of those unavoidable social obligations you reluctantly drag yourself to, but once you’re there you begin—in part because of your...

Local Color at OCMA
The subtitle “Works from the Orange County Museum of Art” made it clear that the exhibition on view there January 11 through March 9 was a collection show. But the main title, “California Landscape into Abstraction,” at first seemed an awkward and obscure attempt to...

Taryn Simon
Taryn Simon, widely considered today’s premier conceptual photographer, is essentially an investigative taxonomist. She rose to fame with her series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” (2007), in which she secured access to normally closed-off sites like...

Dustin Yellin
At first glance Dustin Yellin’s sculptures seem to be all about process and accumulation. They are a technical feat created by fusing layers of collaged and painted quarter-inch glass sheets into blocks that weigh thousands of pounds. These three-dimensional works can...

Leonardo Cuervo
Few artists can walk the fine stylistic line between illustration and painting, but Leonardo Cuervo’s work succeeds. Walking into “IN FABULA,” one experiences adoration and fear: perfect women, shining bugs, all seemingly imbued with an internal turmoil. The works...

Claudia Joskowicz
It’s been said all literature is comprised of two stories: man goes on a journey; stranger comes to town. In her two-channel video, Sympathy for the Devil (2011), Claudia Joskowicz examines these alternate sides of the same coin, exploring the exile of two...

B. Wurtz
Even more than, say, Richard Tuttle, to whom he might (uneasily) be compared—B. Wurtz tests a viewer’s relationship to objects and construction of their meaning, significance, even utility. This encompasses relations among objects, and by extension, our relationship...

Alyson Souza
California artist Alyson Souza creates paintings and sculptures that draw parallels between man-made relics—vintage electrical equipment, say, or battered geographer’s tools—and nature forms of similar shape, texture, or function. An immense head of cabbage opens to...

Timothy Washington
Always following his impulses, Timothy Washington is an artist’s artist, and in the Southern California African-American artist’s community is one of the last remaining practitioners from South Central LA’s Golden Age of Assemblage (late 1960s to mid-’70s). Washington...

Devon Tsuno
Environmental undertones, bright poppy color and a sense of collaboration create a striking combination for Devon Tsuno’s exhibition “Watershed,” which is split into two distinct sections. Tsuno is native to LA and an educator enamored with the Los Angeles River...

William T. Wiley
The guise of the paint-slinging hero never quite fit William T. Wiley, whose early folksy, Western-styled brand of funk art, fueled by Abstract Expressionist and conceptual underpinnings, atrocious puns and general anarchy, was christened “Dude Ranch Dada” by Hilton...

Michelle Segre
It is rare to see an artist make a shift in their work as dramatic as the one Michelle Segre made between her shows at Derek Eller in 2008 and 2011. Within a few short years, she went from making fastidious, slightly-surreal beeswax and papier mâché sculptures to...