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...
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...
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, 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Julia Daultat China Art ObjectsJulia Dault’s recent exhibition “Rhythm Nation,” at China Art Objects feels like a trip down memory lane, or more specifically, a journey back through 1980’s color field abstraction where artists like Jack Whitten and David Reed were...
Matt Saunders at Blum & PoeIn the Hindu language of Sandskrit the word shanti means the perfect calm. Matt Saunders' images bring this kind of quietude to mind, and despite the highly involved technical process by which he makes these evocative and sometimes...
William Kentridge's dazzling "The Refusal of Time," at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, marries science and art in an installation that comprises a 30-minute, 5-channel video featuring live stop-action animation, the spoken word and music projected on three walls of a...
The desert is a surprising place, and we see it anew when artists are drawn there by site-specific projects such as “Spectacular Subdivision,” which took place recently in Wonder Valley over the weekend of April 4 through 6. About 35 artists made work for two sites,...
Christopher Russell at Mark Moore GalleryAs the poet William Butler Yeats wrote in his seminal poem, The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Christopher Russell understands this concept better than most. His recent exhibition, “GRFALWKV”...
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