The theatricality and malaise of machines characterized by abundance, repetition, necessity, error and expansion, come into full play in Analia Saban’s latest body of work, “Synthetic Self,” which is simultaneously exhibited at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar...
“Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow,” Jasper Marsalis’ exhibition at Kristina Kite Gallery, directs me to hear its entirety with my body. The visitor is tasked with arriving and making contact with his process of transcoding a glitch-like...
Who has not asked oneself at some time or another: Should I disappear into the abyss or should I emerge and be seen? It’s a concern that is, at times, about recognizability and addressability, and if we are ready to situate our bodies which contain the raw materials...
At "Tintin Nina Disco," Vivian Suter’s exhibition at Gaga & Reena Spaulings, I not only learned that changes were a part of her paintings, but that I should be ready to accommodate them. Walking through her show, I began to understand this was a peculiar trait to...
Martine Syms’ solo exhibition, “Loser Back Home,” is an epic, multidimensional collage of material and media. It's a labyrinthine of various avatars and personal significations spanning video, photography, painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, forming a...
Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings of cascading, roaming bodies feel as if they washed up on the shores of my mind like sedimentary particles— suspended and unsettled bits of matter that float and sink. Memories behave like mollusks, secreting trails of life, fading traces...
Memories appear shaky and cinderous, meteoric contusions of being and becoming, volcanic rumblings of the self, perpetually oozing and calcifying. Artist Reggie Burrows Hodges imagines psychic realms knotted and stretched by the spirals of space and time—warped and...
When I first met Max Hooper Schneider in 2015, he wore neon-colored costume jewlery up and down both of his ears. During that time, Max frequented Claire’s (the fast-fashion jewlery retailer) at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica where he was sure to get an...
A series of secreting, grotesquely glamorous portrait paintings rendered in gloopy lip gloss, lustrous nail polish, sparkly eye shadows, tints, and creams pay homage to queer-feminist heroes and the power of the performative body. Intimate in scale, Vaginal Davis’...
Keegan Monaghan's paintings feel like the moldy nooks and crannies of a house or a well-worn shoe, rendered in epic and compact proportions. Their compositions shiver with an eerie affection akin to the apparitional creaking of my old, poorly insulated apartment. The...
Augustina Wang's fantastical world evokes a style of magical realism that is uniquely hers, embracing the immersive aspects of fantasy that function as a means of escapism, allowing more playful, nuanced, and expansive notions of identity to flourish. The femmes that...
Vessels are shadowy shapeshifters—morphic geological bodies that contain ancient and imaginative geometries. A strange uncanniness is embedded in Masaomi Yasunaga’s ceramic vessels, evoking fossils and corporeal architecture. The sheen of some of their glazed surfaces...
Njideka Akunyili Crosby's portraits feel static on the walls of the Huntington Library. Thomas Gainsborough's famous "Blue Boy" painting in the adjacent room suddenly feels stagnant and deflated. The Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist's large-scale collages...
Taking its name from The Chick's 1999 song "Goodbye Earl," Bambou Gili's solo Night Gallery exhibition is a beautiful, yet ominous, exploration of the power and potential of womanhood and female friendship. The exhibition loosely follows the song—the story of Mary...
Richly colored, blossoming pseudo-portraits comprise Vanessa Prager's solo exhibition titled "Portraits" at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Each painting depicts a bloom of vibrant flowers sprouting from the necks of the (assumedly) human subjects. Prager's works are a nod...
It's been 30 years since Martin Puryear's last solo exhibition in Los Angeles—an exciting place to contextualize Puryear's work considering the city's history of burgeoning sculptural practices, especially those relating to assemblage and minimalism. The show includes...
Naked, decapitated women were a favorite amongst the macho surrealists of the 1930s, projecting their desire and power onto phantom breasts and bellies. The female figures in Becky Kolsrud's surrealist paintings might also be missing heads and appendages, but they are...
I crouch down to get a closer look at Kelly Akashi’s blooming burial mound and ponder what it might feel like to photosynthesize. An undulating imprint of the artist’s body bulges beneath the landscape like a bloated corpse. Seedlings sprout through a blanket of...
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