I will not lie, Jim Hodges is one of my favorite artists, and the reasons why are innumerable. Like the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, allow me to “count the ways.” His recent retrospective at the Hammer Museum, entitled "Give More Than You Take"...

Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch seem to have channeled the Bauhaus’ Oskar Schlemmer—not an easy task, but one certainly worth considering. Working in the vein of sculptural theater, Fitch and Trecartin have created a strangely alluring alternate universe using “a...

Robert Olson was a colleague and fellow art world traveler. From the beginning his work was marked with a deep sense of isolation, and it this deeply private motivation that suffuses his retrospective at the Luckman Art Center. Spanning a twenty-year period, the show...

We’ve all played gin rummy, or been beat at poker at some time in life, but Mark Licari, in his first exhibition at Koplin Del Rio, reconstitutes the everyday playing card as a luminous object of desire, violence, death and impermanence, wherein the drawing on each...

Damn, Kiel Johnson knows how to draw -- not to mention he’s an amateur beekeeper; thus the inspiration for his newest exhibition at Mark Moore where strangely kinetic, hive-like utopias appear to be unraveling, creating a damnable system of ultimate unreliability....

 Transformation is never easy, but almost always necessary, and in the case of Zachary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, a cause for undaunting exploration. Their most recent collaboration, aptly titled “Post/Relationship/X” explores the intimate moments within a relationship...

In mythology a chimera is described as a strange hybrid monster composed of the parts of more than one animal -- usually depicted as a lioness with full breasts, with the head of a goat and a tail with a snake's head. Stas Orlovski astonishingly beautiful and poetic...

 Group shows are always fun especially when they serve as a means of reminiscing as is the case at Edward Cella Art and Architecture Gallery which is soon to relocate to a new facility in 2015. Spanning 11 years, the show is a survey of the artists who have exhibited...

No doubt The Miaz Brothers   (from Venice, Italy) believe in ghosts, weirdly seductive apparitions, or at the very least “antimatter perception.” Indeed the latest installment of their unique vision achieves a fuzzy gratification, deliberately blurring large format...

Rashid Johnson’s newest effort, "Islands," like subsequent exhibitions of his work at the David Kordansky Gallery encompasses a difficult, if necessary journey into and beyond a constructed human identity. In this case, Johnson takes inspiration from the exceptional...

 The art of successful collaboration involves the ability to transcend the individual vision in favor of the project as a whole, and Rochelle Botello and Marion Lane have certainly done just that in their exhibition, aptly titled Double Trouble. Lane’s elegant...

What can I say that hasn’t already been said about two of the greatest artists in history, except that Van Gogh and Kandinsky, not to mention other lesser known expressionists like Gabrielle Münter, and Franz Marc helped to shape the way we look at the world today....

I overheard a student of mine say “Nobody uses pencils anymore. They are just so old school.” This made me very sad until I saw Kio Griffith’s recent curatorial effort, "Draftpunk" at Autonomie Projects. I was reminded that not only is the pencil very much alive, but...

Regarding John Altoon—all I can say is GO TO LACMA NOW and see Altoon’s stunning, inspiring first major retrospective. Altoon was a visionary, but more that perhaps, he was deeply committed to the process of painting and willing to see where that journey took him....

As a viewer, one must “bear witness” to Steve McQueen’s artwork, which constitutes a totally awe inspiring engaging sensory experience. McQueen’s 1998 video installation titled Drumroll, in combination with his series of 56 photographs of gutters and dams in and...

Mike Kelley was a ruthless investigator, of everything from Mother Mary, to rainbow afro wigs to stuffed toys to the complex mechanism, which was his own mind. The works that comprise this retrospective are alternately humorous and aggressive, quietly lurking and...

Nathan MabryI can think of nothing as “fiercely alluring” (literally) as the open-mouthed skull of a T-Rex, and one with a luscious bronze patina to boot! Nathan Mabry delivers another provocative and mythologically charged visual opus at the Cherry Martin Gallery....