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Desert X Breathes New Life

In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop that the 2023 iteration of Desert X, a young and ambitious biennial, blossoms across the sun-kissed Fantasyland of Palm Springs. ...

Commerce and Culture
Andy Freeberg's Cheekily Captured Art-World Inequalities

by William Moreno

Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New York City and currently residing in Northern California, he began his professional career as a photojournalist working for...

Unknown Landscapes
Jessica Taylor Bellamy Explores the Wetlands

by Lauren Guilford

“Can you smell the earth exhaling? I love the smell of moisture coming out of the ground,” exclaims artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy, inhaling the sweetness after the drizzling rain as we embark on our Sunday afternoon hike through the wetlands of South Los Angeles. As we descend the muddy hillside draped in bright yellow wildflowers, we share a moment of childhood nostalgia, recalling wild mustard...

Of Murals and Mullahs
The Revolutionary Graffiti of Iran

by Josh Herman

It began with marker on concrete: “Dear Zhina, you will not die. Your name will be a symbol.” Zhina was the Kurdish name of Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, the 22-year-old was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her headscarf too loosely. While in custody, she was murdered. Mahsa’s grandfather wrote those words on her gravestone. #MahsaAmini did become a rallying cry, igniting...

“Britt Ransom: Arise and Seek”
at Pitzer College Art Galleries

by Renee Reizman

When stepping into Britt Ransom’s solo exhibition, you face an archway. This reproduction, created with 3D scans, prints and a CNC machine, revives a signature piece of the Tawawa Chimney Corner house in Wilberforce, Ohio. Today, only the arch’s stone pillars remain, but Ransom dug into her family archives to find a photograph suitable for reference. In “Arise and Seek,” Ransom amplifies her...

Zak Smith and Making Art for A World That Is Falling Down
An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings — Torrance Art Museum - March 25, - May 6, 2023

by Ezrha Jean Black

Full disclosure up-front: I am well-acquainted with Zak Smith as an artist. Before we met (in 2010), I was aware of his work only because of his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and not incidentally because his work for that show had (what was for me) an irresistible hook: Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The Torrance Art Museum will be...

All That Glitters
The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta

by William Moreno

One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of myself at the age of five or so, composed by my father. Along with my siblings’ pictures and beyond the sentimentality, these portraits have become distinctive family emblems and historical markers, wrought at a time of optimism and possibility. That singular ability to capture transitory moments and ephemeral character is the essence of portraiture,...

Brilliant Veils
Amir H. Fallah Creates Vibrant Artworks That Question Cultural Boundaries

by George Melrod

Entering a room of portraits by Amir H. Fallah, the first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t see their faces: the figures are cloaked. In one, the subject sits draped in a richly patterned blue-and-purple shawl, cradling what looks like a gilded African head in its lap. In another, a figure with purple arms strikes a pose seemingly drawn from ancient Near Eastern art, swathed in a lustrous...

On the Nose
Helen Chung Talks Anatomy

by Ezrha Jean Black

The afternoon we agree to meet for a quick Q&A over drinks, Helen Chung arrives at the restaurant slightly late (though not much later than me)—fittingly enough, from a commissioned portrait sitting. Engaged by the process, conversation and the resulting portrait itself, the subject has kept her somewhat longer than originally anticipated—commissioning a second portrait on the spot. ...

Frames Within Frames
The Photography of Grant Mudford

by Jody Zellen

Grant Mudford is a photographer with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1944, he studied architecture at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Since the 1980s he has functioned as a commercial photographer and became well known for his architectural and editorial work, along with his portrait photography. Last...

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Reviews

Haena Yoo
at Murmurs Gallery

Brushing my hair as a girl, I remember my hand growing heavier with each stroke as I entertained the wicked urge to unearth every girlish tendril in one fell swoop. The manic, menacing quality of Yoo's strange architecture reminds me of these early manifestations of...

Gabriel Madan
at Gattopardo

The slapdash brushwork of Gabriel Madan’s work suggests a personal but ultimately fleeting investment in his subjects. The style and content are both Pop but not too Pop - an oddball mix of semi-famous celebrities and obscure kitsch. By loosely hand-painting...

Austin Lee
at Jeffrey Deitch

Some shows suck, and some shows barely avoid sucking. Austin Lee seems capable of great things while failing by a long mile. The paintings depict brightly hued, crying, Gumby-like cartoon figures. They are clearly intended to be emotive but fail to elicit emotion; the...

Betye Saar
a Roberts Projects

Mojotech is Betye Saar's abbreviation for the "magic of technology" and the title of her large-scale installation from 1987 on view at Roberts Projects. Standing at the horizon of Saar's trailing altarpiece, I'm reminded of the language of trees and how they...

Brett Ginsburg
at Matthew Brown

This show feels like something that I would have walked in and out of quickly about twenty years ago. The paintings—hazy process-based geometric abstractions—artfully avoid the conventions of painting without actually saying anything. The pink prints look like...

Piper Bangs
at Megan Mulrooney Gallery

Juicy larvae play amongst feral grasses. Slugs laze on velvety pillows of tufted lichen. Cornucopias of ripened fruits germinate in tendrilled verdant habitats. I can’t help but delight in Piper Bangs’ paintings, resonating with my love of dirt and belief in the magic...

PEER REVIEW
Kelly Wall on Ellen Schafer

Known for her life-sized stained-glass sculptures of intertwined lawn chairs, Kelly Wall uses sculpture and time to explore perspective in different ways, turning familiar objects into something uncanny and almost disorienting. In her recent outdoor show at Various...

Markus Lüpertz & Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Michael Werner

There is something inherently contentious about an exhibition juxtaposing the work of a contemporary artist with another whose work has some place within the art-historical canon, more particularly one of the most resonant antecedents of the late 19th- and early...

Bernard Cooper
Gattopardo

If you’ve read any of Bernard Cooper’s books, you know about the care with which he constructs his sentences, how he gives each detail its own breathing room. (If not, Maps to Anywhere [1990] and his 2006 memoir The Bill from My Father are especially recommended.)...

Kyungmi Shin
Craft Contemporary

In The Head in the Tiger’s Mouth (2021), the first composition in Kyungmi Shin’s kaleidoscopic exhibition, my eyes immediately landed on the luminous collection of swirls and stripes suggesting the calligraphic form of a tiger before catching on the colorful tableau...

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