Articles
NEEDLEWORK IN THE SERVICE OF SUBVERSION "Iron Halo" by Sal Salandra
For the past few weeks, Iron Halo, a catalog of Sal Salandra’s art, has occupied my coffee table, stopping everyone who sees it in their tracks. The cover is a detail from a work called Human Ashtray: an ultramarine background surrounds a bearded man wearing a dog collar, his head restrained by a disembodied hand. Two cigars flick ashes into his salivating mouth. But it’s not the shocking nature of the picture that commands a double take—the real reward arrives when you notice that the image is composed entirely of cross-stitched thread. Salandra, a septuagenarian artist with no formal art education, has practiced needlework for more than...
FABRICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Ahree Lee Weaves Seamlessly Between Art and Technology
Multidisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Ahree Lee started her career focused on video work. In 2001, she took on her first major long-term project employing the repetitive and somewhat pedestrian habit of taking a daily selfie. The resulting images were transformed into a mesmerizing visual diary, Me, 2001, which became a prescient viral YouTube sensation. Envisioned as a lifetime effort, it inspired a tsunami of imitators and was arguably one of the internet’s first time-lapse self-portrait videos. The video works were a precursor to her parallel passion—weaving. At one point she had a stint in tech, which, notably, is connected to that...
Metro Art THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY
Visiting the three new Downtown LA Metro stations recently, I found myself intrigued with how artists commissioned by Metro Art use the transparency of glass to design artworks. The street level of the stations is enclosed by glass, both to allow natural light in and to show people outside what is inside, and vice versa. It creates a certain built-in welcome to pedestrians, both those planning to hop aboard a train as well as those who haven’t yet. The new Little Tokyo/Arts District Station is a wonderful example of transforming something functional into something beautiful, even joyful. The glass panels enclosing the entry deck bear a...
ON TOP OF THE WORLD Mercedes Dorame Reverses Power Structures With Spirituality
At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all. “Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yang’aro (Looking Back),” the inaugural installation for the Getty’s Rotunda Commission series, marks the museum’s first solo presentation by an Indigenous Californian from the Los Angeles basin and the southern Channel Islands, the ancestral land on which the Getty Center was erected in 1997. Growing up in Tovaangar (Los Angeles), Dorame heard many times while up at the Getty,...
COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT "Redaction" by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar
A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both Black, decided to produce a book version of the same name, published by W. W. Norton, to attain wider distribution, particularly among members of the poorer Black communities. Redaction focuses on the way this demographic is victimized in both state and federal courts because they can’t afford bail, traffic tickets or court fees. If they don’t pay, they are thrown in jail even...
