Articles

FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP
Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills

"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was unequivocal: I think, therefore, I am. The human being is a thinking being. Doing is another issue. Likewise, the earliest test...

SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
Welcome, Year of the Dragon

by Scarlet Cheng

It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce Lee fans, the dragon is the most powerful creature in the Chinese zodiac, and the only mythological one. (Lee’s Chinese name is...

“If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision” at Brand Library and Art Center
Q&A with Aline Smithson

by Rotem Rozental

Aline Smithson’s conceptual works begin where photographic materials and processes encounter lost and found moments. She has been exploring our complicated relationships with our memories and the devices we use to capture them, our self-presentation and surrounding, focusing primarily on analog photography. Smithson’s work is also at the core of the exhibition, “If Memory Serves: Photography,...

COMPASSIONATE VISIONS
The Los Angeles Poverty Department Brings Attention to Skid Row Artists

by Clayton Campbell

The Skid Row History Museum and Archive (SRHMA), founded by artist John Malpede and directed by Henriëtte Brouwers, is located at 250 South Broadway. It is a unique community art center, as well as a museum and archive for the historical displacement of people in Los Angeles due to immense income inequality. A critical part of the downtown arts ecology, SRHMA is a project of Malpede’s Los...

BEYOND PORTRAITURE
Danie Cansino: Seeing LA Through Her Lens

by Eva Recinos

High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights. Raised in Montebello, Cansino says information sharing is a crucial part of her work. “I want to be able to give the knowledge that I...

ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION
Anne Libby and Anna Rosen Find Freedom in Collaboration

by Tara Anne Dalbow

Communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from the ritual of production and...

THE HERE AND NOW OF IT
Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape

by Ezrha Jean Black

You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The art itself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before; but again, oscillating and permeating through it all is the sense of something...

THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES
Made in L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING" at The Hammer

by Shana Nys Dambrot

They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce Curatorial Fellow Ashton Cooper, proceeded from the intriguing perspective of selecting artists whose work deal in some essential way...

ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT
"William Blake: Visionary" At the Getty

by James Cushing

William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the most frequently taught lyric poem in American and British high schools and universities. His lifetime (1757–1827) dates him with...

BEST IN SHOW: ARTILLERY 2023 TOP TEN

by Ezrha Jean Black

Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums, too. But at the close of 2023, the breathlessness we may have experienced intermittently in galleries blurs with a breathlessness...

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Reviews

Alexander Reben
at Charlie James Gallery

The central piece here is four split-flap displays showing AI-generated text and a large HD TV displaying images based on those texts. The problem is that AI images are already familiar enough to be corny. The upscale production values do not help, and the jokey...

Larry Johnson/curated by Larry Johnson
at Reena Spaulings/ O-Town House

In two exhibitions spanning galleries some twenty-minutes apart depending on traffic, Larry Johnson presents his own work alongside that of two other gay artists of a certain age and a certain generation, who lived through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early...

Aria Dean
at Château Shatto

In her still-young career, Aria Dean has shown a remarkable knack for giving the institution exactly what it wants: shrewd work that stings the nerve of the moment without quite stabbing it. In activating the virtual as a conduit for Black radical thought, Dean’s...

Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art
at Wonzimer Gallery

This show at Wonzimer Gallery, organized by contributing artist Marcie Begleiter, is inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a work that constitutes a parallel exhibition to the show she curated. The Voynich is a mysterious codex from around the year 1410 by an unknown...

Duncan Hannah
at The Journal Gallery

In the early years of cinema, actors were treated as crew members working the conveyor belt of industrialized studio systems. But by the silent-film era of the 1910s, the star system had begun to take hold, with close-ups articulating a visual language of desire...

The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison]
Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires

Organized in concert with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, this re-mounting of Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970–71) — in keeping with the entirety of the Harrison collective’s output — is less about a “collision” (per PST’s...

Cai Guo-Qiang and cAI™
at the Los Angeles Coliseum

At dusk on September fifteenth, nearly 5,000 spectators gathered on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum to view WE ARE: EXPLOSION EVENT FOR PST ART, a monumental daytime fireworks display by Cai Guo-Qiang* and his custom artificial intelligence model cAI™....

Nate Lowman
at David Zwirner

I’ll admit that before attending a press walkthrough for Nate Lowman’s “Parking” at David Zwirner a few weeks ago, I wasn’t familiar with Lowman’s oeuvre. The paintings first appeared to me thumbnail-size, attached to my iPhone invitation. I noted glowing, riparian...

Lotus L. Kang
at Commonwealth and Council

To experience lack is to be reminded of the boundaries of the self, of others. Lacking realizes the unassailable distance between you and everything you don’t and won’t ever have. Therein to lack enlivens desire, or does desire require a lack of something? Kang’s...

Eugenia P. Butler
at The Box

Butler’s threadbare saffron works-on-silk line the perimeter of the back gallery, floating forward and back, filling and falling as if breathing. Suspended by invisible supports and backlit, the delicate veils with their enigmatic marks and hand-drawn symbols...

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