Articles

CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL
Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary

One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary, titled “Wayfinding,” offers vision and agility to spare. Although the theme is rather broadly drawn—referring to clay’s origins in land...

ART THAT TRANSPORTS
Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations

by Scarlet Cheng

The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most ambitious projects yet—that will distinguish three new stations that connect Union Station to 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Having...

Village Mindset
Innovative Community-Building at Art + Practice

by Alexia Lewis

It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an organization such as Art + Practice, which has directly contributed to positive and long-term impact in the majority Black community...

Extra Flavor
Desert X Breathes New Life

by Catherine Yang

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,...

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Reviews

Post Human
at Jeffrey Deitch

Jeffrey Deitch reimagines his 1992 exhibition, “Post Human,” with a dialogue between the 90s works and newer ones, presenting dueling visions for the future of humanity and the self. The show is an opportunity to see Paul McCarthy's The Garden (1991-1992) and Charles...

Rema Ghuloum
at Philip Martin Gallery

This show has some of the best paintings that Rema Ghuloum has made, but that might be a problem. She’s honed this language—obsessively detailed, rainbow-hued, color field paintings—past the point of perfection. These paintings glow, but the unfinished, muddy, and...

Carter Potter
at as-is.la

Sometimes art can just be a weird, cool thing that happened one time. Like, what if you took apart a three-part sectional, stacked it vertically, and poured eight gallons of house paint through it. This is a dumb idea, but dumb stuff can be fun. With art, one plus one...

Andrew Schoultz
at Guerrero Gallery

The word trippy comes to mind here, but it might not actually apply. The quasi-mythological take on nature and the vibrating, prismatic color naturally suggest psychedelia but, overall, these are too controlled to be visionary. They feel, at times, like a collision of...

Austin Lee
at Jeffrey Deitch

Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024),...

“signifying the impossible song”
at Southern Guild

At the entrance of the gallery, viewers are confronted by a massive wall work by Moffat Takdiwa, bhiro ne bepa (pen and paper) (2023), constructed from the detritus of late-stage capitalism and post-colonialist society. The artist embraces the texture and materiality...

Becky Tucker
at Steve Turner

I love seeing an artist push the boundaries of the medium. Becky Tucker does exactly that with stoneware creations that are —FIRE. They look like Clive Barker created the Cenobites from Hellraiser in a kiln lit by hell’s inferno. The most imposing pieces are a trio of...

Liz Larner
at Regen Projects

Liz Larner’s wall works evoke the weathered, mysterious exteriors of unearthed petrified wood. Suspended layers of obsidian, sage, amber, and indigo feel almost magnetized, capable of reshaping the viewer the way magnetic forces reshape landforms. The tautly stretched...

Julia Weist
at Moskowitz Bayse

Julia Weist’s “Private Eye” is like a neo-noir where the investigator investigates themselves and invites us along. The work traffics in suburban paranoia: messages on vanity plates and yard signs asking us to believe. Today, the taboo of surveillance has faded, and...

Matthew Brannon
at David Kordansky Gallery

Through images of Satan and Darth Vader, and references to the politics of the 1970s, Matthew Brannon will unexpectedly break your heart. His show at David Kordansky Gallery mirrors the sensation of biting the pit at the center of a peach: a bitter core beyond what...

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