On a hot August night in the Pico-Union neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles, Nuttaphol (pronounced nut-tah-pun) Ma welcomed me to The China Outpost, the project the 43-year-old artist calls a nomadic, self-imposed sweatshop, which bleeds into his living space at the St. Valentine building just a few blocks west of the Staples Center. From the balcony of his apartment, the buildings and neon...
During her childhood in provincial Nigeria, Shiri Mordechay recalls traversing roadways littered with human skulls, glimpsing live babies discarded in trash cans and being spellbound by a harrowing band of voodoo practitioners that surrounded her abode and pounded insistently on its doors and windows. A green mamba once encircled her ankles while she sat at a classroom desk. Years later, in...
This September, LA gallerist Anat Ebgi launched an unheard of exhibition program committed to featuring only female artists for an entire year: a concerted effort to correct a persistent imbalance in the art world. According to Ebgi, “The exhibition program will serve as a template for the future of our gallery, as we take on more women artists who have a completely unique and uncanny use of...
Where do you start with a six-hour operatic extravaganza on sex, art, alchemy, reincarnation and the decline of the American auto industry, drenched in melodrama and symbology, with so many threads running through it that the original material, if any, is obscured; a film that is overflowing with comparisons between the reproductive, alimentary and industrial canals, and which, owing to its...
Trying to communicate the plot of Matthew Barney’s recent, nearly six-hour opera, River of Fundament, makes me feel like the SNL character Stefon ...“The movie has everything: Fran Lebowitz, gold-leafed poop, Egyptian gods, Elaine Stritch, classic cars, Maggie Gyllenhaal, a baby bird birthed from a woman’s vagina, Paul Giamatti, two pregnant women playing with an oversized feces dildo... ” The...
Walking into Vielmetter Los Angeles’ sunlit loft, it’s easy at first glance to overlook the series of flower paintings inside as traditional floral still lifes. But the stark white backgrounds, untraditional choice of medium, and emotive compositions belie Hugo...
Born in 1935 and raised by sharecroppers during an era when rural Alabama was segregated, Simmie Knox persevered by making history in 2004 as the first Black artist to have his work selected for the official Whitehouse portrait collection—his rendition of former...
Although photography-based collages by Joe Rudko are aggressively analog as objects, they reference the inherent pixelated optics of the digital world. Each unique piece is physically made of thousands of randomly accumulated, painstakingly spliced and intuitively...
In our post-truth age, where it’s easy to assume any image has been digitally manipulated, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ stands out from the pack for his striking candidness. In his eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, the German artist presents a diverse array...
After visiting five major art fairs and too many events and special exhibitions to keep track of, it’s safe to say this was an eventful and surprisingly normal Miami Art Week. Like in previous years, the week provided a venue to reconnect with friends and colleagues,...