Articles

Scarlet Cheng’s Top Films of 2023
Fantasy Takes the Lead

What a year for feature films this has been, both rich and strange. Indeed, fantasy seemed to have taken the lead, as we emerge from the fever of the COVID epidemic and try to find the new normal. These were not the usual escapist fantasies, but fantasies that spoke to our current, more conscious and more precarious state of being. Below are my personal choices for the best, in alphabetic...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 4
New Art Dealers Alliance Fair and a very Miami party

by Annabel Keenan

As Art Week races to a close, yesterday I headed downtown across the dreaded, traffic-filled bridge to the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair for my final full day here in Miami. While the fair opened on Tuesday, the busy week of competing events prevented me from getting there until Thursday. Really, it was the thought of sitting in gridlock traffic to cross the bridge that kept me away. As...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 3
A day at the fairs and a look inside the after dark events

by Annabel Keenan

Artillery is back with Day 3 in Miami Beach. The fairs are in full swing, the collectors are fighting for first access, and the tiny glasses of overpriced champagne are on offer at every opportunity. Yesterday, we started with the design highlight of the week: Design Miami/. Located just outside the Convention Center where Art Basel Miami Beach takes place, Design Miami/ is a refreshing...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 2
Elevate Española highlights the importance of public art, and the fairs begin

by Annabel Keenan

After a weekend filled with art and philanthropy in Palm Beach, we’re officially ready for the parties, fairs, and people-watching of Miami Art Week. Yesterday, Untitled Art and the New Art Dealers Alliance fairs opened to VIPs, and the heavy-hitting Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami/ open today. To kick off my week, rather than dive straight into the fair tents and convention center, I...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 1
New Wave Art Wknd Takes Over Palm Beach

by Annabel Keenan

Miami Art Week is back, which means the crowds are on the way to enjoy the beach, the sun, the stunning hotels, and the most coveted art the market has to offer. For those of us visiting from New York, the warm weather couldn’t have come at a better time. Throughout the week, Artillery will be taking you to the major fairs and public events, as well as a few VIP openings and private parties, in...

WOVEN VISIONS
Diedrick Brackens Explores Identity with Innovative Technique and Unusual Tenderness

by George Melrod

Even with the growing inclusion of textile art in textbooks, surveys and biennials, one doesn’t normally think of weaving as a cutting-edge contemporary art medium. Diedrick Brackens is out to change that. A breakout star of the 2018 Hammer “Made in L.A.” biennial, Brackens uses his works to foreground Black and queer bodies—and the occasional catfish—through lyrical, at times haunting,...

EDGES AND PLURALITIES
Melissa Joseph Brings Craft Into the Future

by Annabel Keenan

For Melissa Joseph, all things relate to edges. Her practice exists on several of them: painting, felting, craft, utility, art … the list continues. She works in a unique dry-felting medium to create imagery based on her own photography and that of her family. While channeling “ancestral stories,” as she explains, she also addresses broader social issues, including gendered labor and identity....

NEEDLEWORK IN THE SERVICE OF SUBVERSION
"Iron Halo" by Sal Salandra

by Tucker Neel

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...

FABRICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Ahree Lee Weaves Seamlessly Between Art and Technology

by William Moreno

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...

Metro Art
THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY

by Scarlet Cheng

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...

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Reviews

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light
at Norton Simon Museum

Grouping art by medium is always too obvious, even when the medium in question has the pizzazz of electric light. This exhibition focuses on the years 1964-1970 but does not, otherwise, establish a clear throughline. Experiments with electric light were, indeed,...

Kevin Brisco Jr.
at albertz benda

Most figurative painting is terrible but these are surprisingly good. Brisco’s restrained brushwork produces a flat clarity that recalls Alex Katz but with harsh moody colors and lonesome figures which echo Edward Hopper’s sadsacks. Suburban homes appear as...

Meg Lipke
at SHRINE

These paintings have a slight hamfistedness, which suggests distance from their alternately whimsical, mystical, Modernist, and Premodern sources. The allusions and references here—like Lipke’s interpolation of Neolithic-era petroglyphs into Kandinsky-esque painting –...

Larry Madrigal
at Nicodim

With scraped knees, tangled sheets, and yesterday’s discarded clothes strewn across the floor, Larry Madrigal’s new evocative paintings at Nicodim showcase the artist at his strongest. In moments where his fluid and textured style strives to move beyond the sexual...

Jane Dickson
at Karma

I never feel hotter or more detached (indeed, more American) than in a car, windows down in the August heat. It’s an exercise in movement, longing on an unremarkable plane of asphalt. Each lane is a pulse, where everyone seeks a false salvation. Jane Dickson’s new...

Darya Diamond
at Sebastian Gladstone

Looking at Darya Diamond’s limp latex sculpture, In Every Dream Home a Heartache (2024), I think of bruised skin, frail shoulders: a tired body collapsed on the floor — phallic, deflated, stamped with marks like a trampled body bag. Throughout “Sugartown,” intimacy...

“Scupper”
at François Ghebaly

Curated to pose as a mirror to society’s collapse, "Scupper"’s artists address a spectrum of social ills from preservatives in food to inadequate healthcare. The six-page press release does a better job than some of the works themselves at justifying their presence in...

Divya Mehra
at Night Gallery

A mechanical broom wielded by a robotic arm sweeps across the floor under the corner of a custom-made carpet shaped like India. In an adjoining room, an enormous inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man lies face-down adjacent to a neon sign which reads “DIASPORA.” A...

Raymie Iadevaia
at The Pit

Don’t let the cute animals fool you; these paintings are not so innocent. A vague sense of foreboding permeates these otherwise joyful works. In Iadevaia’s last show, climate apocalypse hovered in his portentous smokey-pink...

Gabriel Madan
at Gattopardo

Not all pop art is created equal. Gabriel Madan’s literally pops off the wall: As in, a colorful macaw plushie is affixed to one of his paintings, a heart-shaped tag reading “I’m a puppet.” I want to stick my hand up its rear and make it talk. Vulgar, yes, but...

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