Articles

Tara Thomas ( 1966 –2022)
Chef to the LA Arts Dies

Artillery is sad to report that Los Angeles Chef Tara Thomas passed away on August 11, 2022. Tara was an enthusiastic supporter and early adopter of the Los Angeles art magazine. “I consider Tara a friend,” said Editor-in-Chief Tulsa Kinney, “She was generous with her Traxx Restaurant. My husband and I held our wedding reception on that beautiful Union Station patio. She always supported the...

Publication In The Age of Negation, Part III
Compassion and Contempt

by John Tottenham

Let the disgust pour through me. Let it seethe. Let it sink in and settle. I wasn’t capable of doing anything more than lying on the sofa, stewing in bitterness and resentment. One likes to think that one’s work will be well-received by these commercial middlemen—because one has seen the crap that’s out there, because it meets one’s own hyper-self-critical standards, and because the few people...

Publication In The Age of Negation, Part II
Pillorying the Pillars

by John Tottenham

Four weeks passed. I was about to resign myself to not hearing from Charles Wersing, a top New York literary agent, when I checked my inbox one afternoon. “Good to hear from you,” he wrote, and apologized for taking a month to get back to me. He complimented me on my “intriguing” synopsis, and suggested that the novel would require the services of an agent who wasn’t “overly concerned about...

Ways of Reading
On the Road with Tim Youd's 100 Novels Project

by Tulsa Kinney

When I first encountered Tim Youd, he was sitting at a metal table outside an art gallery in Chinatown, tap-tap-tapping away on a portable typewriter, just minding his own business. Most of the crowd didn’t pay him much mind either. Earlier that summer, Youd found himself on the flatbed of a pickup truck parked in front of LA’s Terminal Annex Post Office retyping Charles Bukowski’s Post Office...

Publication In The Age of Negation, Part I
Humility and Humiliation

by John Tottenham

Perhaps you remember me… No, that wasn’t right. It was senseless to open a letter of entreaty by suggesting that I was forgettable, especially when I knew only too well that the party in question would remember me. Hello Charlie, it’s your old friend here… No, that was too presumptuous: only his friends addressed him by that diminutive. I had met Charles a few times at social gatherings; our...

Book Review: A Measured Coolness
Building + Becoming by Amir Zaki

by Christopher Michno

Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the artist’s digital manipulation and, setting aside the medium’s presumed objectivity and fidelity to representation, invites the question,...

Book Review: Heartfelt Moments
Portrait of an Artist by Hugo Huerta Marin

by Annabel Keenan

Portrait of an Artist By Hugo Huerta Marin 424 pages Prestel What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely than would a painting or drawing. It is also possible to create a literary portrait. Embracing this multiplicity of the word, author...

Book Review: Criminal Culture
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

by Anne Wallentine

Portrait of a Thief By Grace D. Li 369 pages Tiny Reparations Books The thorny issues of restitution and museums’ complicity in retaining looted artwork do not tend to make for light summer reading. But a breezy new novel turns these issues into the basis of a high-stakes heist. Grace D. Li’s, Portrait of a Thief, manages to be both portrait and landscape—a portrait of college students on the...

Book Review: Burden of Dreams
Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden

by Catherine Yang

Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden Contributors: Donatien Grau, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim, Andie Trainer 284 pages Gagosian It’s impossible to think of the Los Angeles art scene without considering Chris Burden, an incisive social commentator who approached artmaking with both childlike wonder and fearless abandon. His now-legendary performance-art pieces from the...

Book Review: Ballerina Looks Back in Style
Serenade: A Balanchine Story by Toni Bentley

by Barbara Morris

Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George Balanchine at 17, and she performed with them for 10 years, until a hip injury cut her career short. With her prolonged devotion to...

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Reviews

Anne Austin Pearce: Her Blue Period
River Deep–Mountain High at Founders Gallery at Soka University, Aliso Viejo

What is a colorist painter? In the 19th century, the painter and critic Eugène Fromentin assessed that the work of colorist artists engage hues that are “rare, tender, or powerful, but resolutely [achieved by] a man skillful in feeling distinctions, or in rendering...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Jordan Nassar
Anat Ebgi

Intertwining tradition, identity and memory, Jordan Nassar’s exhibition, “Surge,” turns large-scale Levantine embroidery and mosaics into sites of tactile continuity, connection and solace. These works serve as a means through which to understand his transnational...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Suzan Woodruff
Billis Williams

Suzan Woodruff’s new body of ethereal, abstract paintings and undulating wall sculptures came at a price—one as much physical as psychological. Diagnosed with virulent cancer amid a national pandemic, she endured multiple surgeries and radiological treatments, which...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Tidawhitney Lek and Veronica Fernandez
Sidecar Gallery

At Night Gallery’s newly debuted kunsthalle-inspired space, Sidecar, "What Will You Give?" features numerous large-scale paintings by up-and-coming artists Tidawhitney Lek and Veronica Fernandez. Lek and Fernandez present pieces of work that showcase both the...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Groove
The Hammer Museum

“Groove,” an exhibition of approximately 100 intaglio prints currently on view at the Hammer Museum, has something for everyone, and a bit of everything (save for works in other media), but it will appeal most to those with an unrestricted appetite for aesthetic...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Rhea Dillon
Soft Opening at Paul Soto

There’s no trick of the moonlight at Rhea Dillon’s show, “Gestural Poetics.” Inside and out, each work happens twice. Dillon’s drawings, nestled in sapele mahogany boxes within the white cube gallery, enact two histories at once. While the moniker "sapele" hails from...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Aly Helyer
Vielmetter

In the arresting painting On Your Side (2024), a person and their cat canoodle in twinned profiles that make it seem like they share an eye—and that’s not even the strangest thing about it. The main figure, shirtless and with glowing minty-pistachio skin, has glossy,...

Brad Kronz
Gaylord Apartments

For his untitled exhibition at Gaylord Apartments, Brad Kronz created what looked like a kind of deinstallation—the last few items left in an apartment before moving out, things you don’t know whether to leave or to stack on top of an already packed car: an auxiliary...

Nora Turato
Sprüth Magers

“Self is source. Self is pure positive energy. Self is worthy. Self is full of vitality. Self is healthy. Self is eager about life. Self is amazing.” One might imagine this incantation spoken in a low, meditative tone, as though by uttering the words with enough...

Se Oh
Stroll Garden

As a Korean-born queer person who was adopted at nine months by a conservative white Christian family in the Tennessee Bible Belt, Se Oh struggled for years with the trauma of rejection, including from their adoptive parents who believed that homosexuals don’t make it...

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