“We are not solely regionally focused,” says Miki Garcia, executive director of Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, which will change its name to Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara next week. “The artists that we show are local, national and international, so the projects that we’re doing here are on par with what the MOCA and the Hammer are doing [in Los Angeles]. It’s smaller in scale...
A symposium I attended in Italy, “Venice Agendas,” featuring leading curators from institutions such as Tate Britain, Sotheby's and Serpentine Gallery pondering the future of performance art in museums and galleries, initially brought me to Venice this summer. Throughout the three days of morning discussions and presentations, conversations always returned to the politics and economics of the...
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Samuel Bayer’s series of photographic “Triptychs,” recently on view at ACE Gallery Beverly Hills, is the complexity of the meditation on desire and representation that they can engender in a [male] viewer. These 16 12-foot studies of nude models, each one fragmented into three vertically arranged and slightly off-register divisions, comprise an uncanny...
Born in the late 1970s, contemporary artist and neo-muralist Fernando Corona grew up in and around Mexicali’s vivid and visceral street culture. Receiving a scholarship to study fine art, he traded tagging for painting, establishing himself as one of the city’s most prolific and promising younger artists. Corona became one of a core group—including Pablo Castañeda, Julio Torres, Marcela Perez...
"Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art." Anni & Josef Albers, 1936 “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.” Andre Breton, 1938 Why Mexico? It was not only that Mexico was nearby and easily accessible to U.S.–based artists, although that was certainly true. And it was not just that Mexico had powerful ancient arts that were alien and mysterious to the Euro-American...
It is difficult not to be taken with Ludovica Gioscia’s exhibition “Arturo And The Vertical Sea.” Upon entry, viewers confront three free-standing wooden structures akin to unfinished walls that criss-cross two gallery spaces at different angles, dividing them into...
Amanda Wall’s debut solo show, “JUICY” at The Cabin entices us into the intimate gallery. The exhibition space, which is in fact a small cottage-like structure in the backyard of artist and collector Danny First’s residence, immediately evokes a sense of casual...
Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids...
Central Valley ceramicist David Hicks doesn’t have a big footprint in Los Angeles. To see his work, you have to drive out to a hospital in Sylmar: a sun-parched, semi-rustic neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Los Angeles. There, above the lobby welcome desk, once...
Poetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a...