Articles

Constance Mallinson
Talking Trash: Figuratively and Abstractly

Constance Mallinson’s career has spanned the many vicissitudes of the art world, from Minimalism to Pattern and Decoration, through to postmodern conceptual strategies. More recently, she has created a form of realistic painting that draws from Modernist Abstraction rather than the figurative tradition, and which offers an original alternative to the currently popular trend of pictorial and...

Ilona Szwarc
Reclaiming the History of Breasts

by Julie Schulte

Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest show, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, introduces sculpture alongside her photography, documenting herself casting a model’s torso in silicone and plaster. Other recent LA exhibitions include the group show “PAPA RAGAZZE!” curated by Olivia Neutron Bomb at Nicodim Gallery in 2020; and the solo show “Unsex Me...

Trulee Hall
Femininity in Phantasmagoria

by Emily Babette

On a blessedly moderate summer Sunday, I am driving over to Trulee Hall’s studio in the industrial backside of LA to participate in the filming of her newest project, Ladies’ Lair Lake, by getting nude and air-brushed green from head to toe. This project will be the latest of Hall’s phantasmagoric videos that combine live action, claymation and CGI to create a provocative world in which Hall’s...

Drip Dry: Our Relationship with Water

by Leanna Robinson

Beatriz Jaramillo has had water on her mind ever since she can remember. The Colombian-born Los Angeles–based artist spent her childhood in what sounds like an idyllic wonderland—wandering around the tropical rainforest that surrounded her family’s home. She remembers playing in the water: “It was magical.” There was a deep connection that came from her family—she has memories of her...

An Interview with T.J. Demos
Climate Breakdown and Capitalism

by Eli Ståhl

T.J. Demos is Professor in Art History and Visual Culture as well as Founder and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Last year, he published Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing a book exploring the radical world-making potential of contemporary art and activism in relation to changing climates. I met with Demos over the...

A REAL HORROR SHOW
Ecological Dystopia in Contemporary Art

by Geena Brown, Lauren Guilford

Our apocalypse is self-inflicted. We gouge at our wounds in acts of self-harm. Our collective anxiety festers as disaster takes hold, yet we remain paralyzed by fear, unable to face our reality. Implausible flames dance on the ocean’s surface; acres of California mountains are scorched black; storms terrorize and devastate our cities. The environmental crisis is no longer looming overhead, it is...

Hugo Hopping and The Winter Office
Nature As Infrastructure

by Clayton Campbell

I became aware of LA artist Hugo Hopping in 2009, when his conceptual work appeared in the exhibition “Post American L.A.,” curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas for the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Since then his trajectory has taken him to base his practice between Los Angeles and Copenhagen, where he co-founded The Winter Office (TWO) with Johanna Ferrer Guldager. TWO is an experimental...

Zaria Forman: Fear and Awe
Showcasing Beauty and Fragility

by Annabel Keenan

Climate change is a crisis that we must all recognize and work together to mitigate. For artists engaging with climate content, their activism manifests in many different ways. Some choose to showcase the devastating evidence of global warming, while others highlight the beauty of the natural world. Part of the latter group, Brooklyn-based Zaria Forman has been engaging with the...

Ron Athey at the ICA Los Angeles
“Queer Communion”

by Jamie McMurry

I’m on the freeway traveling through the San Fernando Valley to see the Ron Athey exhibition of art, documentation and ephemera called “Queer Communion” at the ICA in downtown Los Angeles. All of the LA tropes are in place: It’s a sunny and clear June day, the hills of Griffith Park are dry and brown, the plentiful commuters spawning upstream on the 5 all slow to see a majestic Honda engulfed in...

GONE TO THE DOGS

by John Tottenham

“Ride on the street, man.” With difficulty, I attempted to maneuver my way around a young couple who, with their three dogs, were hogging the entire sidewalk. “I beg your pardon,” I said, as I cleared these five figures, who had only made the most minimal effort to make room for me. “What did you just say?” “I said ride on the street, man,” said the man in a lower voice. The speaker of these...

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Reviews

Alejandro Cardenas
Anat Ebgi

So much more than paintings in bespoke carrying cases—though they certainly are that—the results of Alejandro Cardenas’ collaboration with Case Studyo, a Belgian artist-edition platform, engage the conceptual premise of the project with a thoughtful intentionality...

Dyani White Hawk
Various Small Fires

A celebrated episode of the groundbreaking Native television series Reservation Dogs takes a harrowing look at life inside an Indian boarding school, where strict Catholic nuns do their best to indoctrinate Native children into Western culture by punishing them...

Catherine Opie
REGEN PROJECTS

In a photograph titled Idexa and Denix, 2002 (2002/2024), a woman in a tight black T-shirt, with tattoos poking out from under the sleeves, short coiffed hair and a nose ring, among other piercings, stares with striking blue eyes at the camera. On her lap is an...

John Cage & Leah Ke Yi Zheng
CASTLE

John Cage and Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s joint exhibition, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” presents two aesthetically dissimilar bodies of work with overlapping concerns that entangle them. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination tool that uses hexagrams to predict divine...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Nery Gabriel Lemus
Charlie James Gallery

There is something about watercolor that is intimate at any scale. The medium’s unforgiving nature sparks an urgency in its use, creating an immediacy in its organic textures, forcing the artist to build depth from layers and shallow pools that bounce the light around...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Ozzie Juarez
Charlie James Gallery

Stepping into the realm of Ozzie Juarez’s paintings at his exhibition, “OXI-DIOS,” is akin to entering a bustling industrial cityscape, where citizens are invited to gather around modern homages to the illustrious tradition of Mexican murals. Juarez, a torchbearer...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Paul Pfeiffer
The Museum of Contemporary Art

“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” culminates in over thirty multimedia works of artist Paul Pfeiffer. The title of the exhibition references one of the works in the show which shows a video of director Cecil B. DeMille on loop exiting and...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Material Recovery
Angel's Gate Cultural Center

"Material Recovery" combines printmaking with assemblage, collage and sculpture to illustrate the iconography of the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, along with images suggesting the waste left there by the shipping industry. The exhibition of 81 pieces by 31...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Jairo Sosa
Room 3557

Step into Jairo Sosa’s installation, “Be True to the Game” and it feels as though you’ve stumbled upon the conclusion of a journey, an archaeological site or a moment of collective surrender. Room 3557, a small and mighty artist project space, is brimming with eight...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Louise Lawler
Sprüth Magers

Since the early 1980s, Louise Lawler has been making photographic works that focus on the collection and presentation of fine art, and the various meanings of “in-situ.” Her early images were straightforward, black-and-white photographs that documented artworks in...

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