Articles

On Math Bass
“Got a Light?”

If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The predecessor for both Bass and Caillebotte might be the darkly excessive and comical “unswept floor” mosaics by the Ancients, paintings...

Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz

by Julie Schulte

In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft powers” is a breathtaking series of fiber etchings on velvet-patterned jewel tones, resplendent pearls, and ebonies—the images...

The World Needs Dynasty Handbag
A Voice of Unreason for Uncertain Times

by Taylor Doran

I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social boundaries and etiquette for over 15 years. In the Before Time, she hosted a monthly Weirdo Night at Zebulon in Los Angeles. The...

A Reckoning: Monument Lab, Joel Garcia, Ken Lum, and Paul Farber

by Clayton Campbell

Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national movement to remove monuments and statues that reflect the racist history of the United States. Their values reflect progressive...

Finding a Place (for art) in Skid Row
The LA Poverty Department and The Box Gallery

by Kelly Rappleye

The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual January count—even before the disastrous economic effects of COVID. While city officials call this recent wave a crisis,...

Decoder
Just Give Me the Minimum

by Zak Smith

I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line of trees that screens an exurban stretch of one-car-per-three-minutes interstate. It can have the interstate, even, if it’s just...

Spiraling at Casa Orgánica
Javier Senosiain's Architectural Oasis in Mexico

by Avery Wheless

If a structure could imitate warmth and humanity, linking the innate wonder of nature to one’s need to inhibit it, Casa Orgánica by architect Javier Senosiain is it. Built in 1984 in Naucalpan, Mexico, Casa Orgánica was the first organic project of the architect and also his family home for over twenty-five years. Within each room, one is transported...

Photographers of Democracy: Part Two
Elections by Jeff Jacobson, Callie Shell, David Burnett, and more.

by Lara Jo Regan

“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.” –H.L. Mencken At no time in history is the character of a nation brought into more vivid relief than during elections. And no medium illuminates its current moral complexion - warts and all – with more affect and clarity than photography, the visual language of...

High Anxiety: A Conversation with Karen Finley

by Ezrha Jean Black

I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma. Our “live” conversation has been going on since 2015, around the time of her The Jackie Look performances in LA and the companion...

Alex Anderson: Just Like Gold
Just Like Gold

by Scarlet Cheng

It takes a lot of guts to title your solo show “Little Black Boy Makes Imperial Porcelains,” and then it takes a lot of talent to pull off a show with that loaded marquee. Alex Anderson managed to do just that at Gavlak gallery this summer, in a show (March 14–July 11) featuring ceramic sculpture that reached exquisite levels of refined form but also delivered the punch of timely content....

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Reviews

PICK OF THE WEEK: Simphiwe Ndzube
BLUM

“Have I ever felt strange suddenly being myself?” I thought after leaving Simphiwe Ndzube’s exhibition, “Chorus” at BLUM. If I integrate all the parts of myself into the world I believe in and want to see the most, maybe I too will find ordinary enchantment. Perhaps I...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Terri Friedman
Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Terri Friedman’s wonderful woven tapestries are on display in “tomorrow is just a thought,” the artist’s solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Friedman has been creating her "yarn paintings"—applying formal principals of color, shape, and texture to her...

Poncili Creación: No limits, no bounds—only possibilities
Hauser & Wirth

Poncili Creación is in LA, preparing to take us by storm with the glory of trash at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. In advance of their November 11 performance, Our Name is Moving, I took part in their creative workshop POSSIBILITIES OF MATTER and sat with them for an...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Julian Charrière
Sean Kelly, Los Angeles

Julian Charrière is a Berlin-based artist whose work often focuses on nature, ecology and the changing climate. For his first Los Angeles exhibit at Sean Kelly, “Buried Sunshine”, Charrière was drawn to the subject of oil and researched the history and photographed...

PEER REVIEW
Matthew Rosenquist on Pat Phillips

Raised in and around Washington DC, with two degrees in painting, Matthew Rosenquist now makes sculptures, albeit with some paint applied. How did that happen? I ask him. After grad school in the South, he took an entry-level job at the Smithsonian with duties that...

“Nonmemory”
Hauser & Wirth

“Nonmemory,” for the artist Mike Kelley, was something akin to his notorious usage of the “uncanny,” a theory borrowed from Freud wherein repressed memories emerge into disturbing feelings. In nonmemory, however, what has been forgotten stays so, and recollection is...

Deana Lawson
David Kordansky Gallery

While Deana Lawson is known for her individual, staged photographs depicting African-Americans communities in interior and exterior environs, she also conceptualizes the entirety of her presentations, which often include casual snapshots displayed as collages. In...

Steve McQueen
Marian Goodman Los Angeles

Steve McQueen combines his filmmaker’s sense of scale, drama and cinematic history with his artist’s sensibility in Sunshine State (2022), a work of visceral impact and pointed message that is also rich in nuance, symbolism, connection, contradiction and emotion....

Kim Jones
The Box

The opening for Kim Jones’ exhibition had a kind of homecoming spirit, reflected in its title, “Walking Home.” Several of Jones’ first post-graduate performance pieces in the 1970s were marathon “walks” between various landmarks in Los Angeles, performed in the...

Duke Riley
Charlie James Gallery

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” remarked the poet who gave us The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot. The observation supports the standard explanation for the failings of our species to adequately address the climate crisis, the scope and scale of which are too...

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