Articles
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VIII Laying a False Trail Across the Visceral Ether
Nobody is reading this. No sooner have I started to write a sentence than I’m plunged into bitterness and despair. Sitting down to write has become too great a test of my moral and spiritual strength: I am immediately mystified as to why it is so difficult to get my work out there when others, whose works are bereft of conviction, vitality, originality or purpose, who have nothing new to say and no new way of saying nothing, don’t seem to experience the slightest difficulty getting their pointless prose published. It requires too much effort to stifle the resentment that floods forth as a result of these grueling, draining, ungovernable...
Our Bodies, Our Business More Fodder for Michele Pred in a Post-Roe Era
Oakland-based Swedish-American artist Michele Pred achieved notoriety in the early 2000s for her conceptual sculptural installations of items like Swiss Army knives and manicure scissors confiscated by airport security. Pred’s witty and dramatic work, with a strong Pop-inflected emphasis on bright colors and geometry, clearly hit a nerve. In 2014, she was inspired to shift to vintage purses as a primary medium, fashioning words out of glowing EL wire:“Pro Choice,” “Feminist as Fuck,” and “Pussy Grabs Back”a few of the options. The purse, as both a symbol of oppression of women, and of their economic power, offered a double-sided tool....
Moon Raker Michelle Stuart's Conversation With Time
Monumentality is not the point of Michelle Stuart’s work. “Connection” doesn’t exactly sum it up either, although it’s always there. Transit or transition would be closer to it—although it would have to be understood within a post-Einsteinian view of the universe and its moving and multi-dimensional aspects. I wanted to trace those connections and transitions in Stuart’s work to that connective sense she forged early on, growing up in Los Angeles and Southern California before explosive urban development transformed the landscape into what we know today. At one point, I asked her about grid formats she’s applied frequently in her works...
Fire and Water The Beautiful Tragedies of Calida Rawles
In 2004 Calida Rawles moved from New York to Los Angeles, and she found an art scene brimming with life. Trained as an artist, she longed to become part of that world, and asked herself whether she would become a collector or a painter. She decided to give herself the chance to be a painter and made an agreement with her husband that she would take a year to find her way, without any expectations of financial return. She rented a studio—the studio we are in now, in a repurposed industrial building in Inglewood—and she began to explore and experiment. Among the first works to emerge were self-portraits of herself crammed into an acrylic...
Decorum and Decay Watching Astra Huimeng Wang Watching You
On a sweltering September afternoon, I visited artist Astra Huimeng Wang as she was in the final stages prepping for her first solo show of paintings at Make Room LA. Her studio is nestled above a discount clothing store in LA’s Fashion District, where crowded shop windows are filled with children’s pajamas that double as Disney costumes. I paused before an outdoor rack of candy-colored tulle princess dresses being tossed about by the hot wind. It was as if these festive garments were little spirits preparing me to enter Wang’s work. Arriving at the studio and looking at her paintings felt like confronting Renaissance polymath Giulio...
