(Excerpt from an essay). Hugh Jackman makes a brief cameo in the third Night at the Museum movie aptly titled Secret of the Tomb, where he plays himself playing King Arthur in a stage production of Camelot. Jackman as Arthur gets visited by Sir Lancelot, played by Dan Stevens; but he’s not Dan Stevens playing Dan Stevens playing Lancelot, he’s the real Sir Lancelot brought to life via a magical...
What is the Purpose of All of This? And by This, I Mean Life Dear Dr. Trainwreck, I have recently gone through a life change (a major breakup and move) and am having a hard time finding my footing. The close friends that I thought would be there for me disappeared shortly thereafter, and I've spent the better part of the last several months trying to nurture new friendships with people that...
I'm... ...located at an arts fortress that is always free, but you should make a reservation. ...an extremely sexual drawing whose description of what the group is doing is written in a non-offensive language that the entire family can read. ...small (about the size of a piece of paper) and created in the early 19th century by a Frenchman. Send a selfie of you in front of your guess so we can...
Can John Waters offend anyone these days? It hardly seems so. “I’m tired of being respectable,” he quipped at his show, “John Waters’ Birthday Celebration: The Naked Truth,” admitting he might be relatively mainstream today. He listed all his recent awards, and now he is greedy for more! “I want the Nobel Piece of Ass Award!” Whether he can still offend or not, Waters doesn’t disappoint. This...
DAY ONE Last night, Vidiots at Eagle Rock saw the start of the only weekend of the year where being an indie filmmaker in LA feels like it truly matters as much as it should. As the second edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies kicked off, current microbudget stalwart actor Colin Burgess remarked it “probably has one of the best festival names out there right now, because most festivals...
Since 2017, I have been among the 1.7 million people who have participated in the art biennial-cum-treasure hunt to seek out large-scale, site-specific contemporary art installations scattered throughout the Coachella Valley desert, the land of the haves and have-nots. Not in a white cube, locked away in a walled institution, or behind a paywall, Desert X is a great equalizer, breaking...
As fate would have it, the biannual “Spring 2025 ArtNight Pasadena” event is taking place on March 14th—winter’s coldest, dreariest, and rainiest day. Accordingly, you select the handful of venues most likely to feature contemporary work, then set off. An hour and a half and four stops later, you’ve experienced about fourteen seconds worth of satori. It doesn’t seem at all sporting to break out...
Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at the Karma party at Ghengis Cohen, his trucker hat popping up behind a psychic and very beautiful astrologer. I saw James Franco at...
In Robert Russell’s solo show “Stateless Objects,” lush paintings of solitary vessels and kitchenware float like apparitions on the walls of Anat Ebgi. A mix of Judaica—challah platters, kiddush cups, and the like—alongside porcelain teacups produced in pre-Holocaust...
In “First Alienation,” printed matter and machine vision come together in a clearly human context at Timeshare, a co-curated gallery run by six artists in Lincoln Heights. The earliest work included in the show is Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 16mm...
Situating her work at the juncture of word and image—an intermedial locus where, in her case, verbal content is at once borne and engulfed by complex painterly structures —Alexandra Grant has, in fact, had to struggle to achieve a coherent balance between her twinned...
The images in Yorgos Lanthimos’ first photography exhibition were captured while the filmmaker was shooting Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Poor Things (2023), but you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at them. Except for the actress Hunter Schafer in one stark...
Teresa Murta’s hallucinatory fever dream of gestural abstraction is full of organic lines and undulating forms that made me feel like I was finding images in clouds that would begin to take a familiar form before disintegrating before my eyes. Is that a bouquet...
Those of us who have dreamed—which I pray is everyone reading this—know how it goes: A cacophony of vignettes rattle through your unconscious, some a single flash, some endless, though in reality, they’re all only a few seconds in duration. No matter their...
It seems heaven is butter scented. Or at least La Loma Projects is butter scented. And who knew the Pearly Gates were actually in Highland Park? Walking through those gallery doors, you’re hit with a bright light that really does feel like a scene out of a...
Kyle Dunn celebrates the languid vibe of siesta culture through figurative and still-life pieces. The works on view use acrylic to replicate the luminosity of the Old Masters’ oils, giving Vermeer illuminated by the harsh New York summer sun. Siesta (2024)...
Sontag famously wrote about the photograph as a means of securing ownership over an ethereal past. Her words come to mind as one moves through Hailey Heaton’s "Hissyfit," which reckons with the erosion of memory (and therefore history) through dementia. (The...
It’s not uncommon that an art show claims to deconstruct the human form and challenge societal notions of beauty. Derrian Pharr’s innovative “I Am a Bloodstone” makes good on this promise. The otherworldly heroines in Pharr’s works (made with pastels and prisma...