Articles

Secret Garden: David Horvitz
Exploring the Balance Between Private and Public

I met David Horvitz three years ago when he hand-delivered me an edamame plant he had been offering to his community via social media. Now, three years later, we meet again to conduct this interview in the garden he has been building. The garden in question is a previously vacant lot in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, near the Underground Museum and his studio. The lot,...

A Conversation with Emily Barker
Make it New

by Julie Schulte

Emily Barker (who uses they/them pronouns) is an artist and disability activist living in Los Angeles. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have given talks at prestigious institutions including the Royal Academy of Art and UCLA. Barker adamantly refuses the low quality of life a disabled person is expected to endure and, although critical of the systems...

Sherrie Levine: Sherrie Levine, Sherrie Levine
Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

by William J. Simmons

Part I: Lana Del Rey Some claimed that Lana Del Rey’s 2017 song “Get Free” was a rip-off of Radiohead’s iconic and self-masturbatory indie ballad “Creep,” which led to a rather unhinged and masculinist lawsuit. It seems that for women artists, homage or deconstruction or enjoyment or critique can all slide seamlessly and without conversation into fraudulence or a sort of frivolous game. This is...

Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection
Getting Together, Apart

by Kelly Rappleye

The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness, collaboration, participation and community abound across the VCL, which describes itself as “a series of creative experiments in remote...

8-bridges
Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond

by Barbara Morris

Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save the date for a panel discussion featuring the directors of three cutting-edge Bay Area arts venues: Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the...

Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around
Sculptures for a Digital Age

by Daniel Austin Warren

Miami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space. Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable public-accessing of cyberspace. Taking it a stretch further, the Slumpie (as the artist herself claims) envisions “a practical solution to the...

Safety First
Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions

by Alexia Lewis

What sort of working environment will the Los Angeles arts workforce return to once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Or maybe a better question to ask is: How will we honor the skilled work of the preparators, installers, instructors, docents, assistants and more, whose combined efforts are semi-invisible to the public, yet without whom everything would fall apart? Pre-COVID labor...

Remarks on Color: Peacock Blue
March's Hue

by Eve Wood

Peacock Blue wishes to clarify once and for all that her name has little to do with vegetable matter and even less with genitalia, yet imagine going through life mistaken either for soup or a pecker! Such is the fate of Peacock Blue, who’s spent a lifetime in the jest of that name, the butt of jokes and the jibes of mean kids, ostracized and sidelined, obfuscated and undone, relegated to the...

Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU

by Jennie E. Park

When Audrey Chan began at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in October 2019 as their inaugural Artist in Residence, she and the flagship ACLU affiliate had envisioned the creation of a mural commemorating their centennial on their Los Angeles office building. “The initial mural proposal, based on archival research into the affiliate’s history since 1923, was still in an...

Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020

by Ezrha Jean Black

“Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable….” “I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams, I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much...

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Reviews

Rosemary Mayer
Hannah Hoffman; Marc Selwyn Fine Art

The act of writing is a process of appropriations. Words predate the user, who then borrows and deploys them. With each new text, these tools of communication are shuffled to embody another of their possible sequencings, attempting to connect the writer to their...

Richard Mensah
Band of Vices

When writer and poet Peter J. Harris wrote in his poem Only Wine (2004): Blessed be the laughter of lovers for it separates the edges of the future / bless me with your laughter, Blessed be the music of lovers for it spices the taste of all creation / bless me with...

Keith Sonnier
parrasch heijnen

Post-minimalist Keith Sonnier, who passed in 2020, was too prominent a figure to fall into the shadows, as have so many of his contemporaries. But given his striking originality, restless inventiveness and impact upon a broad range of peers and younger artists,...

Vishal Jugdeo
Commonwealth and Council

Two men are talking in a car, as low green fields stream past the windows. “This used to all be fruit trees but the new owner tore them up,” says the driver. “And he planted rice?” the other man incredulously asks. The first man doesn’t answer but shakes his head in...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Fin Simonetti
Matthew Brown

Suspending the administrative and bodily powers of fences and safety cones, Fin Simonetti's sculpture exhibition, "Hardening," at Matthew Brown quizzes viewers to ponder, "Am I safe, am I scared, or am I in love?" Perhaps it's a bit of all three. The gallery features...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Claudia Keep
Parker Gallery

As with many works of contemporary art, Claudia Keep’s compact paintings first entered my field of vision on social media, where her imagery retains its appeal, even as her textured, varicolored and economical brushstrokes are flattened out. Keep often makes blunt...

PERFORMANCE: X’ene’s Witness
Justen LeRoy's Contemporary Opera

As our rushing descent into global environmental catastrophe continues, we are inundated with images of our planet's suffering. We’ve all seen the snapshots—a man up to his neck in water pushing children on a downed satellite dish during the 2022 flooding of...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Ann Weber
Wönzimer Gallery

Spectacular and sinuous, Ann Weber’s large-scale sculptures create a mythic world, one that viewers step within and explore as if moving through a strange and lovely forest of anthropomorphic shapes. Created entirely from cardboard strips, the sculptures are woven...

GALLERY ROUNDS: “A Space Between Us”
Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art

Global pandemics democratize pain, suffering and loss. Therefore, who does one turn to when inquiring about world-reshaping events that impact the interpersonal and economic fabric of society? The answer is artists as they function as visual ethnographic historians....

PICK OF THE WEEK: Sascha Braunig
François Ghebaly

Inclining towards controlled madness while also surveying the forces to which we may dutifully acquiesce, Sascha Braunig's painting exhibition, “Poseuses,” at François Ghebaly, vividly replicates matrices of power that one can experience both personally and within the...

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