When I first saw Marie Thibeault’s hybrid landscapes that merge abstraction with representational figures, I was struck by her bold use of color and unusual iconography, in which organic and industrial shapes are combined, many inspired by the Port of Los Angeles near her home. While the underpinnings of her work suggest eco-destruction amidst the natural environment, her completed paintings...
We’ll be hearing for years and maybe decades about how the pandemic affected the lives of all the artists we’re used to hearing about but the crisis is going to have far deeper and more far-ranging effects on the art world than what we’ll be able to read on the scrubbed surfaces of monographs and profiles. To help with the effort to take stock of the wider picture, I talked to an emerging...
Chaédria LaBouvier is the Guggenheim’s first Black curator, first Black woman to curate a Guggenheim exhibition, first Black author of a Guggenheim catalog, first curator of Cuban descent and, at age 33, the youngest independent curator to organize an exhibition in the lauded fine-art mecca. Her blockbuster 2019 exhibition for the Guggenheim, "Defacement: The Untold Story,” was centered around a...
Guggenheim Fellow and native Angeleno Todd Gray is a visual artist whose work is in the collections of MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. While mostly photo-based he also presents performance works; that is how we first met and collaborated. We recently spoke over the phone for a couple of hours, talking about food and his career, in no particular order. AUGUST 2020: The...
As a maker of books, I met artist, photographer, director and historian Stephen Berkman in the “before time,” when fonts and spelling and public exhibitions of artwork seemed of import. Berkman, you see, was coordinating "Predicting the Past, Zohar Studios: The Lost Years," a show of mostly large-format, glass-plate photography for The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and also producing an...
I first met Gary Simmons in the early 1990s when he was a student at CalArts. At the time I was working for Richard Telles (who eventually opened his own LA gallery) at Roy Boyd Gallery in Santa Monica, and helped to facilitate Simmons’ debut exhibition there. The works presented in that and subsequent exhibitions were centered around issues of education and race. Even early on in his career, he...
We catch up with Nadezdha Tolokonnikova by phone while she’s in LA recording. “Pussy Riot is a movement and we have different creative initiatives,” she says. One of them involves the group getting more seriously into music leading to an album slated for sometime in September. Some of the tracks have been inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests: “I’m here to support them and help amplify...
In ever-mounting reports on the interlocked pandemics of COVID-19 and structural oppression, two words cyclically resound: “vulnerable” and “resist.” While the virus causes us to consider our own immune system’s vulnerability or resistance to it, it also creates or reveals metaphors for how we consider populations or political positions and actions. The immunization-related meaning of “resist”...
"The Democracy Project: 2020" manifests the great, besieged "project of Democracy" as an online exhibition for Artillery's September/October issue, featuring recent work by a diverse selection of the West Coast's most compelling artists. Whether approaching the theme ironically, or with reverence (or a bit of both), the artists below are chosen for their political engagement, provocative...
On April 8th of this year, Fox News reported that Pennsylvania’s famed Graffiti Highway was being completely covered with truckloads of dirt. The one-mile stretch of Route 61 was abandoned in 1993 after an underground fire in the nearby abandoned mining town of Centralia caused the highway to buckle and collapse. Despite the danger, the highway became popular with tourists who left behind both...
Religious parochial dogma is often fraught with pedagogical conflicts in the spheres of doctrine, institutional curricula and, unsurprisingly—queer identity. Overlay these ideologies with Mexican-American cultural norms and concomitant conventions of masculinity, and...
In “Swamps and Ashes,” Sun Woo reflects on the contemporary desires and fears borne from our increasing interaction with and use of commodified technologies. Evoking visceral feelings against the backdrop of fantastical virtual environments, her paintings create a...
Psychedelic experience has some distinct qualities. One may experience hallucinations of shifting yet repetitive imagery. Random objects become supercharged with symbolic meaning. Reality dissolves into the purely visual. Time itself is revealed as an abstract...
The Converge 45 biennial initiative exists to forge a regional, national, and international artistic discourse, and to intentionally center certain aspects of those conversations within the Pacific Northwest arts ecosystem. Showcasing some 50 local, national, and...
I’ve always found the word “gilded” to be slippery. On a literal level, it refers to the application of paper-thin sheets of gold leaf, a technique that’s been around for millennia. Not only does the process coat and protect ordinary materials like wood or stone, but...
Nobody walks in Los Angeles but ducking out of the overheated concrete jungle and into “Between past and present/ Between appearance and memory,”—Soumya Netrabile’s vivid exhibition of wildlife, texture, line and color at Anat Ebgi—may inspire the urge to lace up your...
The theatricality and malaise of machines characterized by abundance, repetition, necessity, error and expansion, come into full play in Analia Saban’s latest body of work, “Synthetic Self,” which is simultaneously exhibited at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar...
One could see the LA-based artist Jesse Mockrin’s decision to name her first solo exhibition in New York City and at James Cohan—“The Venus Effect,” after the art historical term, motif, and visual effect—as itself a gesture towards acknowledging, even inviting...
This September, the Academy Museum opened its John Waters retrospective entitled “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” shortly followed by Waters' induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The exhibit includes the glasses Mink Stole wore in Pink Flamingos (1972), costumes by...
In Gladys Knight’s version of “The Way We Were” (1974), she sings, “Can it be that it was all so simple then; or has time rewritten every line; if we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?” Upon viewing “Evita Tezeno: The Moments We Share Are...