Articles

From Mortar To Metaverse
CONTEMPORARY COMMERCE

Eth, bit, sol, meta, block chain, bored apes, crypto punks, kitty litter squad, non-fungible, minting, mining, tokenizing, gas fee, hot wallet, cold wallet, generative NFT, destructive NFT, candy machines, early adopters—yes this is English—just not the English of our youth or even the English of a few years ago. This is the contemporary language of commerce and the new verbiage for the art...

Pioneering Petra Cortright
NFTs Are a No-Brainer

by Jody Zellen

Petra Cortright’s URL, www.petracortright.com, could be considered a work of net art. Practitioners of net art (beginning in the mid-1990s) often used the internet as their medium, sometimes populating their pages with images and data from other websites. Cortright’s home page is a montage of appropriated animated gifs that include twirling roses, dragons, smiley faces, twinkling and spinning...

Nancy Baker Cahill Challenges the Limits of Perception
Seeing the World Anew

by Tucker Neel

In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works articulating her long-standing interests in questions of physical embodiment. She made real drawings with real materials—like carbon,...

A Conversation with Casey Kauffmann
Hot Girl Sh*t

by Lauren Guilford

Casey Kauffmann is a hoarder of cyber content. Her image archive is a black hole of digital debris, infinitely consuming, tearing apart, and spitting out images—a spaghettification of visual culture. Kauffmann is known for her digital collages that populate her Instagram page, @uncannysfvalley. These assemblages are strange, fragmented manipulations of a visual language that Kauffmann...

Tabita Rezaire and the Materiality of The Digital
COMPLEX INTERACTION

by Eli Ståhl

The digital is an arbitrary category. In everyday speech, it is sometimes used as an opposition to the material: a digital copy, artwork or exhibition versus a material one. The digital is presented as something existing outside of the material realm and the history and politics thereof; an apolitical utopia that does not hold the same accountability as the “real world.” However, the line...

It’s All About Meme

by Anthony Ausgang

A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme reflects the biases of its creator and subsequent co-creator. Memes in their analog form were first identified in 1976 by the...

Travels in the Midwest
Musing on Art and Architecture

by Scarlet Cheng

A couple of months ago I took short trips to Phoenix and Denver for a change of scenery, to indulge in culture, and to see the rebranding of Sheraton hotels. Denver is a surprisingly interesting city, and we stayed in the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, which is very well located near the main street of Denver, 16th Street, with its free streetcar, and near the Capitol with its famous...

A Journey into the Mind of Calliope Pavlides
Pragmatic Surrealism

by Kate Caruso

Calliope Pavlides engineers her compositions like a to-do list, an Easter egg hunt, or survival kit. Her works on paper for an upcoming exhibition at Harkawik in New York City exist as impossible still lifes and contrary landscapes. In the wake of a global pandemic, a climate crisis and personal micro-dramas, the Greek-born artist must “place everything on the table” and assess the damages. She...

The Activism of Allison Janae Hamilton
Land as Witness of History

by Annabel Keenan

Land has been a constant throughout history. We bring to land our personal experiences, and land in turn acts as a witness to the people and events that come and go. For artist Allison Janae Hamilton, land is her most enduring subject. She describes land as a participant in and reflection of histories from the beautiful to the traumatic. Her works are haunting and inspiring, unnerving and...

The Spiritualized Landscapes of Hung Viet Nguyen
DEVOTED TO NATURE

by Genie Davis

“Art is a universal language,” Hung Viet Nguyen says. “And when I came here as an immigrant, my English language was not that great. My strength was in painting. I slowly convinced people that my art is my language.” Nguyen came to the US from Vietnam in 1982, with a background in biology and a lifelong passion for art. After making the move, he decided to make art his livelihood as well. A...

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Reviews

Editor’s Pick: Margaret Lazzari
USC Fisher Museum of Art

The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable”—Margaret Lazzari’s series of works devoted to her traumatic struggle with breast cancer, “The Cancer Series,” fits right into that category. More than 30 works of...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Marilyn Nance
Roberts Projects

The Marilyn Nance exhibition at Roberts Projects beautifully demonstrates the phenomenon known as six degrees of separation—the idea that all people are six or fewer connections away from each other. Nance was 21 when she was chosen to be the United States’ official...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Janet Olivia Henry
Stars

Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture. In Wrought:...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Carolyn Castaño
Walter Maciel Gallery

Carolyn Castaño's “Otros Seres” (Other Beings) exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery is an exhilarating eyeful of stealth environmental disaster. Castaño, of Colombian-American heritage, is well-known for her early extravagant and provocative Garden Heads...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Evangeline AdaLioryn
Sebastian Gladstone

Feathers, fur, gills, horns, tails (spiked and scaled), claws, talons, hooves, and forked tongues are some of the characteristics that adorn Evangeline AdaLioryn's strange amalgamations. The locust of the exhibition, "Her Labyrinth," presents an assemblage of...

GALLERY ROUNDS: June Edmonds
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Now known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing , written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson iterates the definition of resilience by stating: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Blood: Medieval/Modern
Getty Museum

Blood is unsightly in the flesh. Witnessing a bleeding person, one might turn away—or worse, be overcome with nausea and faint. For a substance essential to our functioning, to life itself, its image provokes extreme distress. If we were to trust our physiological...

PUBLISHER’S EYE: Yuji Ueda
BLUM

Appearing as if they are on the verge of moving, Yuji Ueda’s ceramic vessels are complex, layered and their own abstracted compositions, both planned through his methodical process yet a surprise from the firing process. Based in Shigaraki, Japan—a place famous for...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Olivia van Kuiken
Château Shatto

In “Biel Lieb,” Olivia van Kuiken’s inaugural exhibition at Château Shatto, oil paintings of untamed, bold color and mark-making swing between styles of ink wash, graphic novel, pixel and gestures on the verge of becoming scripture, spellbinding the gallery. Fuchsia,...

BOOK REVIEW: parasocialite
Brittany Menjivar's Literary Debut

Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a slender prose/poetry collection titled parasocialite. As a cheeky culture correspondent (a Salvadorian born in the DMV) and founder of Car Crash Collective (a late-night lit...

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