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

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

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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,...

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A Conversation with Emily Barker Make it New

A Conversation with Emily Barker
Make it New

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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...

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

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

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 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...

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Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection Getting Together, Apart

Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection
Getting Together, Apart

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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...

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8-bridges Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond

8-bridges
Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond

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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...

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Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around Sculptures for a Digital Age

Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around
Sculptures for a Digital Age

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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...

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Safety First Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions

Safety First
Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions

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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...

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Remarks on Color: Peacock Blue March's Hue

Remarks on Color: Peacock Blue
March's Hue

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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...

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Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU

Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU

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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...

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Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020

Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020

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“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

GALLERY ROUNDS: Ann Weber Wönzimer Gallery

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...

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PICK OF THE WEEK: Sascha Braunig François Ghebaly

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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GALLERY ROUNDS: Phranc Craig Krull Gallery

GALLERY ROUNDS: Phranc
Craig Krull Gallery

“Phranc: The Butch Closet” at the Craig Krull Gallery is a joyous celebration of a Los Angeles icon. The ambitious exhibit, which includes work and documentation from the past forty years, illuminates how Phranc and her music—she identifies herself as the...

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OUTSIDE LA: Atlanta Art Week

OUTSIDE LA: Atlanta Art Week

When Donovan Johnson and his new partnership cohort stepped in to renovate and relaunch the once-venerable Bill Lowe Gallery—transforming it into the buzzy and ambitious Johnson Lowe Gallery of today—it signaled more than a changing of the guard at one of Atlanta’s...

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PICK OF THE WEEK: Isabel Nuño de Buen Chris Sharp Gallery

PICK OF THE WEEK: Isabel Nuño de Buen
Chris Sharp Gallery

Persuaded by her alchemist rhapsody and teetery yet unshakeable assertion, Isabel Nuño de Buen’s exhibition, “Now and Away” at Chris Sharp Gallery instills in me a yearning for more. Her intricately crafted wall sculptures, characterized by their personable scale and...

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GALLERY ROUNDS: “DEL CIELO” ROSEGALLERY

GALLERY ROUNDS: “DEL CIELO”
ROSEGALLERY

Birds in the trees: all is right in the world unless it’s three in the morning and their birdsong is interrupting your sleep. Birds on a telephone wire: a testament to adaptation in one’s habitat; I hope it doesn’t ruin your connectivity. Birds on the beach: better...

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FILM: Welcome Space Brothers Los Angeles Theatre

FILM: Welcome Space Brothers
Los Angeles Theatre

It’s weird how the treasure trove of Outsider Video Art that was Public Access Television has only started to seep into mainstream consciousness as it has disappeared—the amateur programming itself, as well as its very context and infrastructure, rendered infinitely...

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PICK OF THE WEEK: Simphiwe Ndzube BLUM

PICK OF THE WEEK: Simphiwe Ndzube
BLUM

“Have I ever felt strange suddenly being myself?” I thought after leaving Simphiwe Ndzube’s exhibition, “Chorus” at BLUM. If I integrate all the parts of myself into the world I believe in and want to see the most, maybe I too will find ordinary enchantment. Perhaps I...

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GALLERY ROUNDS: Terri Friedman Shoshana Wayne Gallery

GALLERY ROUNDS: Terri Friedman
Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Terri Friedman’s wonderful woven tapestries are on display in “tomorrow is just a thought,” the artist’s solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Friedman has been creating her "yarn paintings"—applying formal principals of color, shape, and texture to her...

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