Adrift between lust and sleep, the highway unwinds behind closed eyes, in scratchy sheets and stinging heat. A one-way street on repeat. Cracking the veneer, stripping it away, in the obvious light of day. Coming from nowhere, going nowhere, but never far enough. The same signage mile after mile. Interminable layers of fast-food landscape surround dried-up downtowns where nary a soul strolls and...
Top 3 beers? Okay, without a doubt—Guinness. And because I’m in LA, I’m going to say Pacifico. And a can of Stella. Top 3 songs? Dirty Old Town by the Pogues. Sara by Bob Dylan. Chelsea Hotel #2 by Leonard Cohen. Top 3 dead painters? Alfred Wallis. Vincent, of course. Norman Hines. How do you like your eggs? I like them (two or three free-range chicken eggs) boiled for six minutes, peeled,...
Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a biennal is a worthwhile form for an exhibition, I won’t attempt to answer that question here. But even after taking into account the...
Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional start in the music industry, he began paying closer attention to visual art when he started lightly collecting in 2015. He’s not sure...
This show is all smoke and mirrors, but in a good way. Prima Sakuntabhai plays with transparencies, reflections, and shadows to recapture their great-grand-uncle’s favorite haunts. The elder relative is Pridi Banomyong, a Thai immigrant who adopted revolutionary ideas...
The 40-Year Funeral By Pat Williams There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two...
The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the...
Jingze Du’s exhibition “True Colors” features the most well-executed oils in recent memory and all of them are of cute animals. The animals are mostly uninflected white, and their cuteness is eerie and synthetic. The painting itself is restricted to points of defining...
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel...