Articles
Artist Takeover
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
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...
An Artist Answers Questions with Danny Fox
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,...
Art Damaged Expansion of the Critic
Race Place
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...
Reviews
Jaxon Demme and Paz de la Huerta at Spy Projects
The damsel in distress; the innocent vindicated. These are relatively common motifs when it comes to trauma and recovery, yet Paz de la Huerta’s beautifully bizarre paintings make them feel new. Women and girls embrace while crowded by angelic creatures and wild...
The Rise of Mothball Contemporary?
There was a spectre haunting the Frieze Los Angeles Art fair—the spectre of the grandmother’s attic. Musty copper and seashells, old gold and furniture brown, sequins and feathers, paintings and sculpture not literally from an antique store but clearly informed by...
Nadya Tolokonnikova at Honor Fraser
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the exiled Siberian performer and conceptual artist infamous for her Pussy Riot anti-authoritarian protest disruptions in Moscow—whose Putin’s Ashes artworks landed her on Russia’s most wanted list—has found a home away from home at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles.
Barbara Carrasco at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles
The Queen of Los Angeles will not allow her history to be erased, and neither will Barbara Carrasco’s 1981 mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective. Censored swiftly after its completion by the commissioners, the mural collected dust in storage for decades and is...
Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz at Highways Performance Space
Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz defied time and space with her sci-fi thriller disguised as a dance, “Rain Glass Vortex.” In the performance, Cruz wrestled with her dance partners: her walker, Pluto, and her leg braces. She moved her arms and core in jerky, robotic movements....