Articles

Gary Simmons
The Perfection of Erasure

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...

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokno
Dominating Minds with Art

by Luca Celada

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...

Engaging a New Normal: LA Artists on Vulnerability and Resistance
Interviews with Kim Abeles, gloria galvez, Ara Oshagan, and more

by Jennie E. Park

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
An online group exhibition curated by Lawrence Gipe and Antoine Girard.

by Antoine Girard, Lawrence Gipe

"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...

Graffiti Highway
Crude and Sophisticated; Now Gone Forever

by Anthony Ausgang

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...

The Pros and Cons of Erasing History
Damned If We Don't

by Tucker Neel

I’ve been thinking about the concept of damnatio memoriae recently. Translated as “condemnation of memory,” the term refers to a practice associated with ancient rulers who called for the erasure of their predecessors from the historical record; their likeness removed from statues, monuments, coinage and texts. It was a punishment the ancient Romans viewed as worse than death. Of course, it’s...

The City as Canvas
Democracy in the Art World Means Inclusion of Graffiti

by Cole Sweetwood

For this democratized issue of Artillery, I’ve decided to focus on the most democratic medium of art: graffiti. Graffiti is as diverse as any medium but, generally, it is the painting of text or images onto surfaces in public spaces. The operative word in that definition is “public;” these works of art are able to be viewed and enjoyed (or scorned, for some) by anyone who happens to see them....

Frederick Douglass’ Stunning Portrait
Leaving His Image Behind

by Colin Westerbeck

Among the amateur photographers of our time are some rare daguerreotype buffs who still practice this 19th-century form of portraiture, which creates a unique image on a photosensitized metal plate. Back in the 1990s, two such buffs were shrewd enough to realize that an auction house specializing in gun sales didn’t know what they had when they listed as a miscellaneous item a box of odds and...

Kimberly Morris
Give Me Some Art With Hair

by Genie Davis

Kimberly Morris creates work that is intensely visceral. She makes art about subjects intrinsically rooted in American culture, yet entirely personal. As an interdisciplinary artist, she has worked with a wide range of mediums over the years, including painting, video, photography and sculpture. In her recent sculptural work, hair is one of the most used materials. “I tend to work with whatever...

Ari Salka: On Bodies (Be)held
Trans Rights are Under Siege; This Artist Resists

by Julie Schulte

Ari Salka is a trans, non-binary artist based in LA. Their ecstatic paintings and drawings—primarily self-portraits of their body—move in a liminal fantasy space brimming with queer angels and ghosts; a buoyant space where their present and former selves, can meet: recognizing, adoring, embracing and saying farewell. Embracing the ever-changing self, embracing with equal measure the limitations,...

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Reviews

GALLERY ROUNDS: Sabrina Che
Great Art Space LA

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...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Soumya Netrabile
Anat Ebgi

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...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Analia Saban
Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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...

OUTSIDE LA: Jesse Mockrin
James Cohan

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...

GALLERY ROUNDS: “John Waters: Pope of Trash”
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

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...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Evita Tezeno
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Jasper Marsalis
Kristina Kite Gallery

“Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow,” Jasper Marsalis’ exhibition at Kristina Kite Gallery, directs me to hear its entirety with my body. The visitor is tasked with arriving and making contact with his process of transcoding a glitch-like...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Rose Wylie
David Zwirner

In the rehearsed simplicity of “CLOSE, not too close” at David Zwirner, artist Rose Wylie grapples with Platonic ideals and the basic tools of semiotics. In both work on paper and oil on canvas, the artist depicts, again and again, important personal symbols....

GALLERY ROUNDS: Allen Ginsberg
Fahey/Klein Gallery

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg often carried a camera with him so that he could memorialize his friendships in a photographic diary. From 1953-63, he spontaneously recorded times spent with an intimate entourage that included literary figures Jack Kerouac, William S....

PICK OF THE WEEK: “The Inexpressible is Contained”
Sea View

Who has not asked oneself at some time or another: Should I disappear into the abyss or should I emerge and be seen? It’s a concern that is, at times, about recognizability and addressability, and if we are ready to situate our bodies which contain the raw materials...

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