Articles

8-bridges
Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond

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...

Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around
Sculptures for a Digital Age

by Daniel Austin Warren

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...

Safety First
Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions

by Alexia Lewis

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...

Remarks on Color: Peacock Blue
March's Hue

by Eve Wood

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...

Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU

by Jennie E. Park

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...

Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020

by Ezrha Jean Black

“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...

On Math Bass
“Got a Light?”

by William J. Simmons

If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The predecessor for both Bass and Caillebotte might be the darkly excessive and comical “unswept floor” mosaics by the Ancients, paintings...

Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz

by Julie Schulte

In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft powers” is a breathtaking series of fiber etchings on velvet-patterned jewel tones, resplendent pearls, and ebonies—the images...

The World Needs Dynasty Handbag
A Voice of Unreason for Uncertain Times

by Taylor Doran

I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social boundaries and etiquette for over 15 years. In the Before Time, she hosted a monthly Weirdo Night at Zebulon in Los Angeles. The...

A Reckoning: Monument Lab, Joel Garcia, Ken Lum, and Paul Farber

by Clayton Campbell

Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national movement to remove monuments and statues that reflect the racist history of the United States. Their values reflect progressive...

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Reviews

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...

GALLERY ROUNDS: “A Space Between Us”
Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art

Global pandemics democratize pain, suffering and loss. Therefore, who does one turn to when inquiring about world-reshaping events that impact the interpersonal and economic fabric of society? The answer is artists as they function as visual ethnographic historians....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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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