Articles

LA’s Strange Still Beauty
Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill Tool Around the Empty Streets

Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill are two very different artists, both working in the photographic medium during Los Angeles’ great exile inward from the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus. Their recording of this time is both surreal and sublime; capturing these frozen moments of stillness and making them sing songs of sadness, resilience and stark beauty. Shaping color images rife with a loneliness...

Building Bridges with Julian Bermudez

by Betty Ann Brown

I met Julian Bermudez at his gallery, Bermudez Projects, a spare, light-filled space in the Cypress Park area of Northeast Los Angeles. Bermudez was attired in art-world black and sported a thin, pointed mustache. He was bright, energetic and articulate. He started out by explaining, "I am a curator who believes in art and the artists who make it. I believe their art has the power to shape the...

The Met Loses $100 Million! A Mere Pittance

by Cole Sweetwood

The Metropolitan Museum of Art reported on March 12th that, as a result of closing until July due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they would take up to a $100 million loss and are considering the furlough or layoff of many of its staff members. This, for many in the art community, was the first major sign of the crisis that has befallen us. As of April 13th, the vast majority of museums in...

Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram, 1955–59

by Max King Cap

No wonder your president has to be an actor. He's gotta look good on television. Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D. Back to the Future, 1985 It stands triumphantly—a voracious junkyard goat surmounting a catafalque of the written word, a bier of gibberish, a babel of ancient symbols. Pen pals, gone; cursive gone, love letters now exchanged in childish icons. Having eaten everything...

The Online Life: Photos to Cringe By

by Colin Westerbeck

The day I sat down to write this opinion piece, I was moved to do so by a feature in The New York Times that both irritated and alarmed me. “Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust” the headline read, and the text informed me that the Louvre, our National Gallery in Washington, the Courtauld Institute in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York were putting...

SHOPTALK

by Scarlet Cheng

Pomp & Zoom Spring usually heralds a spate of art-school grad ceremonies and shows—the equivalent of debutante balls for young artists and designers trained at our august art schools. This year with shelter-at-home and social-distancing mandates in place, there will be no crowds gathering in an auditorium or on a sun-speckled lawn, no mounting the dais as your name is called out,...

SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Oxblood

by Eve Wood

Red is a color that should never be messed with, diluted, bastardized, cross-pollinated or otherwise appropriated, which calls into question the reason the color oxblood exists at all. If you cut open the belly of an ox, would the seepage of viscera reveal this sickly, mutant shade, like blood mixed with fecal matter? I imagine most ox would find this offensive. Blood is a substance that...

Movements: Battles and Solidarity

by Meher McArthur

On the weekend before everything locked down in Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to catch the exhibition "To View a Plastic Flower" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and to hear one of the featured artists, Vietnamese American artist T. Kim-Trang Tran, discuss her three-channel video installation, Movements: Battles and Solidarity. The installation coalesces three seemingly disparate...

SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia

by William J. Simmons

Editor's Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and memoiristic reflections on colors and craft. Thanks for sheltering with Artillery, and we hope to see you at our usual gallery rounds...

SHOPTALK April 2020 Edition

by Scarlet Cheng

Three weeks ago I was visiting LACMA for their landmark exhibition “Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying,” featuring a Ming dynasty painter at the Resnick. Afterwards I came out to look for the plinth where a new Yoshitomo Nara sculpture would be going—the largest he’s ever made—in time for his first major exhibition on the West Coast set to open April 5. Walking through BP Plaza, I saw...

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Reviews

PUBLISHER’S EYE: “Strong Winds Ahead”
François Ghebaly

In this expansive group show featuring the works of 18 artists, curator Lekha Jandhyala creates a strange, almost dystopian environment, both primordial and futuristic, of works that imply destruction and rebirth; in dialogue with each other, Ragini Bhow’s floor...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Sarah Miska
Night Gallery

Pulsing with energy and light, exuding a sense of dynamic motion, Sarah Miska uses the world of horse racing as her subject and the compelling need for control, risk-taking and forward motion as her themes. Her current exhibition “High Stakes” features large-scale,...

OUTSIDE LA: Anselm Kiefer
White Cube

It’s difficult to really appreciate the extent to which Anselm Kiefer has transformed the space of White Cube Bermondsey London for his exhibition “Finnegan’s Wake” unless one is familiar with what the gallery looks like under more “normal” circumstances. An absolute...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Linda Arreola
Avenue 50 Studio Gallery

Linda Arreola has been quite busy as her nearly sold-out show of new abstract paintings at Avenue 50 Studio Gallery attests. Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, the exhibition comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings—some in...

OUTSIDE LA: Gordon Matta-Clark
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City

Over the course of a single day, a man saws a house in half. A silent and extremely filmic flickering of light and shadow, hand-held shake, spliced establishing and detail shots, and occasional shirtless cameos by the artist and his assistant, filthy with house-innard...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Ally Rae Peeples
Lowell Ryan Projects

The people depicted in Ally Rae Peeples’ exhibition “Crowd Surfing” resemble how they might see themselves while on hallucinogens or in a house of mirrors, where bodies become distorted, facial expressions are exaggerated, and distinctions between figure and ground...

PUBLISHER’S EYE: Saun Santipreecha
Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

Incorporating sound, painting and sculpture into his work, Santipreecha addresses political histories and climates from a range of places through his methodical, layered process—an engulfing triptych responds to the war in Ukraine, a cement painting probes the history...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Pedro Reyes
Lisson Gallery

An avowed pacifist and activist, Pedro Reyes is known for his sculptures that subvert the potential violence of guns by transforming them into shovels for planting trees or musical instruments played in performance. In his current exhibition of recent sculptures and...

CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL
Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary

One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary,...

Mia Middleton
Roberts Projects

History tells us that the highly refined, discreet object imbued with emotional resonance is an artistic choice largely made during a bygone era when the likes of such artists as Johannes Vermeer stood before a blank canvas, choosing to illuminate the specificity of...

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