Articles
COLLISION ENSURES REACTION Getty PST: Art and Science Collide
This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous textile-based technologies of the early modern era, and reflections on the environmental precarity of Los Angeles. There were as...
DUELLING REVIEWS: Doug Aitken at Regen Projects and the Marciano Art Foundation
Gallery Dogs & Cats
STAYING SANE(ish) WITH DR. TRAINWRECK Ask Dr. Trainwreck
Trying to Navigate LA Dear Dr. Trainwreck, Can you talk about chasing fame and how that affects friendship? I’m from the Midwest and came out to California for art school. I’m fresh out of school (one year) and was able to get pretty good gallery representation early on so I count myself lucky. But a classmate that graduated at the same time keeps asking me how I did it. I’m happy to share. I’m...
In Search of a City
“Loa Angeles is 72 Suburbs in Search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker January is always a quiet month for the Los Angeles art world, but it was made even quieter this year by natural disaster—the fires shut down many art institutions while the city grappled with destruction—and the gloom of the national political situation, which depressed an already down-and-out town. There were fire fundraisers, of...
ROLL CALL
Where Artists Eat
ART DAMAGED Reverse Hated
STAYING SANE(ish) WITH DR. TRAINWRECK PTSD, Trauma, Fires
What is to give light must endure burning. —Victor Frankl I had this plan, I was going to spend each issue clarifying an overused, misunderstood and generally obnoxious term or diagnosis. Remember last time when I went on a tirade about ‘triggering’. I planned to do the same with narcissist, borderline, attachment styles, and so forth. Of course, I may still get there but I had to regroup. The...
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Reviews
DERRIANN PHARR at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
It’s not uncommon that an art show claims to deconstruct the human form and challenge societal notions of beauty. Derrian Pharr’s innovative “I Am a Bloodstone” makes good on this promise. The otherworldly heroines in Pharr’s works (made with pastels and prisma...
Ryan Preciado at Palm Springs Art Museum
Palm Springs’ annual Modernism Week dominates the city in February, but I caught this quiet, elegant exhibit at the museum’s satellite space. It’s a revelatory history and homage to Frank Lloyd Wright craftsman Manuel Sandoval, a twentieth-century Nicaraguan American...
KELLY AKASHI at Lisson Gallery
Time is a common theme in Kelly Akashi’s work. Doilies inherited from her grandmother represent the past. The artist’s hands, cast in bronze, serve as timestamps for the present— lines and wrinkles marking specific moments. Cast bronze seed pods represent the...
Ramekon O’Arwisters at Craft Contemporary
Textile art has not always been one of my favorite mediums, but Ramekon O’Arwisters' exhibit altered my thinking. At a time where being Black and Queer, and any semblance of DEI seems fraught - the artist has come out swinging. The thoughtfully curated show is...
Ed Gomez at the MXCL BNL LAB
The long-running MexiCali Biennial got a recent boost from Mellon Foundation and is currently making its mark in the eastern LA suburb of Whittier. The space, which also houses an archive, MXCL BNL LAB545, is located in an unpretentious storefront, betraying an...
DUELLING REVIEWS: Doug Aitken at Regen Projects and the Marciano Art Foundation
PAUL THEK at Hannah Hoffman
I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the...
ANGELYNE at Melrose Botanical Garden
As I fought through crosstown traffic, the messages came in fast and furious. Hurry up!... Where are you?!... She’s about to arrive!... You’re gonna miss her corvette pull up! When I finally parked and made it to Melrose Botanical Garden, the crowd was spilling onto...
FAYE DRISCOLL at REDCAT
I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but...
PIPPA GARNER at STARS
The artist died during the run of her exhibition, just a few days before the new year. It is fitting given that Pippa Garner used her body as a sort of extended art project, something she worked on for years—altering it with surgeries, tattoos and piercings. The...