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 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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Is your current exhibition open to the public by appointment? And does it matter who the “public” is, i.e. only prospective buyers, art critics, art curators? Our current exhibitions are closed to the public as required under the COVID-19 lockdown but we do have more content about our current exhibitions on the webpage where you can see walkthrough videos, a checklist of works in the show in...
Is your current exhibition open to the public by appointment? And does it matter who the “public” is, i.e., only prospective buyers, art critics, art curators? We switched to appointment only as a precaution before the shutdown announcement. Now the Bendix Building - and LA for that matter - just closed completely until April 1st. As a result, I can’t even enter the building by myself, let...
William J. Simmons, art historian and Special Projects curator of the Felix L.A. art fair. EMILY WELLS: Your curatorial practice seems to be steeped in your background in queer and feminist art history. How do you see these two as informing each other? WILLIAM J. SIMMONS: It is an oft-forgotten fact that feminist and anti-racist activism informed, enabled even, queerness and queer art history....
After three years of experiencing artwork, exhibitions, podcasts, and news reports related to Covid-19, it seemed there could be nothing left to consume that is new, inspiring or even interesting. Enter Susan Chen. In a surprisingly refreshing and engaging solo show,...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...