Articles
Art Damaged
Race Place
Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a biennal is a worthwhile form for an exhibition, I won’t attempt to answer that question here. But even after taking into account the...
Capturing The Castle LA’s Coolest Apartment Gallery Leaves the Living Room
Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional start in the music industry, he began paying closer attention to visual art when he started lightly collecting in 2015. He’s not sure...
An Indigenous Gaze Towards The Future Wendy Red Star Recontextualizes Native Culture in Outer Space
Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations,...
My Favorite Cézanne The Only Impressionist Painting I Actually Like
Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right now. I can hear it too: But Western painters had never thought about light that way before! The way they deconstructed figures and...
Reviews
“Actions” at Sarah Brook Gallery
While the connection between the works in Actions is as ambiguous as its title, the exhibition braids together three artists worth examining individually. Laurel Nakadate’s installation serves as a wall-sized shrine for bridging time and absence, with altered...
Beatrice Arraes at Sea View
The song Kukukaya, which partly inspired Beatrice Arraes’s solo exhibition, speaks of a game meant for four, but “Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” feels purposely solitary, quiet—a slow reckoning with time, where winning was never the point. Her paintings, saturated in deep...
Rocky Morton Shatto Gallery
These paintings feature drip-like tendrils of paint, blown by a leaf-blower and sprawled across the canvas at all angles. Areas of the surface are covered at random but, more or less, evenly, like static. The process-based stochasticism is all too predictable. This...
J. Parker Valentine at Bel Ami
The one large abstract drawing here, wedged precisely in between the ceiling and floor, explores a relationship between geometric form and explorative mark-making. The light touch is enticing, but the sketchy linework feels too beholden to the diagonal lines and ovals...
Alexander Reben at Charlie James Gallery
The central piece here is four split-flap displays showing AI-generated text and a large HD TV displaying images based on those texts. The problem is that AI images are already familiar enough to be corny. The upscale production values do not help, and the jokey...