Articles

COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
"Redaction" by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar

A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both Black, decided to produce a book version of the same name, published by W. W. Norton, to attain wider distribution, particularly among...

FUCKING WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Films of Martine Syms

by Cat Kron

How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017, where the then 29-year-old artist debuted her first feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice, as part of the exhibition...

MALKA GERMANIA
Yael Bartana's Jungian Journey Into the Past and Present

by Liz Goldner

In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation, while transforming that trauma into manna. Malka Germania (Queen Germania in Hebrew), created by Israeli native/Berlin resident Yael...

The Complex Stuff is the Best
Keith Haring at The Broad

by Tucker Neel

“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old son, Oscar Forbes, to get his thoughts about the exhibition. After setting up tickets for our visit, the museum’s PR team emailed...

New Art in the Metro System

by Scarlet Cheng

With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts of the station’s architecture—whether part of solid walls or glass panels. What I’ve found particularly interesting is that Metro...

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Reviews

Carter Potter
at as-is.la

Sometimes art can just be a weird, cool thing that happened one time. Like, what if you took apart a three-part sectional, stacked it vertically, and poured eight gallons of house paint through it. This is a dumb idea, but dumb stuff can be fun. With art, one plus one...

Andrew Schoultz
at Guerrero Gallery

The word trippy comes to mind here, but it might not actually apply. The quasi-mythological take on nature and the vibrating, prismatic color naturally suggest psychedelia but, overall, these are too controlled to be visionary. They feel, at times, like a collision of...

Austin Lee
at Jeffrey Deitch

Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024),...

“signifying the impossible song”
at Southern Guild

At the entrance of the gallery, viewers are confronted by a massive wall work by Moffat Takdiwa, bhiro ne bepa (pen and paper) (2023), constructed from the detritus of late-stage capitalism and post-colonialist society. The artist embraces the texture and materiality...

Becky Tucker
at Steve Turner

I love seeing an artist push the boundaries of the medium. Becky Tucker does exactly that with stoneware creations that are —FIRE. They look like Clive Barker created the Cenobites from Hellraiser in a kiln lit by hell’s inferno. The most imposing pieces are a trio of...

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