I rarely get out to galleries these days and often resort to Instagram for my visual fix. Like the internet itself, it’s a seemingly endless rabbit hole of memes, food porn, actual porn and hopeless narcissism. But occasionally some strange and inexplicable gems scroll on through, just waiting to be unpicked. Last year a friend shared a video by a user going by the handle of @mcdazzler. In it, a...
Los Angeles artist Diane Williams engages such historical hierarchies as male/female, human/animal, and self/other in works that focus on her identity as a non-binary immigrant woman. Born in the Philippines in 1973, Williams (nee Diane Doreen Briones) came to this country as a young teen. She attended high school and college here, graduating from Cal State Long Beach in 2013. Since that time,...
This year, the veteran LA gallery ltd los angeles marked the start of its 10th season. In some ways, the gallery’s program looks more like that of a nonprofit than a commercial gallery. They don’t represent artists, per se. Instead of having a roster of 12 to 20 artists who rotate solo exhibitions, with a few group shows sprinkled in between, ltd los angeles works with a broad range of artists,...
Outsider artists, or untrained artists, have been variously labeled Primitive, Naïve, Visionary and Self-Taught. One of the things I like most about such artists is their distinct and fully-imagined worldview, a consciousness that exists without being overly precious or self-conscious. After all, they did not produce art with a market or a collector in mind; they did so to please themselves or,...
By the time my studio visit with Francesca Gabbiani is winding up, the conversation has turned to Griffith Park. We talk about our respective walks, and various neglected areas of the Park—the depleted bird sanctuary and abandoned spaces and cages near the Zoo—and the spirits that haunt those spaces. Gabbiani became obsessed with the dark history of the Park’s benefactor, Griffith J. Griffith....
After experiencing Frieze LA at Paramount Studios, I've got some super exciting ideas for everyone to consider and some fun activities you might want to do to make your experience even better than mine. I would have done the following, but I was there as a member of the press and, well, this is not what press should do. BUT YOU CAN! 1) Sneak YOUR art INTO the fair. It's not a publicity stunt....
Emily Fromm’s solo exhibition currently on display at 111 Minna Gallery, “No Vacancy,” is the painter’s comic-book style depiction of bustling corners of San Francisco. The exhibition shows over 40 works from the California native painter who studied at San Francisco State University. Large canvases display Fromm’s characteristic graphic animation cityscape paintings. These works use thick, dark...
"Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings," is a deeply satisfying survey exhibition of the photographer’s work which has traveled from the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. to the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts and is currently at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. While attending the press opening, I had a chance to discuss the exhibition with the Curator of the National Gallery of...
Jane Brucker’s work has often revolved around memory and how it resides in objects, especially objects that have been worn or used by people we have known. Incorporating notions of ephemerality and decay, her work has a poignancy that touches on our sense of loss. On the heels of her retrospective at the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Fragile Thoughts: Jane Brucker” (which closed Jan. 6), she...
To coincide with this year’s fourth edition of the FOG Design+Art Fair, the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture invited pioneering multimedia artist Joan Jonas to present two live performances at the center’s Cowell Theater. In the work, titled Moving Off the Land, Jonas gave a fact-based art/science lecture as performance, integrating her signature live drawings and interactions with video...
At Geary Contemporary, an exhibition pairing Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen, shows how nuanced, elegant and powerful the two-person format can be. At first glance, Jensen and Gill’s work have seemingly little in common. Jensen’s Warms (2021) sculptures are visually...
It's been 30 years since Martin Puryear's last solo exhibition in Los Angeles—an exciting place to contextualize Puryear's work considering the city's history of burgeoning sculptural practices, especially those relating to assemblage and minimalism. The show includes...
Laguna Castle is a domestic show, focused tightly on the objects and spaces of everyday living. The solo exhibition at Night Gallery takes its name from the complex in Echo Park that hosted artist Hayley Barker’s residency in the apartment of the late community...
Let me start by just getting a few things off my 28AA chest. I didn’t make it to ANY of the satellite Frieze Projects and am particularly upset about missing at least two of them—specifically Kelly Akashi’s project, Heirloom at the Villa Aurora (last week’s Pick of...
Naked, decapitated women were a favorite amongst the macho surrealists of the 1930s, projecting their desire and power onto phantom breasts and bellies. The female figures in Becky Kolsrud's surrealist paintings might also be missing heads and appendages, but they are...
To meander is not the same as to walk from point to point. Aside from being less direct it also implies a kind of dallying and teasing out of things that marching from place to place simply does not accomplish. All the artworks in Fran Siegel's show "Chronicle,"...
The 2023 Mexico City Art Week kicked off its return last week, the entire city humming with visiting creatives eager to take in all that fairs, galleries, museums and performance spaces had to offer. Zona Maco, running February 8-12th, returned to Centro Citibanamex...
I crouch down to get a closer look at Kelly Akashi’s blooming burial mound and ponder what it might feel like to photosynthesize. An undulating imprint of the artist’s body bulges beneath the landscape like a bloated corpse. Seedlings sprout through a blanket of...
Depicting the passage of time and light through the color of a repeated landscape, Whitney Bedford’s “Vedute” immerses viewers in a stunning but haunting forested world. The landscape in each large-scale work depicts the same scene mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and...
A series of diaphanous shelves hover with a brooding, eerie sense of stillness that charms and terrifies. Patrick Jackson's exhibition “Liquid Clay” presents two separate but related sculpture-based installations. Occupying most of the gallery space is a series of...