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...
“Freedom Cannot Wait”. “Deport ICE”. “Para Todos Todo, Nada Para Nosotros”. “Everything for Everyone, Nothing For Ourselves”. These are not slogans pulled from defiant posters in one of many protests happening regularly across the United States, as American society becomes even more divided between the haves and have nots; those who speak English, and those who do not. These phrases are...
I make no claim as to the comprehensiveness or objectivity of this selection. Nevertheless, to the extent that it reflects personal priorities, I believe most artists, if not the entire art community, both local and international, acknowledge the existential criticality of the moment. In one way or another, each of these exhibitions has engaged this moment as it intersects with a specific place...
Looking back at 2018, here are 10 exceptionally memorable shows among the 50 I’ve selected for Artillery’s online Pick of the Week throughout the year. Full reviews, and all other Picks, can be found in the column’s ongoing archive: artillerymag.com/pick-of-the-week/ 1. Melanie Pullen: Unseen Stories Leica Gallery LA Molotov cocktails and stalkers and murders—oh, my! Pullen...
As we raked through ashes in California, reminded that we had already entered an anthro-obscene geological epoch, the most “important” of the Fall 2018 art auctions were already taking place, with records dropping every step of the way—Hopper, Hockney, Jack Whitten, Jacob Lawrence (with unusual drama), even our own Henry Taylor. But as any stand-up comedian or Sotheby’s own Amy Cappellazzo will...
Last year, even as LACMA Director Michael Govan was in the midst of storing the collection off site so that demolition of older buildings could make way for the newly designed museum, he took the time to curate an exhibition featuring Pictures Generation artist Richard Prince. The show was a new iteration of the Marlboro “Cowboy” series that made Prince famous. For the original series made...
“People I have great admiration for, people in my own circle, they just keep coming to Los Angeles. All the key people, and they just keep coming,” says art dealer Jeffrey Deitch at his Los Feliz home. “It never stops. And now we have reached critical mass. It’s no longer, ‘Wow, things are happening here.’ It’s now. It’s real.” We are in the kitchen of the house Deitch bought back in 2010, when...
A recent Barbara Kruger text mural adorns LAXART—accompanying the relaunch of their newly renovated space. The site-specific work debuted in June and extends until Spring this year. One might not have paid much attention to the building before, but Kruger’s signature Helvetica black text on white commands your attention. It just looks so good. Large fig trees surround the building as you enter...
Mention Blockchain and most people immediately think of Bitcoin. No surprise since Blockchain technology was invented to track transactions of the once-esoteric cryptocurrency. But Blockchain is being touted as a technology that will revolutionize our world, in ways that are unrelated to using Bitcoin or its competitors. Perhaps one of the most intriguing applications is its potential for...
Yunhee Min’s work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last summer follows an earlier body of work similar in style, “Movements” at her New York gallery in 2016. Both of them mark a strong new direction for her painting. The new series, entitled the “Wilde Paintings,” is so named because the generous natural light in her new DTLA studio—located on a street in the fashion district named for...
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...
Elliott Hundley's creations have always been superabundant. His dense canvases are usually filled with thousands of small cut-outs—shapes, figures, snippets from advertisements—pinned to the surface of the works and extended out at different heights to turn the...