If one were to Google Canadian artist Eli Langer, most of the results would reference a convoluted legal case against his first show (held at Toronto’s Mercer Union Gallery in 1993) that proclaimed the subject matter not simply to be pornography but child pornography—Canada’s version of the late-’80s Jesse Helms morality and censorship cluster-fuck. The paintings and sketches, only glimpses of...
Laurie Lipton’s supremely detailed large-scale graphite drawings document the haphazardness of modern life as well as the darker more sinister underbelly of consumerist culture. Looking at these images, one can’t help but be reminded of how the proletariat is controlled and all human freedoms are denied in Orwell’s 1984. Lipton’s sardonic content connects with today’s bleak and unsettling...
Gerardo Monterrubio marks his ceramic sculptures with his memories and experiences as an Oaxacan immigrant. Free-flowing drawings upon his pottery relate engrossing autobiographical narratives interlaced with cultural commentary. His work recalls a vast historic spectrum of pictorial clay: cave paintings, Greek amphoras, Mesoamerican vessels and Grayson Perry vases. Monterrubio’s early...
The image on the wall delivers a message of warmth and messiness. Amanda Charchian calls it 7 Types of Love, Agape, and it presents a disembodied pair of female lips floating against a soft sea of pink, a cloud of blood seeping from the red lipstick. As a photograph, it’s torrid and abstract, expressing female sexuality in ways both subtle and direct in “Future Feminine” at the Fahey/Klein...
2017 has been a brilliant year for the movies. And they were good in so many ways, let me try to count them: They offered novel subject matter, woman falls in love with fish-man in The Shape of Water; a despised ex-athlete gets her cinema redemption in I, Tonya; a younger man falls heads over heels in love with a washed-up movie star who is played for sexy and seductive in Movie Stars Don’t Die...
All weekend, the Westside was ablaze with art. StART Up Fair, located at The Kinney (no relation to our editor!) Hotel in Venice, featured over 67 artists in a series of terrific and eclectic motel-room installations. At Friday’s opening, performance artist Guta Galli prowled the halls in a walk-through of 61 pounds, in which the artist carried the titular weight of red yarn and the essences of...
Traversing pre-history, Mesoamerican cosmology, and sexually free interplanetary-futurism, The Formaldehyde Trip, a live performance with video and songs, creates alternate realms for the overlooked casualties of colonialism. Dedicated to the memory of Bety Cariño, it not only envisions a realm in which Cariño is reborn, but foresees a radically feminist world, where according to the lyrics “you...
The rendezvous point was a small coffee shop and bar. Along with about 30 other recruits (participants) I was given a lanyard containing a welcome letter and a schematic of Colony 933. I almost missed a small tightly-rolled scroll that outlined a brief modern history of Earth and the colony. It made claims contradictory to the ones in my welcome letter. Directed by Kate Speer, an...
Last Tuesday night (January 16, 2018), a day before he died, Ed Moses had an art opening of his latest work at a gallery space next to the new Hal’s restaurant in Playa Vista (where you can see a remarkable installation of his painted sliding door screens). Ed wasn’t at the reception which was unusual, and when I spoke with his son Andy I could tell without much explanation that the end was...
In ancient days of strife and warfare, a death squad of bird-women used the strategies of sound and seduction to destroy their enemies. Homer gave the Sirens a starring role in book 12 of The Odyssey, where they attempt to divert Odysseus from his returning home to Ithaca and cleansing his castle of enemies. The Sirens approach Odysseus’s black ship as it sails the western sea, and tempt him...
Water flows ceaselessly through the arteries of Robert Gober's solitary faucet, as if it were a trickling monument to the Sisyphean impossibility of cleanliness. Originally made in response to the AIDS crisis, Gober's handcrafted sink is recontextualized in the age of...
The Norton Simon Museum exhibition opening on October 20 featured just two paintings: Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’ Madame Moitessier (1856) and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book (1932). The latter is a response to the former and, though made seventy-six years apart,...
The Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris is an obsessive abstractionist. The grid serves as her compositional playground where shapes and colors frolic and meander. The 21-year survey exhibition "Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022," at the Institute of Contemporary Art...
The spirograph galaxy of Rhythmic Inquisitions, an exhibition of works by June Edmonds at the Riverside Art Museum, unmercifully hypnotizes. Expanding boundaries, this 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient injects Aretha Franklin’s Respect (1967) into Abstract...
Abe Odedina’s “You Give Me Fever” embodies the spirit of a universal human emotion: desire. In his Los Angeles solo debut on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, the architect-turned-painter considers desire with a kaleidoscopic gaze, depicting deep-seated longings for...
Just across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati is The Carnegie, a former library in Covington, Kentucky constructed in 1904 one of over 2,500 worldwide funded by Andrew Carnegie. Now a theater and exhibition space, the center serves the local and surrounding...
Prunella Clough's paintings glitch, sneeze, and itch in states of spaghettification. Observational renderings culled from the everyday–seemingly subtle yet tidal and awkwardly beautiful–Clough discombobulates the gravitational fields that tether shapes and colors to...
Despite being mired in digital culture, the Bonn based artist Arno Beck makes analogue works. In his exhibition "Zen Them to Hell", he presents typewritten landscape drawings. Each of the eighteen identically sized and shaped, framed works on paper juxtapose...
There is something sugary about Sharon Ellis’ new psychedelic paintings that are reminiscent of my favorite childhood board game, Candy Land, nostalgic of gingerbread plum trees, the peppermint stick forest, Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. Ellis’ paintings also...
Mary Kelly‘s show "Corpus" at Vielmetter Gallery includes thirty framed pieces which alternate between image in one frame and text in another. The name of the show, "Corpus," refers to the work being a collection of writings, yet has a double meaning built in as the...