The Food Group, an ongoing project by Ry Rocklen, is a comical exploration into the relationship between mankind and food. Human subjects (friends of Rocklen’s, mostly) dress up in life-sized food costumes à la Fruit of the Loom that are either rented or fabricated by Rocklen. The costumed subjects are then scanned and replicated by a 3D printer in miniature, food-sized form. The result is a...
On any given Friday, between noon and 2 p.m., you’ll find one of Los Angeles’ best taco trucks parked downtown on 3rd Street in the middle of the Arts District. How do I know this? Because Jonathan Gold says so. “Let’s meet at Guerrilla Tacos,” the LA Times food critic and man-about-town directs me in a text. Gold has agreed to meet me for lunch while we visit a few galleries nearby. I was...
Cannibalism is now a regular thing in the art world. I’m not being metaphorical by referring to the cutthroat competition of an art market mirroring the inhumanity of its elite clientele. I’m talking about actual artists eating people. In 1996 the artist Marco Evaristti served his friends meatballs made from beef and fat extracted from his recent liposuction surgery. Upping the ante, in 2012 the...
Narsiso Martinez shapes richly detailed images of farm workers in oil, charcoal and ink wash—with discarded produce boxes as his canvas. A simple trip to Costco for pizza proved revelatory for the artist, when he found a purple-and-yellow banana box at the store. When drawing on that material, his spare and beautiful work evolved. The artist combines images of the people who bring produce to...
Known as a pioneer of the farm-to-table dining movement, Michael McCarty founded his first restaurant, Michael’s, in Santa Monica in 1979. Ten years later he would open his second location in Midtown Manhattan. Michael and his wife, the artist Kim McCarty, would become known as true friends and patrons of artists—collecting, providing alternative exhibition space in their restaurants and often...
When is a painting high art, and when is it just nice wallpaper? On May 10, I learned the answer to this question when attending ARTXFOOD’s inaugural art-themed dinner, Hallowed Ground. ARTXFOOD is produced by ArtCubed Los Angeles, which hosted a “part salon, part summit happening” at Goya Studios. The event involved eating a fancy dinner designed by celebrity chef Richard Blais while surrounded...
Food allures our ocular faculties as much as it gratifies our alimentary and salivary organs. We devour visual stimuli with our eyes just as we ingest edibles through our mouths. It thus seems felicitous that the word “taste” applies to aesthetic predilections as well as culinary concoctions. Art is cultural sustenance, food for thought. “You are what you eat”: No wonder victuals have served as...
June is LGBT+ Pride month, and it also marks the month of the third annual Los Angeles-based Queer Biennial, founded and curated by Ruben Esparza, which opened on June 1, titled “What if Utopia?" I have to admit that I am disappointed by this queer biennial, unlike the prior year’s that I praised for its inventiveness and intriguing images and performances—even as it reckoned with the heavy...
It’s an uncharacteristically cool, rainy afternoon when I climb the steps to Judie Bamber’s home and studio in a neighborhood off Sunset. As I enter her studio—a surprisingly spare and self-contained space—a rectangle of golden light seems to float on an easel set up at the rear of the room, seemingly appropriated from some magic hour we’re bound not to see on that particular day. As I move...
Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. — Claude Cahun Thinh Nguyen is a non-binary artist who calls our attention to the constructed nature of our ideas about race and gender. Nguyen challenges the dualist thought that dominates so much of our public discourse: the fraught oppositions of fixed cultural...
In her inaugural solo exhibition “All in Time” at Murmurs Gallery, sculptor and sound artist Maria Maea braids palm fronds, milkweed, rebar, chicken wire and—most importantly—radical community. One can hardly even call the show “solo,” although it deserves the same...
In the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot, a square of green grass houses a dark bronze tree trunk. The leafless branches expand out from the top of the trunk and amidst those branches another tree of a silvery color is nestled upside down. The cluster of...
To experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of...
Most folks mainly (or only) know Nancy Holt from Sun Tunnels—her 1973-76 land art installation laying large concrete pipes along a certain axis keyed to the seasonal solar arc, thus activating the rural place in which you stand, while igniting a soaring connection...
Lily Wong’s phantasmal figures traverse boundaries that blur celestial realms and built environments, painting a world that evokes fragmented feelings and cosmic confusion spurred by her personal quest for ancestral knowledge and identity. Bodies glow with an...
Luciana Abait’s survey exhibition “On the Verge” features twenty works of various mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, video installation and an augmented reality. Each work is a wondrous landscape both magical and tragic. The magic comes from the...
Luminous, pastel colors abound in new paintings from Lily Stockman’s solo show “The Tilting Chair” at Charles Moffett in New York. Overall minimalist in style, Stockman’s abstract works are full of circles, ovals and petals resembling the plants and flowers referenced...
There are no straight lines or perfect circles in Physics, there are only currents, vortexes, distorted electromagnetic fields, impossible matter and beings in a reflexive state of becoming—morphing, deforming, sprawling and spilling out with each aberrant encounter....
"Spirit of the Land: Artists Honor Avi Kwa Ame" fortifies the work of activists—including the show’s curators, Checko Salgado, Kim Garrison Means and Mikayla Whitmore—who catalyzed the introduction of a congressional bill this year that would designate Avi Kwa Ame...
Will Rawls’ solo exhibition, "Amphigory," at Adams & Ollman in Portland, OR binds a weightless density to a lexicon of its own creation. Multi-panel installations of black & white abstract prints on paper line the three walls of the gallery space, as well as...