The structure is made out of bamboo poles and stakes, secured with palm rope. It stretches from the side door leading out of the museum, crosses the small courtyard, and extends towards the street. The soft beige color of the Moso bamboo underscores the apparent simplicity of this tunnel/bridge, which was designed following the geometric and mathematical principles of the golden ratio and...
The photographic tableaux of Los Angeles–based Parisian transplant Reine Paradis evoke an ambiguity of place. The central focal point of each is a solo figure, played by Paradis, typically costumed in an A-line mini or similarly chic garment fashioned from transparent, tinted PVC; she is most often posed humorously or awkwardly—sometimes, heroically—in an iconic landscape, accompanied at times...
“Made in L.A.” has finally hits its stride—this fourth edition feels fresh with discoveries, both of artists you may know and many you may not. It features 32 artists, from emerging ones with promising talent to the exciting re-emergence of an artist who fell from the public eye for several decades—Luchita Hurtado, age 97. In the last two years, Hurtado has had two shows, but her last solo show...
How to describe Gretchen Andrew’s practice? Her website proclaims her a “search engine artist and internet imperialist who programs her paintings to manipulate and dominate search results.” Piggy-backing on the Google phenomenon, Andrew has slyly infiltrated the World Wide Web. For example, an image search for “powerful person,” which one would expect to produce images of presidents and world...
This week’s announcement that Klaus Biesenbach, director of New York’s PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite in Queens, was chosen to be the new MOCA director was greeted by mixed notices among the LA art community including: “He never smiles.” True if he’s judged by his photos. Biesenbach, who is the Godfather of the Berlin Biennale, was quoted as saying LA reminds him of a “new Berlin.”...
When I learned of the news that Jonathan Gold had passed away, I was at a memorial for a dear friend—what a cruel irony. It came as a shock to me as I had interviewed Jonathan in late May for Artillery’s food issue. Gold’s name is emblazoned in black-and-gold letters on the cover of our current July/August issue. Besides the weirdness of having an interview with someone that has since died, it...
Although Christopher Reynolds’ art is full of food imagery, few of his installations and performances traffic in actual foodstuffs. “It’s not really about the food, but the food referencing,” the Northern California-based artist says in a phone interview. There is at least one glaring exception—an opulent performance last year at a private supper club in Santa Monica, but that, too, pointed to...
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...
In the late winter of 2019, I became enamored with Joan Didion. I and my then partner were driving the backroads of Tennessee and North Carolina as a leg of a cross country move from Portland to Philadelphia. Somewhere along our trip I picked up a copy of South and...
In Laguna Art Museum’s 10 years of mounting its annual Art & Nature installations, a consistent theme has been the preservation of our planet. In this year’s version, the museum celebrates the beauty of nature while artfully addressing environmentalism and...
Forever enchanted by Francesca Woodman’s photographic realms, I trace her contorted, fluttering body in the passing shadows and opaque reflections of her self-portraits–I see a witch, a siren, a spirit, a saint, a veiled apparition. Woodman’s body is simultaneously...
The first word that comes to mind to describe "In Praise of Shadows" is ‘immense’. This may be what is expected from an artist’s thirty-year retrospective, but William Kentridge is not just any artist. The South African artist is prolific, and this show captures the...
For those already acquainted with Elaine Cameron-Weir’s practice, her recent exhibition “Exploded View / Dressing for Windows” at Hannah Hoffman Gallery feels familiarly sterile and sacred, mechanical and magical. Clusters of assemblage sculpture made of concrete,...
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...