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...
Sometimes art looks like design, and sometimes design looks like art. It’s hard to know the difference these days as both artists and designers seemingly want to merge one with the other. Either way, the 5th edition of FOG Design + Art was the perfect hybridization. FOG likes to promote the D for design to attract non art fair patrons; however, the A was in full force this year filling a...
On Thursday evening, when performance artist Astrid Hadad began telling a glitter-bombed, sombrero-wearing rubber chicken that everything would be okay, I remembered that there was still good in the world. The day’s news had been completely crappy, and I had ridden into the Mayan Theater on a toxic tide of gloom. I arrived to see Hadad’s show, I Am Made in Mexico, which kicks off REDCAT’S Live...
The experience of art in Los Angeles is always both very specific to its localized encounter and acutely conscious of its engagement with the world. As political forces outside California moved to further isolate us in 2017, that dialogue and artists’ sensitivity to the global implications of their work have only intensified. To move through the many memorable art shows this past year in Los...
At Kandis Williams’ studio, sparse and white with tall ceilings and drywall divisions, her studio neighbor Orion Martin and I sit and talk with her about contemporary intimacy. I am struggling as to whether I should revive a Tinder account in an act of hysteria spawning from a relationship that cut far too deep for its brevity. Williams shakes her head, empathetic and saddened. Williams is at...
In the mainstream, queerness has a way of being pushed into the shadows, forced back into the closet. It happens all around us, especially in communities of color, spaces which still oftentimes say that queerness does not belong here. It was a bit of a surprise then to see queerness so unabashedly out this fall as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the massive exhibition series funded by the...
Just as there is a certain metaphysical link between acknowledging one’s existence and looking in the mirror, there exists a similar link between the acknowledgement of a culture’s experienced reality and its representation in media. When a cultural group lacks representation, the variety of their experiences is suppressed. At times, then, they are fueled to create an artistic response outside...
Diego Rivera’s artistic oeuvre is so connected to our collective unconscious that touring this exhibition of 150 paintings, frescoes and drawings, feels like a homecoming. The show also includes film projections of murals that the artist created in Mexico and the US...
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...