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...
Years before the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA” was initiated, the Museum of Latin American Art was exploring Latin and Latino culture. Its previous 2011–12 PST, “Mex/L.A. ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930–1985,” explored the relationship between artists and supporters on both sides of the border, and included murals by José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Yet in...
China had its first major avant-garde exhibition in 1989, which was also the year of the Tiananmen protests. The exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (through Jan. 7, 2018) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, acknowledges that sea change, and ambitiously tries to track the major sociopolitical changes in post-Mao China with its contemporary art. “No nation in...
“Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West” is a new exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii seeking to revisit and, in effect, rewrite the history of Abstract Expressionism. Since AbEx debuted in the 1940s, the movement has been lauded by critics. Yet, this first uniquely American art movement to achieve international recognition has never fully taken into account its...
Perhaps the best way to think about “Unsettled,” the ambitious fall exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, is from a planetary perspective. As a complement, a separate project concurrently on view suggests and reinforces that viewpoint. A one-to-one scale model of a small satellite tethering a large spherical Mylar balloon, Orbital Reflector (2017) by Trevor Paglen, is the first object that...
This past August I decided to brave the coastal traffic to make a visit to the Lux Art Institute near San Diego. I was on deadline and woke up with a cold, but I had been notified that mega-artist and LA expat Jorge Pardo was scheduled to speak as his artist-in-residency time was winding down. I had encountered Pardo a year before, at his new home base in Merida, Mexico, when he had graciously...
It’s one thing to engage in a discourse about the influence of art historical movements on contemporary painters, and another still to analyze a particular artist’s specific set of influences, such as Nicole Eisenman’s robust relationship with the European...
Vessels are containers–spaces for bodies of volume to dwell, to fill up–shaped by what they have held and what they long to hold. In Anina Major’s solo exhibition “Inheritance” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, fragmented baskets molded from clay operate as metaphorical...
Two works by Shirley Tse, originally exhibited indoors, are remixed under the spell of wild elements in The Magic Hour's current iteration time going backward and forward. Founded in 2018 in Twentynine Palms, California by Alice Wang and Ben Tong, The Magic Hour has...
At the wall in the back of the space rests an altar surrounded by oyster shells, pearls, pumpkin seeds, white candles on white cloth, white gloves, a brown fedora, a box of pralines, a Precious Moments angel. An audience member approaches and places a stem of white...
There’s something remarkable about standing in front of a painting that makes you squint, move, readjust your perspective and question your eyesight altogether. Christina Allan’s paintings do just that. Made with acrylic and spray paint, Allan’s compositions are crisp...
An ouroboros of hair and vomit surges through an arched body; vulvic lilypads share a tender moment of caress; aluminum breasts perched above erect flower stocks posture as suits of armor, guardians, gargoyles; a tantalizing cocoon drips from above; a nest of braids,...
And we’re back… back to communing for art’s sake. If you’re looking for something intimate and off the trodden path, there’s Caleb Stein’s exhibition "Down by the Hudson." It’s a focused collection of subdued, low-contrast, black-and-white photographs featuring water...
Just as Diego Velázquez’s "Las Meninas" (1656) troubled differentiations between life and painting, Paul Mpagi Sepuya confuses the boundaries that separate life and photography, questioning what is intended to be seen and concealed. In his recent exhibition at...
Since I first saw Olivia Hill’s solo exhibition “Strike-Slip” at Bel Ami, I’ve found myself returning to one work in particular—one of the smallest in the show, a sunset-hued rendering of sandy terrain. Entitled Tire Mark in Yucca Valley 34°12’27.9″N 116°26’17.2″W...
In swirls of citrus yellow and lipstick red, a neon sign just inside the entrance proclaimed: My Body My Choice, Her Body Her Choice. The words of protest—framed by recycled cardboard to echo the font’s curvaceous forms—seemed to flash a prescient warning the day the...