Artist Masami Teraoka said, “Let’s make art!” and they did. Pure art rumbles, bubbles and springs forth, like the eruption of a magnificent geyser. As the plume spray drifts and evaporates in the wind, the beauty of the gesture is the impermanent purpose. A site-specific, immersive interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest was conceived, planned, strategized and rehearsed for a singular...
“Get off Bonnie Brae!” Chris Kraus shouts from the car speakerphone when I resort to calling her for directions. I’m lost in MacArthur Park, a neighborhood that borders downtown Los Angeles, looking for the writer/critic’s house. I wasn’t sure if Kraus raised her voice for my safety (Bonnie Brae is a notorious drug-copping street), or just to point me quickly in the right direction. When I...
Can art hurt people? In mid-February, I sat in Boyle Heights’ El Tepeyac café across from a revolutionary named A. and probed him with questions in order to find out. A., a slim Latinx man wearing Elvis Costello glasses, belongs to the anti-gentrification group Defend Boyle Heights. DBH is a nationally recognized rebellion against the encroachment of art galleries into communities of color, and...
It’s true what they say. You can’t go home again—even if home is a neon jungle. Even if you’ve remade that neon jungle into your own constantly morphing, expanding universe. Even if that jungle is based upon an ideal garden of your youth, into which you’ve sown every idea, image, metaphor, concept, or obsession that ever flew into your head, and seemed to take a shape one could physically...
It used to be about the art. It used to be that seeing (and being told to step back from) a Picasso was enough. But, once again, millennials have ruined it for everyone. Simply admiring a statue is as anathema as simply watching a movie without simultaneously texting, checking IMDb for where you recognize that actor from, and taking a selfie at the theater #lovegettingoffsocialmediaforabit!...
“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is an ambitious show by any stretch of the imagination, boasting six of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms together with a selection of other work from the remarkable 65-year career of the “world’s most popular artist” (according to a 2015 survey on museum attendance by The Art Newspaper). Kusama has...
Desert X, we love the name of this art biennial out in the Coachella Valley—“X” as the unknown, the sexy, the je-ne-sais-quoi factor. There is something mysterious and alluring about the desert, with its sere, sparse, wide-open expanses and its promise of possibilities. This one also conveniently offers some amenities, like posh hotels and spas, good restaurants, and hip rock concerts. The...
Jami Porter Lara stumbled upon both the subject and the medium of her current exhibition “Border Crossing” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., while walking in the arroyos along the U.S./Mexico border in Arizona four years ago. Little did the New Mexico artist know then that she would end up showing this evocative work near the White House, where the sitting...
Most customers at Trader Joe’s have food on their minds. Not Ann Weber. While others grab favorite items off the shelves, the intrepid artist heads for the dumpsters. Perpetually on the lookout for cardboard boxes to transform into sculpture, she has an eye for colorful labels, crisp black letters and remnants of shipping tape, but she isn’t opposed to plain brown. “I love making beauty from...
This Spring, for the first time in the US, spectators can engage directly with the art and performance of the Berlin-based collective Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel) in City as Stage, a multidisciplinary work in two parts: 100% City, an immersive video installation housed at the MCASB, and Home Visit USA, a series of interactive performances hosted at...
The work of Jovencio de la Paz exists between the ideal and abstract and what the press release referred to as the “fallibility of physical space.”I don’t think of “physical space” as a “fallible” domain, nor are digitally constructed spaces necessarily ideal. Yet...
In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2012) bell hooks states, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” Such words were actualized in “Known & Understood: Selections from the Permanent Collection” on...
There are few forces in the world as powerful as memory. Reconjuring the fleeting scents of former lovers and the chattering sounds of childhood, memory evinces that life is composed of so much more than the here and now; it summons impressions that both soothe the...
Working in a continuous exegesis of an overarching project, pursuing branching pathways to their conclusions then returning to the center and setting off again, Alison O’Daniel transforms elusive ideas and ambiguous experiences into concrete objects—still and moving...
The initial apprehension upon entry to Ei Arakawa’s exhibition took a few moments to subside. It was swiftly alleviated upon realizing that it is not an exhibition in the typical sense but more of a journey through a cardboard-constructed maze: a metaphorical...
Upon entering Helen J Gallery, the electric sounds produced by the neon lights of Ahn Hyong Nam’s dynamic sculptures pour into visitors’ ears and plunges them into the artist's reimagined matrix. As the show's title implies, "Automatic Nature," Ahn's work investigates...
Amir Zaki's exhibition 'On Being Here' presents hyper-real, large-scale color photographs of piers in Southern California. In each image, Zaki divides the composition into two sections, juxtaposing a view on the pier looking towards the ocean with another from the...
At the ICA Los Angeles, curators Marcelle Joseph and Legacy Russell have assembled 25 artists whose practices engage with the construction of identity and the self as subject –or, as Judith Butler puts it, The Condition of Being Addressable. This international and...
Kristopher Raos’ "No Escaping the Housework" is an eye-popping splash of vibrant color. His bold works are highly refined pop art which depict the packaging for a variety of different cleaning products. Technically untitled, each piece indicates a “product” name and...
A grotesque feeling of excitement and misery shivers through me whenever I encounter Mika Rottenberg’s work. Her stories of monstrous mechanisms of hypercapitalism are infused with a queasy comedy that reminds me of Julia Kristeva’s “laughter of the apocalypse”...