Apocryphal notions, like northern superiority and European “discovery” of land already populated, pervade the Western Hemisphere. Even before Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, our so-named New World has been a locus for European fantasy projection. Currently on view at UCR ARTSblock, “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas” showcases the work of artists employing science fiction...
What do we have when those closest and dearest to us pass away and what do we do with the things that were once theirs? Richard Turner's installation Air Becomes Breath, 2017, takes that question on and has turned the clothing of his recently deceased wife, Sylvia, into the central element of his show. He has made these uninhabited garments into the hinge around which his installation literally...
Karen Finley’s The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery unfolds similarly to a dream that makes complete logical sense when experiencing it, but is difficult to piece together the linear structure upon waking. The one-woman show lasts for an hour and a half (no intermission) and I was impressed by the endurance and vitality of the sometimes-panting, sometimes-yelling, always passionate Finley. The...
I have had the opportunity to visit the Venice Biennale on numerous occasions. In reflecting, I realize that what makes one trip stand out over another is the totality of the experience and not the specificity of the art. How can one not love Venice? Navigating criss-crossing bridges and canals to find an installation that completely takes over and transforms an ancient palace is always one of...
In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at least happens in that context. But if art serves as a metaphorical megaphone, she uses it to broadcast loudly, aiming to erase the...
Ana Serrano’s colorful cardboard sculptures of cityscapes and buildings, inspired by Latin American vernacular architecture, will be featured prominently this fall in two PST: LA/LA exhibitions. “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft and Folk Art Museum will include her sculptures Cartonlandia (2007) and Chalino (2008); additionally, several of Serrano’s smaller...
When I heard the title of Jose Dávila’s recent book, Daylight Found Me with No Answer, it sounded familiar. During the years I was living in Guadalajara, I frequently talked with Dávila and other mutual friends at endless parties that lasted until dawn. But I hadn’t seen Dávila since those distant days and this was the first time I had ever paid him a studio visit. He was finishing a public...
Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s depiction. Each face of its four members—two young boys, father and mother—is made up in the style of the Mexican Dia de los Muertos. The...
Even more than its predecessor, the first Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative that ignited Los Angeles’ arterati six years ago, PST: LA/LA conjures a kind of Aleph-like quality in its ambition to encapsulate at its widest points the art of an entire continent, an archipelago of islands, and the appended LA metro region. Geographic and other (cultural, historical, colonial, identity, conquest)...
Mid-Wilshire 1301PE Jorge Mendez Blake 0/9–10/21/17 1301pe.com Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles David Lamelas: “Time as Activity” 9/7–10/21/17 spruethmagers.com The Loft at Liz’s “South of the Border” 10/8: 7–9pm: author Eileen Truax panel discussion 10/17: 7–9pm: “Alienated” special performance by Johan Miranda theloftatlizs.com JACK RUTBERG FINE ARTS Hans Burkhardt in Mexico 9/23–12/23/17...
Since 1985, Theodore Svenningsen has been working sporadically on “Primitive Structures,” an ongoing series of paintings, mostly black and white, that are seductive at surface level, yet purposefully unsettling upon closer inspection. When viewing the 12 works from...
The elusive relationship of the brain and the mind has always fascinated without ever quite being resolvable. It is as though we collectively hold the convoluted gray mass that constitutes the brain in suspension with respect to its relationship to the entity whose...
“Alternate Realities” at the Norton Simon Museum presents the work of four California painters from the mid-20th century: John Altoon, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and Emerson Woelffer. These artists formed part of the California version of Abstract...
Works on paper by Russell Crotty are a mix of travel journals, celestial cartography, landscape sketches, stream of consciousness narration, auric cross-hatched impressionism, and sculptural installation. Their palette is that of desert and the night; their imagery of...
Artist, feminist, environmentalist—these themes elegantly converge in her exhibition “Bound Angel” which examines, with perverse pleasure, the darker cultural implications of mass production, the fight for gender equality, and the mounting ecological crisis....
The ornate paintings depicted in Robert Ginder’s first solo show at Craig Krull Gallery induce nostalgia, especially for those Angelenos. Palm trees, long-standing businesses, bungalow-style homes, and points of attractions rise from their gold leaf-encrusted wooden...
I’ve always enjoyed the playful and uninhibited spirit of summer group shows, unbridled by the circuits and agendas of the art market. Chirs Sharp’s exhibition, “A Minor Constellation”, perfectly exemplifies this kind of delightful candidness. The show features a...
Co-curated by Liz Gordon (of Loft at Liz's) and Monique Birault, the 15th iteration of Gordon’s ecologically driven “Diverted Destruction" is both exciting, and more visually spare than past exhibitions. Rather than filling the main gallery space with smaller pieces...
Artists Casey Kauffmann and John de Leon Martin have created a super-collage at Human Resources, Los Angeles. A messy collision of screens, drawings and passionfruit vines engulf the gallery space with the intention to bamboozle. The duet’s maximalist installation...
Cornelia Parker's landmark retrospective at Tate Britain journeys through her multimedia work to narrate a country willingly stuck in small-island-energy. Parker (b.1956) examines objects by considering how they change when their associated value is disrupted,...