Marc Horowitz has shifted in the past few years from his early work, bridging performance, social practice, entertainment and social media, into the more traditional practices of painting and sculpture. “Interior, Day (A Door Opens),” his show at Depart Foundation last year, demonstrated publicly for the first time the extent of that shift. Two recent solo shows of his painting and sculpture—the...
If you are familiar with Laurie Fendrich’s work, you know that the artist is a New York–based painter of vibrant geometric abstractions that strike a precarious balance between order and subterfuge. And you may have heard about her 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. But do you know that she is also a writer and teacher who embraces English novelist Jane Austen as a...
How do we put this? A Guy’s gotta paint! And the Guy who’s gotta paint has clearly gotta be obsessed about it! And maybe a few other things besides painting… like SEX! I mean a Guy’s gotta be inspired to paint! And then he’s gotta get through the stuff that fuels, fires, or contrarily, blocks that inspiration, those obsessions. Like—could he get a drink or something? No—something more...
When I first saw Lauren Halsey’s work-in-progress during her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, I was stupefied. The installation was genuinely a new experience, challenging my notion of visual and spatial aesthetics. It was exhilarating and puzzling, but familiar. Two years later I saw the float she made for the Martin Luther King Day parade in Los Angeles and I knew this was an artist...
The grassy plains of southern Missouri came into view as the plane prepared to land in Springfield, a small city on the edge of the Ozarks. I grew up in a much smaller town not far from there. Springfield was the big city where Mom took us to buy new school clothes. Upon exiting the airport the muggy air was practically suffocating, and I was immediately transported to the barefoot summers of my...
I recently interviewed curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado of New York’s El Museo del Barrio at the opening of Site Santa Fe’s current biennial, “Much Wider Than A Line.” Rocío was part of a team of five curators for this Site’s ongoing focus on contemporary art from the Americas. We spoke at length in person, then through email several times after I left Santa Fe. Most of the interview came from...
NYC VISUAL & PERFORMANCE ARTIST GUY RICHARDS SMIT The Grossmalerman! Show November 11, FRIDAY, 8 p.m. Ace Hotel Downtown LA 929 S Broadway, LA 90015 This is a free event held at Segovia Hall featuring Jibz Cameron (Dynasty Handbag) The contemporary art world isn't all that different from your world, except for the glamour, unscrupulous collectors, vengeful critics and one...
Jibz Cameron, the performance artist and poet of female panic who goes by the moniker Dynasty Handbag, is trying to make more user-friendly work. Cameron has made her name by staging wild and incandescent actions that make you feel excitedly deranged. In her 2015 show Come On at the RADAR Queerfail Festival, she imagined trying to seduce a prospective lover by sticking out her butt and singing...
In his 2011 book Normal Life, law professor and trans-activist Dean Spade writes of the wide-ranging goals of trans-resistance, a political awakening that fights against such manifold systems of domination that its practitioners cannot focus unilaterally on sex, gender, race, class, disability, or queerness, but must take as their object the liberation of all subjected people: “[This resistance]...
Ten. It’s our number for this issue as we enter our 10th year of publication. So we thought it would be fun to put together a batch of Top Ten Lists for the greater Los Angeles art world. Our contributors came up with categories and compiled lists of what they considered tops. While lists can be fun, they can also be fraught with problems: Why wasn’t so-and-so listed? Who cares about that? WTF?...
The artist Bradford Salamon embraces his entire life in his artwork, from his childhood and teenage years—watching cartoons and films, surfing in SoCal, playing in bands, and engaging with friends—to the present. These experiences and influences are recollected and...
There was an almost respirational pacing to this show—taken from a slightly more expansive exhibition of the Montana-based artist’s work at the Missoula Art Museum—between variously light or darkness-drenched works on canvas (and/or panel) and the chromatically...
Ever had your memory moonwalk? Such a notion is possible after experiencing Without Your Interpretation, the Ulysses Jenkins multiverse at the Hammer Museum, a retrospective comprised primarily of video and performance art covering five decades. Putting soul in...
Suggesting both the afternoon desert sunlight just before it fades into dusk and the night black sky that makes Joshua Tree National Park such a stellar stargazing site, these images are as fragile and tough as the Joshua tree itself. In “Embracing the Incarnate,”...
Mining tensions between the hyper-feminine and the fragile masculine, Troy Montes Michie continues his interventionist textile and collage practice with a body of work centered on the reappropriation of the Chicano countercultural figure La Pachuca. Dishwater Holds No...
It’s all I can think about. It’s all I can think about. It’s all I… Since the news broke revealing the Supreme Court’s green light to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it’s all I can think about. It is tremendously difficult to avoid feeling the progress forged by decades of...
Highly prescient, somehow whimsical, Sandow Birk’s exhibition “Los Angeles and Her Surroundings” explores what can only be described as late-stage capitalism in Southern California. In 40 drawings that have whiffs of nostalgia, environmental and architectural...
Monica Wyatt’s “c u r i o u s e r - Assemblage Creations from Wonderland” is a magical mystery tour of immersive experience. Wyatt offers work that is, at turns, whimsical, wild, and ephemeral. Created of repurposed materials, her detailed, intricate work floats and...
Love lingers in memories of past embraces, in y(our) shared moments of agony and affection. The pains of past love form bruises–tender and swollen kinks that excite and sting. Sophia Stevenson’s MFA thesis exhibition is personal, as is our relationship (she is a...
To do a one-woman play is a challenge; to do a one-woman play about a noted public figure and keep the audience enthralled for two hours is a tour de force. That’s what Holland Taylor manages to do in Ann, which just opened at the Pasadena Playhouse (through April...