An austere flat horizon is blanketed by intensely blue sky and bracketed by the remnants of an orange window frame, its rectilinear quiet slyly evoking Rothko. Gauzy clouds, piled atop a low mountain, are seen Magritte-like, through a thick wooden square—maybe a window frame or a picture frame. A diptych—or, rather, a window bisected by a thin mullion—opens to a desert landscape punctuated by...
“My name is called Disturbance,” as Mick Jagger sang in "Street Fighting Man," and as 2016 careened into 2017, many of us wondered where exactly we stood with respect to what beckoned immediately across the horizon and came to grips with an unsettling notion that we might have no real understanding of what constituted that specific place. Our own physical actuality had made its own irrevocable...
Melanie Pullen invites me into her sunny apartment as she cleans up from a party the night before, “This is why I left New York!” she says, gesturing to full-length windows with a sweeping view of Koreatown. “All this room!”Pullen’s enthusiasm for Los Angeles is apt, given that her photography consists of cinematic explorations of beauty, crime and the city’s history—she is perhaps best known...
It’s worth considering why it’s so easy to caricature Donald Trump. He looks strange—with his fake tan, anus-like pout, signature comb-over—topped with a bright red, race-baiting ball cap. Like any President-to-be, he’s the focus of boundless criticism and ridicule, yet pundits and partisans have marveled at his ability to refract most critiques in a way that makes him even more omnipresent and...
Mel Chin’s latest public art project in Los Angeles, The Tie that Binds: MIRROR of the FUTURE, was initiated last summer during CURRENT: LA Water, the city’s inaugural month-long Public Art Biennial presenting temporary large-scale artworks sited along the LA River and in other water-adjacent locations. The biennial came and went via a whirlwind of press events during one of the hottest summers...
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...
Deborah Roberts’ mixed-media works propose new ways to depict Black children. Her figures dominate an otherwise blank canvas (sometimes white, sometimes black) either filling most of the frame or resonating against the negative space. Rather than contextualize them in...
Colorful, peculiar and static, Arlene Shechet’s freestanding sculptures possess an animation. They cant and list in space, tilting precariously as if ready to tumble. On a plinth or platform, they are eccentrically placed, rarely centered. The spatial lilting is seen...
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May in a beguiling, gestural and chromatically complicated suite of blossom paintings by E.J. Hill. They were undertaken during a recent residency that coincided with the interruption of life as we knew it, shaped by both the...
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...