Articles

THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES
Made in L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING" at The Hammer

They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce Curatorial Fellow Ashton Cooper, proceeded from the intriguing perspective of selecting artists whose work deal in some essential way...

ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT
"William Blake: Visionary" At the Getty

by James Cushing

William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the most frequently taught lyric poem in American and British high schools and universities. His lifetime (1757–1827) dates him with...

BEST IN SHOW: ARTILLERY 2023 TOP TEN

by Ezrha Jean Black

Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums, too. But at the close of 2023, the breathlessness we may have experienced intermittently in galleries blurs with a breathlessness...

Scarlet Cheng’s Top Films of 2023
Fantasy Takes the Lead

by Scarlet Cheng

What a year for feature films this has been, both rich and strange. Indeed, fantasy seemed to have taken the lead, as we emerge from the fever of the COVID epidemic and try to find the new normal. These were not the usual escapist fantasies, but fantasies that spoke to our current, more conscious and more precarious state of being. Below are my personal choices for the best, in alphabetic...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 4
New Art Dealers Alliance Fair and a very Miami party

by Annabel Keenan

As Art Week races to a close, yesterday I headed downtown across the dreaded, traffic-filled bridge to the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair for my final full day here in Miami. While the fair opened on Tuesday, the busy week of competing events prevented me from getting there until Thursday. Really, it was the thought of sitting in gridlock traffic to cross the bridge that kept me away. As...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 3
A day at the fairs and a look inside the after dark events

by Annabel Keenan

Artillery is back with Day 3 in Miami Beach. The fairs are in full swing, the collectors are fighting for first access, and the tiny glasses of overpriced champagne are on offer at every opportunity. Yesterday, we started with the design highlight of the week: Design Miami/. Located just outside the Convention Center where Art Basel Miami Beach takes place, Design Miami/ is a refreshing...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 2
Elevate Española highlights the importance of public art, and the fairs begin

by Annabel Keenan

After a weekend filled with art and philanthropy in Palm Beach, we’re officially ready for the parties, fairs, and people-watching of Miami Art Week. Yesterday, Untitled Art and the New Art Dealers Alliance fairs opened to VIPs, and the heavy-hitting Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami/ open today. To kick off my week, rather than dive straight into the fair tents and convention center, I...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 1
New Wave Art Wknd Takes Over Palm Beach

by Annabel Keenan

Miami Art Week is back, which means the crowds are on the way to enjoy the beach, the sun, the stunning hotels, and the most coveted art the market has to offer. For those of us visiting from New York, the warm weather couldn’t have come at a better time. Throughout the week, Artillery will be taking you to the major fairs and public events, as well as a few VIP openings and private parties, in...

WOVEN VISIONS
Diedrick Brackens Explores Identity with Innovative Technique and Unusual Tenderness

by George Melrod

Even with the growing inclusion of textile art in textbooks, surveys and biennials, one doesn’t normally think of weaving as a cutting-edge contemporary art medium. Diedrick Brackens is out to change that. A breakout star of the 2018 Hammer “Made in L.A.” biennial, Brackens uses his works to foreground Black and queer bodies—and the occasional catfish—through lyrical, at times haunting,...

EDGES AND PLURALITIES
Melissa Joseph Brings Craft Into the Future

by Annabel Keenan

For Melissa Joseph, all things relate to edges. Her practice exists on several of them: painting, felting, craft, utility, art … the list continues. She works in a unique dry-felting medium to create imagery based on her own photography and that of her family. While channeling “ancestral stories,” as she explains, she also addresses broader social issues, including gendered labor and identity....

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Reviews

Larry Madrigal
at Nicodim

With scraped knees, tangled sheets, and yesterday’s discarded clothes strewn across the floor, Larry Madrigal’s new evocative paintings at Nicodim showcase the artist at his strongest. In moments where his fluid and textured style strives to move beyond the sexual...

Jane Dickson
at Karma

I never feel hotter or more detached (indeed, more American) than in a car, windows down in the August heat. It’s an exercise in movement, longing on an unremarkable plane of asphalt. Each lane is a pulse, where everyone seeks a false salvation. Jane Dickson’s new...

Darya Diamond
at Sebastian Gladstone

Looking at Darya Diamond’s limp latex sculpture, In Every Dream Home a Heartache (2024), I think of bruised skin, frail shoulders: a tired body collapsed on the floor — phallic, deflated, stamped with marks like a trampled body bag. Throughout “Sugartown,” intimacy...

“Scupper”
at François Ghebaly

Curated to pose as a mirror to society’s collapse, "Scupper"’s artists address a spectrum of social ills from preservatives in food to inadequate healthcare. The six-page press release does a better job than some of the works themselves at justifying their presence in...

Divya Mehra
at Night Gallery

A mechanical broom wielded by a robotic arm sweeps across the floor under the corner of a custom-made carpet shaped like India. In an adjoining room, an enormous inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man lies face-down adjacent to a neon sign which reads “DIASPORA.” A...

Raymie Iadevaia
at The Pit

Don’t let the cute animals fool you; these paintings are not so innocent. A vague sense of foreboding permeates these otherwise joyful works. In Iadevaia’s last show, climate apocalypse hovered in his portentous smokey-pink...

Gabriel Madan
at Gattopardo

Not all pop art is created equal. Gabriel Madan’s literally pops off the wall: As in, a colorful macaw plushie is affixed to one of his paintings, a heart-shaped tag reading “I’m a puppet.” I want to stick my hand up its rear and make it talk. Vulgar, yes, but...

“a field once more”
at Melrose Botanical Garden & Jane Galerie

Melrose Botanical Garden is not actually a garden, but it might as well be. Tucked between thrift shops and piercing parlors on the avenue, the narrow gallery feels like an oasis. “a field once more,” a group show drawing upon Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of...

Michael E. Smith
at Chris Sharp Gallery

Michael E. Smith’s unassuming, poetic sculptures are late capitalist Zen koans: riddles with no answer but which nevertheless spark a moment of satori. For instance, a milk carton covered in mirrors seems to suggest that we are all the lost children. But is this a...

Oscar Tuazon
at Morán Morán

Oscar Tuazon’s activist art project LAWS: Los Angeles Water School combines high concept with a rigorous materiality. Machined folds and facets shape The Evening Redness in the West (2024) a C-print printed on an aluminum sheet that mimics the way coated analog photo...

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