Inside American prisons, thousands of men sequestered in tiny, dim rooms spend their lives waiting to die. Outside, this marginal population is hardly considered, except as a seamy abstraction. SoCal-based artist Amy Elkins finds inspiration in prisoners’ hermetic introspections. Through her vividly evocative photographic series, “Black is the Day, Black is the Night” (2009–14) and “Parting...
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years, the gallery was packed. I turned to the only piece in the first room that offered an unobstructed view: photographer Natalie...
Jeremy Couillard says that the pleasure of working with virtual reality (VR) is that he can move away from “a deceitful world I deeply wish did not exist. I need to create an alternative to that universe so I don’t go insane.” A video and installation artist, and teacher at LaGuardia Community College, Couillard had a recent exhibition at the Louis B. James Gallery in New York. Visitors entered...
The world of contemporary popular culture has largely left the biosphere behind, for a world of limitless extraterrestrial space. It is not so different from the contemporary avant-garde, which remains a cerebral, intramural phenomenon. It takes an extraordinary, even cataclysmic, event to turn the conversation, the way we see and talk about art—sometimes even a change of civilization.The 2016...
Liberty Cabbage. Freedom Fries. Whenever a reactionary quorum congregates one can be certain no good can come of it. While our senate stages a work stoppage on judicial appointments, and a viable presidential candidate—best known for his government shutdown antics—suggests patriots patrol Muslim neighborhoods just to keep an eye on those people, it is instructive to review the bigotry of our...
I recently overheard somebody make the observation that David Bowie’s death has “staying power.” It sounded like an idiotic remark at first but in this case it seems accurate. Sure, Bowie was one of the greats, an unfading star who provided an exhilarating soundtrack to countless lives, and a true gentleman who aged with preternatural grace, but it’s been more than three months since he kicked...
Ross Lipman, the legendary film restorationist responsible for preserving the cinematic legacies of Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, and a cluster of forgotten American neorealist gems including Killer of Sheep and The Exiles, has turned his attention to a more high-profile form of film history with his expansive examination of Irish literary genius Samuel Beckett’s sole foray into...
The “death of painting” is frequently traced to the work and writing of Donald Judd. In 1965's “Specific Objects,” the same essay in which Judd outlined painting’s limitations—above all, its inherent illusionism—he even more forcefully predicted the death of sculpture. Describing sculpture at the time as a “set form” or “a certain kind of form,” he wrote, “it can probably be only what it is...
Land Art, also known as Earth Art, emerged in the period that was, with hindsight, clearly one of the most radical, innovative, experimental and groundbreaking periods in the history of art. The genre is part of a much wider trend that falls under the umbrella of conceptual art, and represented a shift away from art as a commodity and towards the dematerialization of the art object. Ironically,...
Ceramics is again making a major splash in the world of fine arts. Way back in the 1950s Peter Voulkos pushed ceramics into that realm, with his Abstract Expressionist pieces of cut and contorted clay slabs, followed by the works of his students (among them, John Mason, Ken Price, Paul Soldner) and others who continued to establish ceramics as sculpture. Today über-gallery Gagosian is pushing...
Enlivened by the energy of Frieze Week LA, I went to The KNOW Contemporary to view curators Knowledge Bennett and Charles Moore’s group exhibition, “BLACK.” To my surprise, I’d stumbled into the installation’s culminating event, a panel discussion with its artists and...
We are supposed to wish upon them when we see them fall. But however sentimentalized shooting stars may be, they are merely rocky debris skimming the atmosphere — all their mythology is manufactured by those of us watching in awe from our Earthly confines. In the five...
Jonas Wood’s highly patterned and flattened paintings take up all four gallery rooms at David Kordansky Gallery. Evoking the decorative arts, their inherently “attractive” quality reminds one of a painted mosaic. Wood created this affect by using deliberate linear...
It’s rare to encounter a Warhol exhibition with something genuinely new to say, but somehow Lifetimes (a co-production of Tate Modern, Museum Ludwig, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Aspen Art Museum — its only U.S. venue) accomplishes it. Thanks to both the thoughtful...
Deceptively clean, simple, and filled with Southern California light, Ed Templeton’s new exhibition “The Spring Cycle” explores life in a suburban Southern California beach. And it has a deeper context: a critique of the banal isolation that often permeates suburbia....
Be careful not to break a mirror, or it’s seven years of bad luck. Don’t hang a horseshoe upside down unless you want the luck it holds to trickle out the ends. Step on a crack, break your mama’s back. Though they are most often recalled trivially and half-jokingly,...
Kicking off 2022, New York’s The Hole has debuted a solo show from Gosha Levochkin, the gallery’s first with the Russian American artist. Wild, vibrant and interminably buzzing, Last Element is rife with bright constructivist shapes, cartoonish figures and references...
Ross Bleckner’s first solo show in 25 years, “Sehnsucht” at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is a haunting meditation on longing and the cerebral process of lamenting. The 15 new pieces (created from 2019 to 2021) are fleeting in nature, chilling and deep. Mostly large in...
In "Another Land" at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day invites viewers to face the ugliest parts of ourselves and our nation’s history: its legacy of racialized violence. This latest series of drawings is informed by Gonzales-Day’s extensive research into...
Jane Margarette’s otherworldly sculptures and installations mine the tensions between the rough and the sensual, the realistic and the fantastical, the mechanical and the organic. In her exhibition at Anat Ebgi, A Honey of a Tangle, Margarette has created a suite of...