Articles

LOST IN SPACE
The New Restoration of Franco Rossi's "Smog"

Franco Rossi’s restored Smog plays like a Nouvelle Vague travelogue, with protagonists seemingly lost in an urban landscape that amplifies their inner malaise. That backdrop is Los Angeles and the long-lost 1962 film (now finally available in a pristine 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and UCLA Film & Television Archives) is also a snapshot of the city in its modernist “adolescence.” At...

FIELD REPORT
Art For All: The Gilbert & George Centre, London

by William Moreno

Gilbert & George, the quintessentially British pioneering queer artist-duo have staked a clear position within the milieu in which they operate. They have scant tolerance for art-world conventions, yet it is precisely that peevishness and their enduring, long-term collaboration that created the context for the creation of their provocatively lurid and iconic works. On a recent trip to...

STAYING INSIDE THE LINES
Painting AI's Possible Future

by Bill Smith

Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage flipping coins or Jeff Koons exploiting labor? As AI ramps up from being a tool of human artists, could it become autonomously creative?...

FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP
Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills

by Glenn Harcourt

"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was unequivocal: I think, therefore, I am. The human being is a thinking being. Doing is another issue. Likewise, the earliest test...

SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
Welcome, Year of the Dragon

by Scarlet Cheng

It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce Lee fans, the dragon is the most powerful creature in the Chinese zodiac, and the only mythological one. (Lee’s Chinese name is...

“If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision” at Brand Library and Art Center
Q&A with Aline Smithson

by Rotem Rozental

Aline Smithson’s conceptual works begin where photographic materials and processes encounter lost and found moments. She has been exploring our complicated relationships with our memories and the devices we use to capture them, our self-presentation and surrounding, focusing primarily on analog photography. Smithson’s work is also at the core of the exhibition, “If Memory Serves: Photography,...

COMPASSIONATE VISIONS
The Los Angeles Poverty Department Brings Attention to Skid Row Artists

by Clayton Campbell

The Skid Row History Museum and Archive (SRHMA), founded by artist John Malpede and directed by Henriëtte Brouwers, is located at 250 South Broadway. It is a unique community art center, as well as a museum and archive for the historical displacement of people in Los Angeles due to immense income inequality. A critical part of the downtown arts ecology, SRHMA is a project of Malpede’s Los...

BEYOND PORTRAITURE
Danie Cansino: Seeing LA Through Her Lens

by Eva Recinos

High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights. Raised in Montebello, Cansino says information sharing is a crucial part of her work. “I want to be able to give the knowledge that I...

ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION
Anne Libby and Anna Rosen Find Freedom in Collaboration

by Tara Anne Dalbow

Communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from the ritual of production and...

THE HERE AND NOW OF IT
Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape

by Ezrha Jean Black

You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The art itself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before; but again, oscillating and permeating through it all is the sense of something...

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Reviews

Aria Dean
at Château Shatto

In her still-young career, Aria Dean has shown a remarkable knack for giving the institution exactly what it wants: shrewd work that stings the nerve of the moment without quite stabbing it. In activating the virtual as a conduit for Black radical thought, Dean’s...

Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art
at Wonzimer Gallery

This show at Wonzimer Gallery, organized by contributing artist Marcie Begleiter, is inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a work that constitutes a parallel exhibition to the show she curated. The Voynich is a mysterious codex from around the year 1410 by an unknown...

Duncan Hannah
at The Journal Gallery

In the early years of cinema, actors were treated as crew members working the conveyor belt of industrialized studio systems. But by the silent-film era of the 1910s, the star system had begun to take hold, with close-ups articulating a visual language of desire...

The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison]
Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires

Organized in concert with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, this re-mounting of Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970–71) — in keeping with the entirety of the Harrison collective’s output — is less about a “collision” (per PST’s...

Cai Guo-Qiang and cAI™
at the Los Angeles Coliseum

At dusk on September fifteenth, nearly 5,000 spectators gathered on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum to view WE ARE: EXPLOSION EVENT FOR PST ART, a monumental daytime fireworks display by Cai Guo-Qiang* and his custom artificial intelligence model cAI™....

Nate Lowman
at David Zwirner

I’ll admit that before attending a press walkthrough for Nate Lowman’s “Parking” at David Zwirner a few weeks ago, I wasn’t familiar with Lowman’s oeuvre. The paintings first appeared to me thumbnail-size, attached to my iPhone invitation. I noted glowing, riparian...

Lotus L. Kang
at Commonwealth and Council

To experience lack is to be reminded of the boundaries of the self, of others. Lacking realizes the unassailable distance between you and everything you don’t and won’t ever have. Therein to lack enlivens desire, or does desire require a lack of something? Kang’s...

Eugenia P. Butler
at The Box

Butler’s threadbare saffron works-on-silk line the perimeter of the back gallery, floating forward and back, filling and falling as if breathing. Suspended by invisible supports and backlit, the delicate veils with their enigmatic marks and hand-drawn symbols...

Shirazeh Houshiary
at Lisson Gallery

Houshiary's mesmeric abstract canvases depose our human perception of scope and scale, engaging the macro and microscopic; they connect a single breath to the breadth of the sea, carbon's molecular structure to the structural integrity of a star. The intricate pencil...

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light
at Norton Simon Museum

Grouping art by medium is always too obvious, even when the medium in question has the pizzazz of electric light. This exhibition focuses on the years 1964-1970 but does not, otherwise, establish a clear throughline. Experiments with electric light were, indeed,...

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