Articles

AS THE WORLD TURNS
Deborah Stratman Gazes Into the Abyss of Time

“I’m not sure satisfaction is a thing I feel while making art. I get satisfied from stuff like getting my laundry done or digging a trench or putting away my books,” mused director Deborah Stratman in a recent interview with Documentary magazine. Perhaps this questing, open-ended relationship to her practice is why, at age 57, Stratman has nearly two dozen films to her name. An associate...

REALM OF THE SENSES
Jónsi’s “VOX” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

by Emma Christ

Jónsi, artist and frontman of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, masterfully crafted a recent show titled “Vox” which challenges the definitions of visual, sonic and olfactory art, merging the mediums to form a multi-sensory exhibition that plays on the viewer’s mind and body. The entry point to the show is Var (safespace) (2023), a tapestry of hundreds of micro speakers draped over a rope...

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

by Luca Celada

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...

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Reviews

Elise Rasmussen
at Night Gallery

The history of photographers capturing the West is as storied as the mythos of manifest destiny. Elise Rasmussen steps knowingly into this lineage and subtly pushes the contemporary momentum of turning towards the sculptural, beginning to break photography’s physical...

“Actions”
at Sarah Brook Gallery

While the connection between the works in Actions is as ambiguous as its title, the exhibition braids together three artists worth examining individually. Laurel Nakadate’s installation serves as a wall-sized shrine for bridging time and absence, with altered...

Beatrice Arraes
at Sea View

The song Kukukaya, which partly inspired Beatrice Arraes’s solo exhibition, speaks of a game meant for four, but “Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” feels purposely solitary, quiet—a slow reckoning with time, where winning was never the point. Her paintings, saturated in deep...

Rocky Morton
Shatto Gallery

These paintings feature drip-like tendrils of paint, blown by a leaf-blower and sprawled across the canvas at all angles. Areas of the surface are covered at random but, more or less, evenly, like static. The process-based stochasticism is all too predictable. This...

J. Parker Valentine
at Bel Ami

The one large abstract drawing here, wedged precisely in between the ceiling and floor, explores a relationship between geometric form and explorative mark-making. The light touch is enticing, but the sketchy linework feels too beholden to the diagonal lines and ovals...

Alexander Reben
at Charlie James Gallery

The central piece here is four split-flap displays showing AI-generated text and a large HD TV displaying images based on those texts. The problem is that AI images are already familiar enough to be corny. The upscale production values do not help, and the jokey...

Larry Johnson/curated by Larry Johnson
at Reena Spaulings/ O-Town House

In two exhibitions spanning galleries some twenty-minutes apart depending on traffic, Larry Johnson presents his own work alongside that of two other gay artists of a certain age and a certain generation, who lived through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early...

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...

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