The subject matter of several of my recent paintings derives from screwed-up iPhone panorama photographs. For centuries art linear perspective has ordered the space of paintings, determining how we look at an image. In panorama mode my iPhone-5 liberates the mind from this order, stitching together the world in a way similar to how humans actually conceptualize everyday scenes. In active viewing...
When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an industrial strip in Northeast Los Angeles. Besides the open door, the house also stood apart with its manicured lawn and the polished...
If one thinks of the essence of Modernism as being about direct experience rather than recreated experience, the artist who has really continued to expand possibilities is James Turrell. A striking aspect of his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which fills one whole floor of the Broad pavilion and a large portion of the Resnick, is what a personal experience...
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he took a photograph. In 1993 when Brady was six or seven, Morell looked up at a wine glass sitting on the kitchen table, seeing it...
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century. In most cases, the artists charged with passing on family traditions are male since Japanese women were traditionally unable to...
As I meandered through Marisol Rendón’s installation, “So, Dragons Do Exist?” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery last summer (this was before I had even glanced at the contrarian, almost self-negating parenthetical subtitle, “Considerations of the Unavoidable Syndrome of Illusion”), I felt as if I were confronting the Kübler-Ross stages of grief acted out by Komodo dragons (all five of them,...
So like a few of you (not many more—which was wise—you really didn’t miss anything), I went down to the Grand Central Market at 3rd and Broadway downtown to hear Dave Hickey plug his latest, Pirates and Farmers, subtitled “Essays on Taste,” under MOCA’s auspices—which I confess struck me as suspect from the get-go. But MOCA’s communications people are pretty broad-minded, so I have to give them...
Well the axe has fallen once again on the magnificent American Folk Art building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects. The structure is considered to be an architectural gem having won numerous awards including an American Institute of Architects National Honor Award (in 2003); the World Architecture Awards for Best Building in the World, Best Public/Cultural Building in the...
James Welling’s “Flowers” (2004–11) suggest backlit tree branches in bloom against a blank sky. A pure white light appears to pass through these elegant arrangements of shadowy stem, leaf and petal shapes, and in the process is refracted, as if by a prism, into otherworldly hues. These are photograms, camera-less images made by placing objects onto photosensitized material then exposing to...
Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Through photographic works, videos, installations, performance and writing, she has become known for critically engaging the tropes of art history and modernism, with a particular eye toward resurfacing and re-examining feminist activism. Recently, she launched a collaborative poster project called “(en)Gendered (in)Equity,” in...
Julie Curtiss has finally made her artistic debut in the UK with “Monads and Dyads” at White Cube Mason’s Yard. This is the Parisian-born, New York-based artist’s first exhibition in London, where she presents 29 artworks across the gallery’s two floors including new...
Emil Alzamora’s “Waymaker” is like journeying through a series of time warps. Cement, steel and wood figures loom in various states of decay like Greco-Roman relics in a museum. Yet a modern sensibility invites the sculptures into a surrealist dream conjuring a...
Los Angeles is coming back to life. That’s a sentiment that somehow simultaneously feels cliché and unexpected all at once. But just look around: concerts are being promoted, theaters are rescheduling shows, and bar hoppers are, once again, singing far too loud at far...
Hujar’s portraits reveal how closely linked the creative networks of NYC’s downtown scene were at the time. Backstage offers a glimpse of Hujar’s personal and professional relationships with prominent figures of the subculture. The main gallery features the portrait images of two queer icons, Divine and John Waters, more or less striking the same pose. Both of them lie down sideways, with their left arms supporting their heads. Divine is, of course, John Water’s number one actor, as the two have collaborated in numerous films including Pink Flamingos (1979) and Hairspray (1988). By replicating the same pose, the two friends diverge from the asymmetric power dynamics of director-muse relationships.
If the uncanny valley had an interior decorator, their name would be Roland Reiss. The recently departed artist has a new exhibition at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery, featuring not only a host of recent works but also Reiss’ ground-breaking installation, The Castle of...
Cristian Castro’s latest exhibition, “Robotix: Intersections of Art and Technology,” features new work expanding on his practice repurposing vintage appliances and found objects. Each room is defined by different themes that pertain to the entire exhibition: beauty,...
From the outside, Trotter&Sholer’s current exhibition of works by Derek Weisberg might look like jarring Frankensteinian creations. With roughly hewn figural assemblages, mixed media collages, and fragmented bricolages of ceramic masks, the show reveals sensitive,...
The capacious white central gallery is filled with a medley of artworks that at first glance seem to have no apparent connection. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and ceramics are distributed evenly on the walls and floor. Eventually it becomes clear all of these...
Human connection and relationships are at the heart of Paige Emery’s “Ritual Veriditas” at Coaxial. Though small in size, the works create an immersive experience with video, sound and mixed-media visuals created entirely by the artist. The praxis of “Ritual...
The line between the real and unreal is a thin one. Just beyond the horizon, and beyond the corner of our eye, exists only the expanse of our imagination – what you might call magic. And it’s in this liminal space between magic and matter, fact and fiction, that you...