More than a re-imagining of the Michael Jackson story, Julien Nitzberg’s play, For the Love of a Glove, serves as a point of departure for a wildly surreal take on an already bizarre life, from the troubled entertainer’s repressed childhood in Gary, Indiana, to the shady realm of Neverland. Among other things, the madly inventive production depicts Jackson as the pawn in an inter-planetary...
Toni Bentley danced with New York City Ballet for 10 years under George Balanchine and is the author of five books that include The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir, about an obsessive love affair that introduced her to sodomy, rendering the physics, paradoxes and transcendence of the act a revelation. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair among...
Monica Majoli, an artist and professor of art in painting and graduate studies at UC Irvine, whose work explores sexuality and intimacy, is interviewed by art historian, Ph.D. Candidate and Provost Fellow in the Humanities at USC, William J. Simmons. WS: I’ve been really interested lately in queer nostalgia—a term that, I’ve found, some artists find grating. I do not mean nostalgia in a...
A pair of pastel-hued bikini underpants are draped across the wall. Riddled with tiny holes, the thong-thin back resembles the mesh of fishnet hose. A large lavender moth orchid hovers over the genital area, recalling the poetic similarities between labia and the petals or “lips” of the flower. The patterned panties embody the teasing shuttle between revealing and obscuring that is the substance...
Meeting the Los Angeles–and Mexico City–based sculptor, songwriter and curator, Janet Levy, was a gift from one of the many “ifs” of life. Our serendipitous encounter occurred at one of my favorite cafes when I couldn’t help but notice a woman at the adjacent table, lavishly adorned with an ornate necklace, who exuded an air of eccentric confidence. It wasn’t long before we were talking and I...
Los Angeles-based filmmakers John Cannizzaro, and New York-based Stuart Fordyce, presented two short films on May 18th at The Electric Lodge in Venice. Both films, one an experimental work composed of found footage and the other a documentary short, explore the...
The long, unlikely, and utterly genuine friendship between two artists—conceptualist cross-platform tragicomedian Jeffrey Vallance, and painter of wildly popular cottage-core idylls Thomas Kinkade—is commemorated in "Kinkadian La-Z-Boy Room," a new exhibition by...
Memories appear shaky and cinderous, meteoric contusions of being and becoming, volcanic rumblings of the self, perpetually oozing and calcifying. Artist Reggie Burrows Hodges imagines psychic realms knotted and stretched by the spirals of space and time—warped and...
Amalia Galdona Broche and Demetri Broxton’s recent Los Angeles debuts at Patricia Sweetow Gallery are nothing less than startling, sensorial revelations. Moving through the exhibition of these intimately personal works, it’s hard to catch one’s breath. Both bodies of...
In an unlikely art venue—a stall of a Chinatown shopping mall—Mexican American multidisciplinary artist Nao Bustamante has opened their solo exhibition, “Brown Disco,” with OCD Chinatown. The show is the latest in the rising star's repertoire of experimental...