The large brightly-lit room of the Armory at last month’s Monster Drawing Rally was crowded with people—and it was hot. I’m one of the artists participating in this fund-raising event where around 25 artists draw for one-hour shifts, hang the completed work on a selling-wall where all art sells for $75. If more than one person wants the same piece, a playing card is drawn, and the highest card...
Through the heart of every true Southern Californian, there flows a passionate mixture of blood, salt water and gasoline. "Kustom Kulture II" is a celebration of this Life and Style. Grab your sweetie and a blanket, revv the rod and head down to the sands of Huntington. If you are new or old school to our Southwest turf, Kustom Kulture II, now up at the Huntington Beach Art Center, is a...
Ten years ago, I was driving down Venice Boulevard one morning, late to work as usual, when I spotted a large modern artwork among the bric-a-brac in front of a thrift store. It’s got to be a poster, I thought as I circled the block. But no, it was a framed abstract oil painting with an over-sized, stylized signature in the upper right corner that said REYNOLDS. Being a fan of art featuring...
I’m listening to Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass’ Classics, Volume 1 as I write this. Besides being famous for his ’60s music, Alpert has apparently been making art for almost as long. I ran into his formidable sculptures again recently, this time at the Robert Berman Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. I saw them for the first time at ACE Gallery in Beverly Hills a few years back....
See Ave Rose do a spoken word and dance performance as The Cell Singer From Aliens in LA at The Standard for Artillery Magazine June 18th, 2013. This was part of Artillery Magazine's book reading series and Aliens in LA did an enhanced reading from the book published by Ink Pen Mutations. Camera by Michelle Tomlinson
Margie Schnibbe has a jungle thing going on in the front reception area of her house, as it seems to be filling with artsy-crafty sculptures made of stuffed pre-dyed and hand-painted fabrics. Some of them have a vaguely Nikki de Saint-Phalle aspect; others could only be the winking ironic craft creations of Schnibbe herself. What looks like a large seven-foot high patchwork dildo dominates a...
“We are not solely regionally focused,” says Miki Garcia, executive director of Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, which will change its name to Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara next week. “The artists that we show are local, national and international, so the projects that we’re doing here are on par with what the MOCA and the Hammer are doing [in Los Angeles]. It’s smaller in scale...
A symposium I attended in Italy, “Venice Agendas,” featuring leading curators from institutions such as Tate Britain, Sotheby's and Serpentine Gallery pondering the future of performance art in museums and galleries, initially brought me to Venice this summer. Throughout the three days of morning discussions and presentations, conversations always returned to the politics and economics of the...
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Samuel Bayer’s series of photographic “Triptychs,” recently on view at ACE Gallery Beverly Hills, is the complexity of the meditation on desire and representation that they can engender in a [male] viewer. These 16 12-foot studies of nude models, each one fragmented into three vertically arranged and slightly off-register divisions, comprise an uncanny...
Born in the late 1970s, contemporary artist and neo-muralist Fernando Corona grew up in and around Mexicali’s vivid and visceral street culture. Receiving a scholarship to study fine art, he traded tagging for painting, establishing himself as one of the city’s most prolific and promising younger artists. Corona became one of a core group—including Pablo Castañeda, Julio Torres, Marcela Perez...
A man sits center frame, drowned within an interior sea of red hues, arms spread as he pensively gazes against our direction into the distance of the frame. A woman laughs cross-legged on a stool, mouth wide open as if paused mid-speech or laughter, as a grinning fox...
If you wanted to get an indoor photo during the first wave of punk rock, you needed a camera that you could adjust the settings on, and you had to learn what the settings were. That didn’t really change until the advent of digital photography, which makes photographs...
Sprüth Magers is currently exhibiting two shows by two of the most notable creatives of the last forty years: Cindy Sherman’s "Tapestries" and John Waters' "Hollywood’s Greatest Hits." Though, if you’re anything like myself, one will leave you elated, and the other,...
Although "Amazing" is the first exhibition of Ulala Imai's works in Los Angeles and the United States, she has quite a following in Japan. Imai is a prolific painter as the presentation of over thirty paintings at Nonaka Hill demonstrates. She successfully combines...
“The Bronx Comes to LA” features artworks from the larger body of work set up in Bronx storefronts by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, dating from 1990 to 2020. The life casting process for making the figures is fairly complicated, but even more importantly, requires...
“Fictions in Fragments,” the latest show by Fu Site at Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an adventure not to be missed. Mixing ghostly characters and cracking lightning with influences stretching from modern architecture to baroque drama, Fu’s paintings alternately...
The title of Karen Carson’s show of new "bas relief" paintings, exhibited alongside some of the zippered canvas works that marked her debut into the Los Angeles art world almost half a century ago, “Middle Ground” is a kind of conundrum, consistent with the kinds of...
Portraiture is almost certainly the artistic genre in which power and privilege imprint themselves most legibly. To "represent" can mean to depict, but also the right to speak on behalf of a group. The tension between these two meanings is at the heart of Hamishi...
It is difficult not to be taken with Ludovica Gioscia’s exhibition “Arturo And The Vertical Sea.” Upon entry, viewers confront three free-standing wooden structures akin to unfinished walls that criss-cross two gallery spaces at different angles, dividing them into...
Amanda Wall’s debut solo show, “JUICY” at The Cabin entices us into the intimate gallery. The exhibition space, which is in fact a small cottage-like structure in the backyard of artist and collector Danny First’s residence, immediately evokes a sense of casual...