BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN WATCH THE GENerally hit or miss online content of MOCAtv you'll have to navigate through a bombardment of commercials and pop-up ads conjured up by Google and used as revenue for both the Internet giant and MOCA. The newly instated YouTube channel (as of October 1, 2012) divides its dozens of artists—picked out from MOCA exhibitions as well as discovered beyond the...
Two days before the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performs, I am opposite Artistic Director Benoit-Swan Pouffer at l'Agora, cité internationale de la danse in the charming French city of Montpellier. We are sitting in a corner of the courtyard on a warm July afternoon, and Pouffer is visibly amped that his company is touring in Europe. The renovated 14th-century monastery is the headquarters...
That's what black people are, myths. I come to you as a myth," announces Sun Ra in a scene from Space Is The Place, the marvelously entertaining mixture of blaxploitation, space travel, mysticism and free jazz that screens on one of the many video monitors at the "Blues for Smoke" show. By this, presumably, he means as myths to people of other races, particularly white people—and nowhere is that...
In the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the anonymous unmarked storefront of Mark Bradford’s studio betrays nothing to passersby, but the large white security gate which rolls back to reveal a parking lot at the north east end of the property is an unusual flourish for the area. Inside, the multi-building space is organized and impeccably neat. Cocoon-like, it feels insulated from the...
Slender, dark-haired Lisa Aslanian speaks softly but with conviction as she shows visitors around her sparsely furnished 1,000-square-foot space, The George Gallery. The venue derives its name from George Sand, a pseudonym for the intrepid 19th-century writer Aurora Dupin. On North Coast Highway in Laguna Beach (a city halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego), where ocean breezes waft in the...
One of the largest survey shows of contemporary Canadian art ever produced, "Oh Canada," is the culmination of five-year's research and 400 studio visits by North Adams MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish. It joins a history of international survey exhibitions of Canadian art as well as biennials in Montréal, Alberta, Quebec City and by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from 1926 to 1989....
FOR AN ARTIST, FINDING THE ENTRY POINT to a canvas can be the most confounding part of the creative process. Tomer Aluf, a 35-year-old Israeli who has lived in New York City for the past eight years, uses fictional narratives in which he is the protagonist as his doorway. Like an armchair Gauguin, his imaginary expeditions become fodder for his paintings. "There's something romantic about being...
Phyllida Barlow, "Rift," a site specific installation in three parts, 2012: Untitled: hoardings, 2012, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, photo by Maksim Belousov, Mykhailo Chornyy. DO WE NEED ANOTHER BIENNALE? CERTAINLY UKRAINE SEEMS to think so, with Kiev staking its claim on the international art scene. From Liverpool to Venice, from Istanbul to São Paulo the world is awash...
UNDER THE RADAR Pearblossom Hwy MIKE OTT'S PEARBLOSSOM HWY REACHES for reality, in a real way, sort of. LA filmmaker's Mike Ott's last movie—LiTTLEROCK (2010) was a surprise smash in indie terms, racking up the kewpie dolls at LA's AFI Fest, indie fests in Boston, Reykjavik, and Montreal and the Independent Spirit and Gotham Awards—the latter included a limited commercial theatrical run in NYC....
I visited the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens while its current exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” was being installed. I’d be tempted to call the Huntington a “peculiar institution,” had that phrase not already been coined as a euphemism for slavery in the pre-Civil War era. Let’s just say that, at...
If gazing upon the figurative paintings of Philip Guston is akin to a religious experience, then the exhibition "Transformation" at Hauser & Wirth represents a cornucopia of blessings. Spanning from the early sixties into the late 1970s, the show offers an...
“Precarious as obtained by entreaty or prayer,” Timo Fahler’s solo exhibition at Maple St. Construct, features 27 iterations of The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602), a painting by the canonical artist Caravaggio. After visiting Rome and viewing the painting in...
It is no stretch to say that the COVID-19 pandemic – principal among several other tragedies, injustices, and horrors over the past year – has fundamentally altered the way we see our world. It has revealed inequities more sharply than any other time in recent memory,...
Stephen Aldahl’s current solo exhibition, "Cool Intentions," is as pictorially generous as it is emotionally taciturn. His paintings, layered compositions using photo transfer, decals, text, and collage, do equal amounts to reveal as they do to hide. Engaging in a...
Nature has been the font from which many artists have taken their inspirational sacrament. And it is a pleasure to see an artist who takes that inspiration and so masterfully manifests the power and majesty of our natural world into something entirely new, which is...
"Skin Deep: Then and Now" at The Loft at Liz's offers a vital visual conversation about race in America. The powerful subject brings together the same eight artists who comprised an original exhibition ten years ago, with pieces still available from the initial...
“Eternal Witness” is a show emblematic of the endless pertinence of history. Adams maintains that history is just as relevant today as it ever was when it was happening. The scenarios may change but he pursues the notion that the ideas driving humanity, for instance,...
Curated by Gary Brewer and on exhibit both online and IRL at Wonzimer Gallery in DTLA, "The Shape of Life," is a dazzlingly lovely show. The nine-artist exhibition includes works by Brewer, Tim Hawkinson, Aline Mare, Cheyann Washington, Jeff Colson, Mercedes Dorame,...
There is a natural tension drawn between old and new, conservative and progressive. Often times, it can feel that between those two positions there can be no resolution. Even in art, it can be difficult to fit the opposing ideals together; though when it happens, the...
Brie Ruais' stunning ceramic sculptures have a visceral quality. Though created in her Brooklyn studio, they stem from private, site-specific performances in the desert where the naked Ruais uses her entire body to shape clay into large geometric formations that meld...