How do you disappear when you’re already invisible? The unnamed narrator/protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) would answer by instead choosing to reappear to awaken sleepwalkers from their racist straightjacket. Similarly, selected artists in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, now at the Broad in Los Angeles, interrogate the...
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with the mysticism of Jung’s collective unconscious. While created separately by five artists and three artist teams over the course of...
If the art world is a microcosm of our society at large, then the performance stage presents a unique opportunity for artists to write or rewrite reality as they would prefer it to be. It’s undeniable that women continue to face a host of gender-specific difficulties, both in society and in art, whether it’s lack of representation, repression of agency, or objectification—not to mention such...
Right from the start, “Zoe Leonard: Survey,” a career-spanning exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, establishes the artist’s role as an art-world renegade and provocateur. Now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary site, the installation begins with a pairing of photography and sculpture in a narrow gallery where Leonard’s photographs made through airplane windows...
I rarely get out to galleries these days and often resort to Instagram for my visual fix. Like the internet itself, it’s a seemingly endless rabbit hole of memes, food porn, actual porn and hopeless narcissism. But occasionally some strange and inexplicable gems scroll on through, just waiting to be unpicked. Last year a friend shared a video by a user going by the handle of @mcdazzler. In it, a...
Phillip K Smith III makes works that glow. His individual pieces and his installations share a kinship with California Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, as they are primarily about light and the nuances of shifting colors of...
Jim Shaw’s work has always moved, both performatively and analytically, between the quotidian space of individual consciousness, and collective and cultural spaces both conscious and unconscious. Since he began using film studio and theater backdrops as readymade...
A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants...
Transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings which operate like a story or a fairytale—a mythology of metamorphic processes that disrupt, shape-shift, alter and expand concepts of the self—employing a kind of magical thinking oriented around...
It is not unusual for an exhibition of Friedrich Kunath’s paintings to be accompanied by something outrageous and unexpected. In both 2012 and 2017 he carpeted gallery floors, transforming them into soft, colorful fields dotted with sculptures, couches, socks, giant...