This week’s announcement that Klaus Biesenbach, director of New York’s PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite in Queens, was chosen to be the new MOCA director was greeted by mixed notices among the LA art community including: “He never smiles.” True if he’s judged by his photos. Biesenbach, who is the Godfather of the Berlin Biennale, was quoted as saying LA reminds him of a “new Berlin.”...
When I learned of the news that Jonathan Gold had passed away, I was at a memorial for a dear friend—what a cruel irony. It came as a shock to me as I had interviewed Jonathan in late May for Artillery’s food issue. Gold’s name is emblazoned in black-and-gold letters on the cover of our current July/August issue. Besides the weirdness of having an interview with someone that has since died, it...
Although Christopher Reynolds’ art is full of food imagery, few of his installations and performances traffic in actual foodstuffs. “It’s not really about the food, but the food referencing,” the Northern California-based artist says in a phone interview. There is at least one glaring exception—an opulent performance last year at a private supper club in Santa Monica, but that, too, pointed to...
The Food Group, an ongoing project by Ry Rocklen, is a comical exploration into the relationship between mankind and food. Human subjects (friends of Rocklen’s, mostly) dress up in life-sized food costumes à la Fruit of the Loom that are either rented or fabricated by Rocklen. The costumed subjects are then scanned and replicated by a 3D printer in miniature, food-sized form. The result is a...
On any given Friday, between noon and 2 p.m., you’ll find one of Los Angeles’ best taco trucks parked downtown on 3rd Street in the middle of the Arts District. How do I know this? Because Jonathan Gold says so. “Let’s meet at Guerrilla Tacos,” the LA Times food critic and man-about-town directs me in a text. Gold has agreed to meet me for lunch while we visit a few galleries nearby. I was...
In the late winter of 2019, I became enamored with Joan Didion. I and my then partner were driving the backroads of Tennessee and North Carolina as a leg of a cross country move from Portland to Philadelphia. Somewhere along our trip I picked up a copy of South and...
In Laguna Art Museum’s 10 years of mounting its annual Art & Nature installations, a consistent theme has been the preservation of our planet. In this year’s version, the museum celebrates the beauty of nature while artfully addressing environmentalism and...
Forever enchanted by Francesca Woodman’s photographic realms, I trace her contorted, fluttering body in the passing shadows and opaque reflections of her self-portraits–I see a witch, a siren, a spirit, a saint, a veiled apparition. Woodman’s body is simultaneously...
The first word that comes to mind to describe "In Praise of Shadows" is ‘immense’. This may be what is expected from an artist’s thirty-year retrospective, but William Kentridge is not just any artist. The South African artist is prolific, and this show captures the...
For those already acquainted with Elaine Cameron-Weir’s practice, her recent exhibition “Exploded View / Dressing for Windows” at Hannah Hoffman Gallery feels familiarly sterile and sacred, mechanical and magical. Clusters of assemblage sculpture made of concrete,...