Articles
“If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision” at Brand Library and Art Center Q&A with Aline Smithson
Aline Smithson’s conceptual works begin where photographic materials and processes encounter lost and found moments. She has been exploring our complicated relationships with our memories and the devices we use to capture them, our self-presentation and surrounding, focusing primarily on analog photography. Smithson’s work is also at the core of the exhibition, “If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision,” which I curated at the Brand Library and Art Center (on view through February 24, 2024) organized with the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP). Her solo project, “The Ephemeral Archive,” consists of new and revisited...
COMPASSIONATE VISIONS The Los Angeles Poverty Department Brings Attention to Skid Row Artists
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive (SRHMA), founded by artist John Malpede and directed by Henriëtte Brouwers, is located at 250 South Broadway. It is a unique community art center, as well as a museum and archive for the historical displacement of people in Los Angeles due to immense income inequality. A critical part of the downtown arts ecology, SRHMA is a project of Malpede’s Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles. The publicly available archive speaks to the importance of...
BEYOND PORTRAITURE Danie Cansino: Seeing LA Through Her Lens
High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights. Raised in Montebello, Cansino says information sharing is a crucial part of her work. “I want to be able to give the knowledge that I have to a younger generation to further form artists,” Cansino said in a phone interview. This, she added, means investing in one’s community, and bringing knowledge back to one’s home. Cansino’s training in art and art history began in community...
ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION Anne Libby and Anna Rosen Find Freedom in Collaboration
Communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from the ritual of production and promotion, but liberation from themselves. The two women first met in New York City when Rosen walked into a gallery where Libby was temporarily working, carrying an enormous Skechers display shoe. Rosen disclosed that the sneaker was part of an art project...
THE HERE AND NOW OF IT Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape
You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The art itself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before; but again, oscillating and permeating through it all is the sense of something that has come before. Then the title given to the exhibition impresses itself upon the visitor: “I am here.” The whole of it is all here and now—as the viewer awakens to the realization of everything that has happened throughout the past 40 or 50...
